Most of the general purpose Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications offer limited capabilities to log customer service calls beyond their core marketing and sales functionality.  CRM call handling is rooted in generic services industries like banking/finance and low value consumer products. These CRM applications are woefully inadequate in delivering product support for manufactured durable products that are high value and have complex product configuration.  

Most of the manufacturers also use distributors, dealer channel or independent service centers to provide the service to the end customers. Manufacturers mainly provide support services to these service centers and dispatch end customer calls to the nearest eligible service center.

Even though the product information is very important to validate the warranty entitlements and find applicable service resolution, most CRM case management applications do not deal with specific product information leading to longer response times and unsatisfied customers. The product support system for the product manufacturers need to utilize the full product service history, product configuration (BOM), warranty and contract entitlements to provide an adequate and pertinent response.

As manufacturers offer a number of brands, models and product variations, it is critical for knowledge management systems to filter the solutions based on the relevant product and problem classification to get to a relevant resolution faster. Companies may also need to engage the right people within the company to resolve some support requests.  Support systems need good routing logic and work flow to assign support requests to leverage the right expertise.

Support requests are also a very good source of information to perform failure analysis and improve the quality of the products.  This kind of failure analysis requires the right information to be captured during the support request resolution process. Most CRM systems are not equipped to capture the essential failure information like causal part, complaint, cause and corrective action. Integrated support analysis focused on product quality enables companies to take timely action to reduce escalating warranty or recall costs and protect brand equity.

Most of the support calls require some service fulfillment like generation of Return Material Authorization (RMA), dispatching the support request to local service center for further action, ordering of parts, or generation of warranty claim. Support system to be truly effective needs these service fulfillment capabilities.  

Specialized support systems like 4CS iSupport are addressing the needs of manufacturers that CRM system leave out. The focus of managing the entire support process instead of just call logging and handling will enable the companies to provide excellent product support that their customers expect and demand.