CRM communication integration maintenance overview
A housing organisation will manage many different forms of communication from any number of sources, including the growing potential for social media interaction. Those individual communication methods that they support through their business processes - telephone, email, SMS, housing surgery, post room, etc. - can all be configured on the system and linked to specific attributes such as the direction (inbound or outbound), the precise location where the communication took place and what scripts, if any, should be launched at the point of contact e.g. Pre-Script and Security Script. Individual SLA targets can be linked to each communication method in order to monitor compliance against a housing organisation's policy and customer charter. For instance, a housing organisation's policy may stipulate that customer contact initiated through the call centre should be assigned a higher priority - in terms of reduced resolution time - than those received via email.
The CRM call handling capability includes the potential to track inbound emails to one or more nominated accounts. Integrated with Microsoft Exchange Server through standard web services, CRM communications can be automatically created for incoming emails posted to these accounts and matched to a communication method, capturing the subject, the body text and any associated attachments. Similarly, social media Tweets posted against one or nominated Twitter handles can also be tracked and matched to a relevant communication method, capturing as separate attachments the core text as well as any associated images or video clips.
Each communication method can also be linked to an automatic expiration rule. For the most part, a housing organisation will endeavour to respond to all customer interactions within the terms of the SLA. However, there might be exceptional circumstances where it would be impracticable to respond to certain communications; hence it is possible to define rules whereby communications received via a specific method are automatically expired after a defined period of inactivity. By way of example, it might be useful to employ this capability in the event that any one of the housing organisation's social media sites be linked to a correspondence that goes unexpectedly viral.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of CRM communication integration maintenance, including: