Benefits of Unifying Trouble Ticketing with CRM and Service Management

There are many great trouble ticketing systems for cloud and communications providers out on the market.

They are mature products, ranging from relatively simple systems such as Atlassian Jira Service desk to massive, carrier-grade ones like BMC Remedy. Traditionally, these have been dedicated systems, focusing exclusively on incident management with integration adapters to other systems such as network monitoring (e.g., Remedy with IBM NetCool).

However, lately this landscape is changing as CRM systems acquire more and more functionality. Leading CRMs like Salesforce, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics are all extensible platforms with add-on apps ranging from quoting through billing and even financial systems. They are also development platforms with custom data objects and fully programmable UIs. This causes many businesses to re-think their strategy how to implement ticketing.

This post outlines key benefits of implementing ticketing in the CRM, especially when the CRM is also used for service management & inventory.

Enhanced customer support

Keeping CRM and ticketing together enables better issue prioritization because service personnel can be granted access to valuable account information:

• How long has the customer been with us?
• How much revenue is associated with the customer? What is customer level (silver, gold, platinum)?
• Does the customer have any open opportunities? How much potential revenue is at stake?
• Are there any work orders that are currently active on the account or service (e.g., an issue may be related to undergoing maintenance work)?
• Does the customer pay the bills? For customers that are late, a business process with a friendly reminder can be built into the ticket resolution.

Improved account relationships

If tickets are kept in the CRM, they will ultimately be related to accounts. This enables account management or sales teams to be aware of current and past tickets history for the account. This is valuable because:

• Prevents calling customers with new product and upgrade offers when they have open issues and are probably unlikely to talk about new purchases
• Enables account managers to call customers when issues are present to reassure them that they are taken care of

Better product management

If tickets are associated with services and ultimately products, this helps product management to obtain better visibility into product issues:

• What products are causing issues?
• What are the underlying root-causes with per-product breakdowns?
• What are break-fix cost and duration?

Cost reductions

When using building business architecture using siloed systems (e.g., separate CRM, order processing, ticketing, finance, etc.) integrations are required to make sure that business process flow though the systems.

Unfortunately, integrations are costly (not only to implement but even more so to maintain) and sensitive to system changes. The more functionality is on a single platform (CRM in this case), the greater the cost reduction and fewer data discrepancies — CRM becomes the single source of truth database. In our case trouble ticketing would share the same account, contact and preferably service information.

Conclusions

For siloed systems (i.e., separate CRM, order processing, ticketing, finance, etc.) integrations are required to ensure that business processes flow through. Unfortunately, integrations are costly (not only to implement but even more so to maintain), and sensitive to system changes. The more functionality is consolidated within a single platform, the greater the cost reduction and fewer data discrepancies.

When adding ticketing to the CRM, the latter becomes the single source of truth database for account, contact and (preferably) service information. There are multiple options for handling trouble ticketing in Salesforce (described in detail here) enabling businesses to take advantage of CRM/ticketing consolidation.

Nextian is a vendor of Quote-to-Cash (QTC) software for cloud and communications helping providers accelerate growth and increase customer lifetime value.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you!