Who you gonna call? CRM for Production Support Teams

Many Production Support teams don't consider Customer Relationship Management (CRM) an important part of what they do. In my opinion, there are very few things that matter more than knowing your customers and their needs intimately. I'll provide a few examples that will lend insight into why I feel this way. Before I do that, let me explain that I use the word customer interchangeably with stakeholder. Thus, customers can be internal business partners, external business partners, vendors, other internal teams, etc.

First of all there are basic needs that all Prod Support teams have in terms of knowing which teams to contact when resolving an issue goes beyond the Prod Support team's scope. For example, knowing how to contact a Network or DBA team can be critical. Thus Support teams need to have a well-known, easy to navigate Escalation Database. Most organizations I've been in utilize intranet Wikis or document management sites like Sharepoint to keep an escalation list. It's critical that these DBs be up to date and should contain critical information like:

1. The documented team name: I can't stress this one enough. Many large companies have several teams that handle networks for example, knowing which team to call is critical. For example, the team that handles routing might not be the same team that handles load balancing, yet they both might land under the network umbrella.
2. The escalation rotation with the hours that the rotation encompasses
3. The contact telephone number and/or e-mail

Each person in the support team must know exactly where to find the escalation database and accessing this information should be easy. There are few things more important, when you get a new person in your Support team, than providing them the information of whom they should call.

A few more thoughts on the Escalation DB: It should also contain the names of all the support staff and managers. There should also be a process to maintain the Escalation DB (most teams will update the information organically, however, giving the Escalation DB a quarterly or semi quarterly review is always healthy).

More advanced CRM practices can provide Support teams valuable information about clients, especially external customers. Utilizing CRM tools like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics allow teams to track various pieces of information for customers. For example, different customers might have different times when they connect to a system to perform transactions. Also, it might be good to know which products a customer uses versus others.

True power of CRM systems (which can provide competitive advantage) comes when they're accessible to both business users and support staff. Well-documented and adopted processes to gather information about a customer and their transacting patterns allows teams to better prepare and support them. For example, when onboarding a new customer, a sales representative for a financial trading system might mention that a particular customer performs most transactions right before market close (let' say between 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM). Thus, the Production Support team might add extra monitoring to keep an extra eye out for this customer and their trasactions during this time. The team might notice that the customer isn't connected and ready to do business and might want to preemptively call to make sure that everything's OK. In many financial trading systems, revenues come in the form of fees on transactions. If the customer can't do business this could mean losses in revenues.