If your organization has to schedule resources of any kind—people, equipment, vehicles, buildings, and so forth—it’s a daily chore of your service manager to make sure these limited resources are used to best effect and that customer needs are met promptly. When this dispatching function is performed on paper by multiple people, mistakes that hurt customer service are virtually unavoidable.

Your service manager’s CRM priority: Centralized, intelligent scheduling
The service manager is focused on quickly and cost-effectively delivering services to customers and wants a system that can:

• Show at a glance the availability of every service resource companywide.
• Allow centralized service scheduling.
• Give multiple people access to the scheduling resource from any location.
• Intelligently apply your business rules to service scheduling (for example, “Bob and Sally are our only Xwidget experts”).
• Monitor the use of resources.
• Generate a history of which customers have received which services at which times.
• Automatically record service requests (both open and closed) associated with specific customer records.
   

Questions for your service manager

• Who schedules service appointments today?
• How is it done? How do you wish it could be done?
• How does your scheduler know which resources can deliver a service and when they are available?
• Are the dispatchers a bottleneck in scheduling service for customers?
• What are your most common customer complaints relating to service scheduling?
• What kind of reporting do you need on your service team and on the services you’re delivering?
   

Conclusion

Scheduling services promptly and following through with excellent service when promised can go a long way toward enhancing customer relationships. A CRM solution with built-in service scheduling capabilities that work the way your business works can improve customer service and lower your service costs.

By NextCorp, Ltd., Dallas Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner