Infor CRM Strategies: An Example of How Your Customer Service Team Tracks Quality Control

By Dick Wooden on December 27, 2016 at 2:00 PM

In this final post of the series, we will look at an example that illustrates Infor CRM’s support of a q uality control system and walk through how customer service representatives can utilize it along with the software’s Tickets functionality to track quality control issues and identify trends.

Example for Improved Quality Control

Say for instance you are the operations manager of a computer and electronic product manufacturing company. One of your company’s operations goals is to track quality control issues of your products. As you manage the daily operations of your company, it is brought to your attention that over the last 30 days your company has seen a noticeable increase in calls from clients about defective laptop monitors. You find that the issues range from broken screens, to screen backlights not working, to screens going completely blank, amongst other issues. And the issues are occurring with multiple brands.

Let’s look at this issue more closely. On the surface, what is clear is that clients are having problems with your computer screens and they are possibly due to a variety of reasons. But you also notice that it could be a manufacturing issue since it is affecting more than one brand at once. There are several questions to consider as you begin your analysis:

What is the exact problem clients are having with their monitor?
How many distinctive computer screen issues exist?
How many clients are having problems with their monitors?
What clients are having this problem?
Is this the first, second, or third time this issue has occurred?
When did the monitor issue first begin?
When were these particular computers manufactured?
Is it a process or product issue?

The Tickets feature in Infor CRM is the main feature that would be used by your customer service team. This is often the first place of contact made by your client and where some of these questions will be answered.

Customer Service and the Quality Control System

Utilize a Quality Control System

Client Partnership: This partnership is based on the expectation that your company will provide a quality product to help your client fulfill its business objectives. Your customer service team is responsible for understanding this partnership and delivering service that supports those expectations. As a first point of contact, your customer service team has a significant role in nurturing this partnership each time they communicate with clients. CRM features that assist in delivering quality customer service. features that assist in delivering quality customer service.
CRM SpeedSearch to locate customer issues and resolutions
Process Management: Understanding the process to be followed to deliver upon these expectations, the customer service team would open a Ticket and place it in its proper hierarchical order and set its priority and then record the product category to which it pertains, the business area to which it belongs, and the issue the client has with the product along with other pertinent data. And as can been seen in the figure below a longer, more detailed description of the issue can be added to ticket detail as well as many other fields to further define and detail the issue.

Infor CRM Ticket.png

Resolve the Quality Issue

Strategic Planning and Alignment:Your Company’s objective is to provide quality products, and as part of your quality control system, you have a plan of how you will ensure quality on the front and back end. The quality of data that is captured by CSR’s is what is used in the analysis of potential trends and reveal ways to get ahead of the trends in a timely manner. The customer service representative
Process Management: Along with the process of gathering and recording quality control issue data by CSR’s, the appropriate parties then use that data in their analysis and methods employed to make the proper improvements to control quality.
Supplier Partnership: The Ticket detail data helps to identify the cause of the problem. It will help to determine whether the computer monitor issue is a troubleshooting issue that can be handled by technical support, if it needs to be returned for maintenance, if maintenance is required because of defective parts, or if there is a need to address the quality of parts from your supplier.

Performance Management: It is the initial and ongoing data that is collected by CSR’s that reveals the nature of the product issue, that potentially gets assigned to technical support or your supplier contact record depending on what the analysis reveals. Beyond resolution, this information provides a clear picture on how CSR’s perform in the context of quality control, how other departments such as technical support contribute, the role that partners and vendors play, but most importantly if there are trends that need to be guarded against and what you need to do to ensure that they are. CRM features to capture insight into performance. features to capture insight into performance.

CRM Advanced Analytics to gain a deep understanding of your team’s performance, service, and support related to quality control.

Identify Trends and Quickly Make Improvement

Continuous Improvement: Equipped with knowledge of the quality issue that you learn has become a trend, you can now begin to develop the proper solutions. CRM features to capture insight into possible trends. features to capture insight into possible trends.

Ability to analyze ticket volume at the product and category level
Ability to create reports to understand escalated tickets in order to improve resolution time and manage quality more effectively

Employee Involvement: With this quality control system in place, every department, including your customer service team is trained and responsible for carrying out the system and engaging in its ongoing success.

As you can see, Infor CRM system can support your quality control system. From the example above it is clear how important the information your customer service team gathers from the client, the process through resolution, and the communication from other departments. It also demonstrates how easily a quality control system can fit into the capabilities of the system.