Service Like A Virgin (Atlantic)

There’s been a lot of discussion here where I’ve talked about the value of good customer service and how CRM lends itself to enhancing the quality of customer service.

This article about the corporate culture at Virgin Atlantic makes the same case.

The challenge is how to personalize service when interactions with customers may be few and far between, and/or when you have a large customer base.  The answer is your CRM.  The value of a CRM is not in its ability to store customer contact information.  Heck that can be done freely with lots of great online tools.  The value of a CRM lies in its ability to give you a full portrait of each individual customer.  And to give you that portrait in a moment’s notice.

There should be no reason why any contact with a customer is not informed by data stored in the CRM and readily accessible.  It’s easily done.  You can create any number of fields for data that have to do with how your customers engage with your products or services, as well as notes about personal preferences and interests.  But you must also create a culture that encourages and rewards this level of service.  Your agents need to be tuned into their customers and they need to take the time to note relevant bits of data within the customer record in the CRM.

As we rely more and more on the data we store in CRMs to guide or business practices—big data, that is—it becomes increasingly important that we have confidence in the quality of that data.  CRM users need to know they are looking at the right record, that the record is not duplicated elsewhere in the database, and that the information is completed and accurate.  As this kind of data becomes more and more a critical asset, it also becomes critical that organizations invest the time and resources to maintain that data.