We often see this kind of situation in business: our team of experts was faced with mailboxes full of customer requests. These tasks were too short to justify delegation to someone in-house, so the experts chose to do them themselves.

These were often similar requests from different customers. The requests varied from evaluating a new team member to creating a copy of an invoice.

The consequence: the accumulation of “small” requests was overloading their schedule and causing additional delays in serving customers. A solution had to be found to this problem, without creating a new one (for example, delays due to a delegation process where a lot of time is lost following up on small tasks).

What’s more, the solution had to integrate easily into our sales process, and use the tools we already had at our disposal.

The solution: Membrain

One of our long-standing partners is Membrain. Their platform offers everything a sales team needs to consider when choosing a CRM.

After experiencing many frustrations with their ticketing provider, Zendesk, they decided to develop a complete support ticket management module for Membrain. We were lucky enough to be among the beta testers for their final phase.

We seized the opportunity not only to use the module to process customer support requests, but also to take the exercise a step further. The entire internal team sat down to review all internal processes for executing queries, requests and even processes not directly related to a customer request.

Membrain makes it possible to set up a dynamic step-by-step process, which includes actions such as sending e-mails according to a given template, automatically creating reminders, automating, querying the database, and so on. All these elements put together enable us to respond more quickly to a support request.

The results 

The impact of this exercise has been significant. We estimate that we have freed up at least 20% of our experts’ time by implementing this automated process. We have been able to delegate more easily and quickly, while improving the traceability of requests. Our experts can track the execution of support requests without having to call several internal team members to find out the status. With more time at their disposal, the in-house team can handle more types of request, and receive a faster response from an expert.

Although the initial idea was to improve the support request management process, we achieved several related benefits.

• Internal process audit: We often talk about sales processes or manufacturing processes, but we can’t stop there. Internal processes also need to be defined and put into an IT tool, so that they can be automated and productivity gains achieved. This is what we did with the Membrain module.

Questioning ourselves forced us to ask, in a general way, whether we were wasting time in certain of our processes or certain elements of our processes. This enabled us to assess where they could be optimized.

• Improved customer experience: This exercise enabled us to clean up all our requests and processes, which improved the customer experience. For example, when onboarding a new customer, we’re able to concentrate all the information in one email instead of three.

We’ve found ways to optimize the efficiency of what we do. Normally, we don’t necessarily take the time to question what we’re doing, because we’re established in a routine and everything moves too fast to take any time out.

• Testing the Membrain module forced us to take an in-depth look at what we do. What’s more, it’s an ongoing exercise. We’re going to have to keep sitting down, looking at our processes and making them evolve. There’s still work to be done, but already, the team is feeling a huge difference.
• Impact on growth: We’re growing and adding to our team all the time. We expect the integration of new people into our team to accelerate drastically because we have successfully defined and optimized our processes.