Blending CRM into Service Desks

One trend that does seem to be emerging this year in the world of Cloud Services is the re-thinking of established business processes and the applications used to provide them.

Take, for example, Customer Relationship Management. With CRM, there is one key ingredient and that is the customers. And as UK-based service management company, Sunrise Software, is aware, the one place where a business is likely to deal with customers more than anywhere else is the service desk.

The company’s approach to this issue it to view it as a problem that can solved with a platform approach. The company has now published a paper detailing how taking a platform approach to customer service can deliver the benefits previously promised by CRM systems.

In the paper, drafted by Neil Penny, Product Director at Sunrise Software, he explains how using one system to manage all manner of operational and support processes can provide a myriad of business benefits. The paper includes references to several award-winning Sunrise customers that have achieved major business growth by taking the platform approach.

As Penny comments; “Many organisations are now on their second or third generation of service management software and are looking to see what added value they can derive. Modern Service Desk platforms are capable of managing all manner of operational and support processes and it is a natural progression to roll out the system across departments. We are seeing a marked increase in the demand for this type of requirement reflected in the ITTs and RFPs we receive.”

The benefits of taking the platform approach are many and vary depending on the type of organisation. However, as the paper discusses, there are several common themes. These include the economies of scale, where one system means one licence, one set of support infrastructure and just one system to learn for IT and users alike; ease of management and support – as well as being easier to support there are fewer integration issues; a single version of the truth where data integrity is maintained as information is held once only; and visibility through data being subject to security controls and permissions so it can be viewed organisation-wide, rather than residing in numerous silos where it is difficult to access.

It also includes traceability, which removes the problem of unproveable provenance for information being stored in spreadsheets and circulated via email and ensures an audited history; comprehensive reporting to support better more informed business decisions; real-time displays for consolidated views of dashboards; consistency and efficiency; and collaboration , including the fact that staff are trained on the same system enabling closer collaboration between departments and operational units.

Penny’s conclusion is that monolithic CRM systems have largely failed, and that taking a platform approach to customer service delivers all of the benefits promised by CRM in a more manageable and cost effective package.

“For organisations looking to update their Service Desk or IT/Business Operations software, taking the platform approach where the system is rolled out across multiple departments makes a very compelling business case,” he concludes.

Rather than be on the company’s website, copies of the paper, ‘A Platform Approach to Customer Service could Revolutionise your Business Operations’ can be obtained by emailing andreina@pra-ltd.co.uk.