Automate Case Updates to Customers in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

A common complaint of customers is a lack of responsiveness on the part of support/customer service.  World class customer service organizations provide quick and consistent communication with their clients, especially when resolving issues.

One thing that is really nice about working with Microsoft support is that whenever a case is resolved, I receive an email summarizing what has been done, with instructions on what to do in case the resolution is not satisfactory.

So what can you do to increase responsiveness and effectively communicate support incident resolution to your clients?  Why not use Microsoft Dynamics CRM?

Step 1.  Use Microsoft CRM to manage cases

Step 2.  Add the Responsible Contact lookup to the form. 

A little background—Cases in Microsoft CRM have a customer lookup field that can be linked to either accounts or contacts, but not both.  This provides the ability to handle both B:B and B:C customer cases.  If you are dealing with corporate customers, you will want to use the customer lookup to designate the company that the case is regarding, so it is associated with that customer. 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides an additional contact lookup field that you can use to specify the responsible contact for the case.  By default it is not added to the form.  You will need to go to Settings,Customization, Customize Entities, edit the case form, and add the Responsible Contact field to the form.  I would also recommend that you make the Responsible Contact business required.  The idea is that when you automate something via workflow, it is going to happen every time you resolve a case, so it is critical that there be a contact in that field for the workflow to perform consistently.

Step 3.  Create a Workflow to automatically send an E-Mail when the case is resolved.

Go to Settings, Workflow, and create a new workflow. Select Case as the Entity.

On the next screen, set your workflow to run whenever  record attributes change

Hit the Select button and click “Status.”  This will make the workflow evaluate whether or not to send an E-mail every time that the status is updated.

Then, add a check condition step to the Workflow Rule.   The step should be if Status = Resolved, then send E-Mail

Click the Set Properties button and create your email message.  Using the Form Assistant, you can enter any field from the case or the associated entities, such as the Responsible Contact.  To use the Form Assistant on the create email screen, first, select the field on the form that you want to populate, then in the form assistant, select the entity that you want to look for the value, and the field that you want to insert.  You will notice that the Form Assistant will limit your selection based on the type of field—for example, you can’t insert a money attribute into a date field.

For your To: value on the E-Mail, make sure you select Responsible Contact (Contact) as the look for entity in form assistant.  You may be tempted to select Customer (Contact); however, that is the relationship used for the customer lookup, and will result in e-mails not sending in the scenario where the case is created against a company.

For the body of the e-mail, you should come up with a template that includes the message that you want to relay to your customers when a case is resolved.  It should include things like:

• Thanking the customer for their business
• Letting them know when the case was resolved
• Providing instructions for re-opening the case if necessary.

It may also be good to provide a summary of what was done to resolve the case.  This brings up one potential shortcoming—when you resolve a case in Microsoft CRM, the resolution details are stored in a separate entity called Case Resolution.  The issue is that this entity cannot be accessed via workflow, and data in the case resolution cannot be included in workflow emails or e-mail templates. 

The solution is to add a case resolution summary field to the main case form.  This will allow you to type a quick summary for external consumption prior to closing the case, and reflect that field in the body your case feedback E-mail.  There are several benefits to this approach:

1. It will personalize the message to your customer, providing relevant information pertinent to their case.
2. It will give you the ability to have “Internal” resolution notes vs. “External” resolution notes.  Frequently there are details that you want to record internally that you would not want external audiences to see.  Of course, if you are making a note that the contact was unreasonable or difficult to work with, you would not want that message going back to that user. Also there may be some behind the scenes details, such as if the manager of customer service approved something, that are relevant to your internal resolution history for the case, but are not important to the end user.

Step 4: Save and Publish your workflow

Now you will have an E-Mail sent immediately to your customers whenever a case is resolved, so you can be sure that you are providing timely feedback, and as a result, improving customer satisfaction. 

Note you can expand this workflow to also send updates when the status changes to something other than resolved, such as when the case is canceled.  Just insert another check conditions step after the first one and select status = Canceled, for example, then create an email specific to your canceled status.

Comments

[Shell Smith]

I think these are some great tips - that when added to other things could help in a lot of customer retention. I think people need to educate themselves a little better about customer service before they dive head-on in to the business world (thinking about little things like this). I have my employees take an online survey and the we discuss it. It has a lot of great information. I hope it can help someone else as much as it has helped me. survey can be found at: www.mshare.net/aboutus-quiz.html

[Cheap Computers Canada]

An excellent customer service is what keeps the customer coming for more and that's what we all need to improve our busienss.