Customer Management - Stages

In the last two months, I met a variety of businesses (in India) trying to understand their process maturity in terms of managing their customers and I wanted a simple way to classify them. This pyramid helped.

Customer Management Maturity Stack

Stage 1: Organize Customer Interactions such as Email requests, Phone calls, Customer Feedback, Complaints, Purchase history, After-Point-Of-Sale data such as Warranty, Service Records etc to provide "Single View of the Customer".

Stage 2: Manage customers and processes. Simple things like responding to a customer with in one business day, Solving customer problems, Understanding campaign effectiveness etc.

Stage 3: Segment customers based on preferences, buying behavior etc. And send targeted messages.

Many multinationals such as Dell and few larger Indian organisations do this well. Most Small & Medium businesses  (surprisingly even a few established ones) that I met are still struggling in Stage 1 and Stage 2. 

Announcing ServeSmart v1.2

We are happy to announce the release of ServeSmart v1.2. Please make sure you have the latest version from AppStore / Android Market.

What's New in Version 1.2

1. Improved Contact Designer Usability with few sample templates for different kinds of businesses - B2C, B2B, Health care provider, Education service provider etc.
2. Fixed issues related to special character handling in form designer.
3. Ability to send a form link via email.
4. Ability to respond to an interaction via email.

What's planned for Version 1.3

1. Continued usability improvements around management of forms & data.
2. Offline support for data collection
3. Basic API support.

Thanks for providing feedback and evolving the app. We look forward to serving you better next year. Happy holidays and Happy New Year!

ServeSmart for Restaurants & Hotels

Looking for ways to improve your customers service / experience ? We have a solution.

ServeSmart Customer Interaction Software helps you to monitor, analyze and fine tune your customer experiences at an interaction level. It is designed to work on Smart Phones, Tablets and Desktops.

Benefits

1. Hear from your customers directly. Handout an iPad or a Galaxy Tab to your customer and ask them for feedback on the accommodation / dining experience. And respond to them with a button click.

2. Know problems as soon as they surface. If the quality of a dish has gone down because of a new cook you hired, learn about it and take corrective action quickly.

3. Conduct a quick poll. When you are wondering which new menu to launch or which one to phase out, ask your customers.

4. When you have made an improvement to your product offering, know easily if your customers liked it.

To know more, click here.

Issues with Form Designer - Move button

First of all, we thank everyone who have checked out our app. As pointed by couple of users, there is a bug with the Form Designer - Move Field functionality. This can corrupt your form. We have identified the issue and working on an update. For now, please stay away from the Move field functionality.

Update: We released an update version 1.1. The update is available in iPhone & iPad AppStore, Android Market and Chrome Web Store.

We are looking for feedback & early adopters!

We started with the hypothesis - businesses that care about customer experience need a simple way to monitor, analyze and fine tune experiences at an interaction level. And, we have been designing a software solution to address the need for small businesses. Though there is a lot that needs to be done, we are at a point where early adopters could try our product and evolve the product with us.We also invite experts in the Customer Experience space to review & provide feedback.

To request for a detailed demo, please get in touch with us at support {at} servesmart {dot} biz

Iterate Service Design

Usually in most small businesses, at-least the ones that I have interacted with, the management defines a few customer service processes initially and that pretty much stays. Not much thought goes into measuring the effectiveness of these processes and fine tuning them.

With ServeSmart, we advocate an approach similar to what is followed in world  of Online Marketing - Define service goals, Run periodic campaigns in the form of survey, feedback forms, Analyze data & fine tune. This is a more agile and proactive approach, help businesses fix problems as soon as they surface.

Besides the customer service design needs to constantly change to adapt to the needs of the customer. For example, if you are a retailer and if there is a new product that requires a bit of hand-holding, you may need to craft a service design which is different from a product that requires no training. Service Design is an interesting new field and we believe small businesses can benefit by applying some of the ideas from experts.

Introducing ServeSmart

We are very excited to soft launch our new software product in the Customer Management space for Small & Medium businesses.

Features:

1. Design forms for your customer service business processes

2. Collect data anywhere

3. Manage Customers & Interactions

4. Export data for analysis

Pricing:

We currently offer a free edition of the software - ServeSmart Lite (50 interactions / month). Please stay tuned for updates on pricing plans.

Contact Us:

If you like a demo of the product, please send an email to support {at} servesmart {dot} biz