Accolent ERP Provides the Tools and Features Your Team Needs to Deliver Great Customer Service
Why Distributors Need Customer Service Management Software?
In the highly competitive world of wholesale distribution, most distributors know that one of the most effective ways to retain customers is to provide good customer service. Your customers can probably get many of the same goods that you sell them at comparable prices from your competitors. And, as we all know, there is no shortage of competitors. What makes the difference and keeps your customers coming back to you is the relationship you’ve built with them over time. This is largely driven by how good your customer service management software is and how effective your service management processes are.
Customer Service Management Challenges
There are several challenges that can get in the way of great customer service management:
- With the increasing interconnectedness of business models and workflows, customer service problems have become significantly more complex.
- Having to navigate through complex linked workflows means that you need better tools for your customer service reps to get the right answers quickly.
- At the same time, customers’ service expectations have gone up, putting more pressure on customer service reps.
- Continuing cost pressures and outsourcing of customer service functions only exacerbate the situation.
Distributors need great customer service management software to overcome these challenges and deliver great service.
How to Deliver Great Customer Service Management?
So how can distributors deliver great customer service management? It is very straightforward in principle but much harder to deliver in practice.
In a nutshell, there are essentially three sequential steps that drive great customer service management in an organization:
- First, you have to provide your customer service reps with the tools to quickly get the information the customer is seeking.
- You cannot stop there though, you have to also create the kind of organization that empowers your customer service reps to take on and solve whatever issues the customer is facing.
- Lastly you have to measure how well your customer service management works and put in place a process to continually improve it.
Following these steps will ensure that your team delivers great customer service and improves customer satisfaction, which in turn will build strong customer relationships.
Customer Service Management Software Tools
To deliver excellent service, customer service management software needs to deliver the following tools:
Track Customer Enquiries
To provide the tools for your customer service reps to answer customer enquiries, you have to first track the customer enquiries. You have to provide a customer service management software logging platform that tracks incoming service requests and records the resolution delivered. This ticketing system needs to be flexible enough to capture different types of enquiries, simple to use or your customer service reps won’t use it, and able to provide the analytical reports that will enable you to evaluate the process.
Provide a Single Source of Truth
Your customer service management software must also have a central database, which serves as the single source of truth that customer service reps can access to respond to customer enquiries. For distributors this means getting off multiple disconnected systems and moving to an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software system for distribution that runs off a central database.
Create the Ability to Get Answers
To get answers customer service reps must be able to access and query the ERP database. This is easier said than done. Many customer service processes were built on reporting tools which were difficult to use, rigid, and often delivered less than satisfactory results. The new paradigm is to provide customer service reps with more than just AI chatbots and instead deliver true agentic-AI capabilities that can allow answers to be much more tailored to the specific customer enquiries. Your ERP software must be able to deliver these kinds of AI tools effectively.
Self-Service Tools
Most customers prefer to be able to solve their issues themselves – it is quicker, easier and more satisfying to them if this option is made available. However, customers do not want to be simply directed to how-to knowledge base articles. They want/need to be able to access the same kinds of agentic-AI tools that customer service reps can access. In many cases customers can deliver better more insightful AI prompts based on their knowledge of their own processes and workflows than customer service reps can. Of course, you need more guardrails and limits on customers’ ability to trigger agentic-AI workflows.
Industries
Optimized for wholesale distribution across a number of vertical industries: auto parts, building materials, chemicals, fasteners, food & beverage, industrial, jan/san, restaurant supply and more
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Organizational Change
Your customer service management software is part of the solution, in addition, you need to build an organization culture that facilitates excellent customer service. All of the following must also be present:
Empower Customer Service Reps
To ensure that customer enquiries aren’t just answered but that your customer service reps go to the next level to solve these issues requires a supportive organizational culture. You need to make it possible for customer service reps to take these steps without undermining their resolution metrics. You also need to highlight and reward customer service reps that exemplify this behavior.
Design Measurement Systems that Work
To get the kind of behavior you’re seeking you need to put in place the right measures of the success of your customer service management process. The metrics you emphasize will dictate the customer services reps’ actions. Customer satisfaction metrics can often conflict with service ticket turnaround time or cost per service ticket metrics. Think through this carefully.
Continual Improvement
Mandating a process of continual improvement alone won’t work. It has to become a core organizational aspiration that is supported and nurtured and given the management focus it needs to succeed.
Accolent ERP Customer Service Management Software
Accolent ERP customer service management software can help distributors strengthen customer service and relationships.
- Centralized Database – Accolent ERP runs in the AWS Cloud and manages your whole business off a single centralized database, creating a “single source of truth” for customer service reps.
- Extensive Reports and Dashboards – Customer service reps can access hundreds of standard reports and dashboards.
- Searchable List Screens for Transactions – Allow customer service reps to quickly locate transactions in any status and deliver up to the minute information to customers.
- Customer-Specific Pricing – Customer service reps can quickly lookup customer-specific pricing by product and quantity.
- Full Customer Account Dashboards – Reps can easily access customer’s purchases by product, accounts receivables aging, payments and full customer ledger card.
- Extensive Documentation and Wikis – Customer service reps can access documentation and AI chatbots to troubleshoot functionality or support issues for customers.
- Agentic AI Tools - Allow reps to access full agentic AI tools and workflows with access to customers’ databases.
- Customer Self-Service Portal – Allow customers to use a self-service portal to place orders, check on status, pay invoices and see their open AR.
- Customer AI Tools – Also give customers access the same AI chatbots and agentic AI tools and workflows as customer service reps use.
Contact Us Today About Customer Service Management Software
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