The Critical Role of SLAs in Customer Service and How Service CRM Helps

No two businesses are alike. However, every company knows one truth: finding new customers is hard work. That’s why keeping your existing customers happy is so crucial. Naturally, if you are a service manager, you have to think: what makes customers stick around? The answer is ‘satisfaction’, of course. It’s no surprise that CSAT scores are a hot topic in every customer service department.

Now, while high CSAT scores are important, the way many companies approach it is, at best, highly flawed. You can’t expect customers to be happy if your customer service team is working in the dark. Unfortunate as it is, most customer service teams work in the dark. They react to problems and never understand why they happen, why they matter to the customers, what counts as satisfactory resolution, and so on. This is a massive gap, and that is why SLAs exist – to plug this gap and to marry ‘what service professionals do’ with ‘what customers want them to do’. 

How can SLAs align customer service teams with customer expectations?

SLAs are the daily micro-targets that guide your team toward meaningful work. They’re the backbone of a scientific management style. They make success a part of the design, not a matter of chance. But surprisingly, SLAs are rarely used in B2C settings and are often used carelessly in B2B.

Over time, SLAs can lose their effectiveness and become something to be ‘managed’, often with recourse to questionable workarounds and prevarication tactics. This happens because SLAs often feel like a burden, not a reflection of the team’s work. But what if they could be the secret sauce to customer service greatness?

How to make SLAs the secret sauce of greatness in your customer service?

Here’s the thing: SLAs shouldn’t be based on industry standards. Instead, they should be tailored to your specific business – what you sell, how you sell it, and whom you sell it to. SLAs are essentially an unambiguous indicator of daily performance and progress. But the key to making SLSs help service professionals do the right work, and do it the right way, is to design them the right way. 

Start by creating granular SLAs based on what you think your customers want. Then, fine-tune them based on actual customer behaviour. This change improves customer satisfaction significantly, as critical issues are addressed promptly, and less urgent matters still receive adequate attention. For example, consider a B2B software company that sells project management tools to small and medium-sized businesses. This company already has a tiered response system in place, with SLAs for different severity levels: critical issues within two hours, high-priority issues within 12 hours, and low-priority issues within 24 hours.

As they gather data, they notice a pattern. 

  • Critical issues, like system outages, are well-handled with the two-hour response time. 
  • However, they find that 12 hours is too long for high-priority issues, such as users being unable to log in or access purchased features. These problems significantly impact productivity and customer satisfaction if not resolved within the same business day. To address this, the company adjusts the SLA for high-priority issues to four hours, ensuring that these critical user experiences are resolved promptly.
  • On the other hand, low-priority issues, which don’t significantly affect customer satisfaction, are reassessed. The company extends the SLA for these issues to 48 hours.

These changes significantly improve customer satisfaction. High-priority issues are addressed within a more appropriate timeframe, reducing downtime for users, while low-priority matters receive adequate attention without overwhelming the support team. However, very few companies are able to bring this granularity to their SLA design. Why’s it so?

A flexible service CRM is the prerequisite of SLAs that work

For effective SLA design and fine-tuning, you need a robust service CRM. Let’s understand the key qualities of a service CRM that can support the SLA-led planning style in an organization.

  1. First, your service CRM should faithfully replicate your workflows. This means every step your team takes can be mirrored in the system.
  2. Second, it should capture data for every step. That’s how you gain a clearer picture of how your processes are working and where improvements are needed.
  3. Your service CRM should reveal insights from the data. It’s not enough to just collect data. You need to understand it. A good CRM helps you see patterns and trends that can guide your SLA adjustments.
  4. Most importantly, it should let workflows evolve based on customer needs and team performance. As you learn more about what your customers value and how your team operates, you should be able to tweak your processes to better meet those needs. This adaptability in the CRM is crucial for keeping your SLAs relevant and effective.

Now, every service CRM claims to offer these facilities. But only a few get the first three right, and almost none get the fourth right. The problem is in the rigidity of traditional CRM.

Why traditional CRM can’t help and why low-code service CRM can

Traditional CRMs (hard-coded) are rigid, hard to customize, and expensive to maintain. Hard-coded CRMs are so tough to change that organizations can’t find the budget or time for their IT teams to keep them updated.

Low-code CRMs, however, can overcome this problem. How? By making it easy for any user to become a developer, even if they have never coded before.

How is this possible?

Low-code service CRMs are built on these five pillars:

  • A visual editor that lets you stitch together workflows, with code generated automatically in the background.
  • Templates that you can modify from standard use cases.
  • Dashboards that fetch data accurately from any source and perform the right operations to provide needed reports.
  • Secure operations, to eliminate the risk of shadow IT.
  • Reusable innovation, as anything built, becomes a template for others.

This flexibility makes low-code service CRMs a powerful tool for any business.

How Amoga low-code CRM can make SLAs the winning hand for your organization

When we built Amoga, we aimed to create a system that makes achieving goals part of its design rather than relying on random factors. That’s why our service CRM is not only easy to use but also easy to customize based on real needs. We believe that end-users should shape the system. This also means we believe in freeing IT teams to focus on transformative projects instead of constant troubleshooting.

If you think your service team can perform better without working in the dark or dealing with irrelevant SLAs and metrics, you’ll appreciate how we’ve solved similar problems for our clients. Our approach ensures SLAs reflect what’s truly important to customers.

To see how Amoga can transform your service operations, book a call with us today. Let us help you turn SLAs into a winning edge for your organization.

CTA

Streamline Your Ticket Triage with Low-Code Solutions

Are these situations part of your service team’s daily life?

  1. Tickets get allocated to people not suitable, trained, or authorized to work on them.
  2. Tickets come to light only when someone asks for an update from the client side.
  3. Tickets pass through more than one layer of the helpdesk before they land in the right queue.

For 90% of service teams, this is so common that nobody is even particularly shocked when it happens. However, realize this: every time you let any of these situations happen, a customer somewhere is left waiting – their requests are not even close to being resolved.

This is why, despite good work and hard effort, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores for most service teams don’t improve. But why do service teams struggle so much, when they have a CRM in place that promises to make life easy?

When the war cry on everyone’s lips is that of ‘automate, automate, automate’, why does so much work get done based on memory, intuition, and sometimes even guesswork? Let’s find out.

Why Does This Happen?

Traditional CRMs look great till the time you buy them. Then you realize they are rigid and hard to modify once they are set up. Customizing them further is costly, and IT never seems to have the budget or time, because they are busy with urgent issues. This rigidity makes the CRM practically a roadblock for service teams. On one hand, you have a business that is changing every day and customer preferences evolving every day, and on the other hand, you have a system that is living in the past – this gap is the real problem. The worst news is that this gap will keep on widening because of internal as well as external factors. Let’s look at the Internal factors first. 

Your business is not static; it’s dynamic. Your product and offerings evolve. How you deliver them also changes. You improve processes, introduce new workflows, and automate tasks, all of which alter the nature of issues. Additionally, as your product offerings change, so do your team’s skills and roles. This ongoing evolution means your CRM must adapt to new workflows and issues, but traditional systems often fail to keep up. Now, let’s look at the external factors. 

When you first begin with a service CRM and set up ticket triage rules, they are based on a set of initial assumptions about customer issues, product usage, and service expectations. However, these assumptions hardly ever align with reality. The real world is far more nuanced than broad-stroke assumptions can capture. Some issues might be completely unexpected, while others may require more attention than you initially anticipated. Over time, if your CRM does a good job with data analysis, you will find trends. However, traditional service CRMs fail to adapt and force teams to resort to manual intervention, which increases errors.

What happens when your triage system can’t keep up with the dynamic nature of your business and your customers? It’s easy to guess: tickets end up in the wrong hands, leading to delays and frustrated customers. But, Low-Code service CRMs can end this problem and make effective ticket triaging the secret sauce of your service ops. 

How Low-Code Service CRMs Change Ticket Triage

To understand this, let’s first understand what Low-Code is. Think of Low-Code as a software development approach that shifts away from traditional coding to a more visual approach. 

So, when you use a low-codeLow-Code platform, you use visual tools to build your applications, instead of writing code. With low-codeLow-Code, you have visual editors, workflow builders, and templates for common use cases. You can create dashboards that fetch accurate data from any source and generate the needed reports. But how does this help you solve the problem of erratic ticket triaging?

Low-Code solves the problem of inflexible CRMs in several ways:
  1. You can model your ticket routing process exactly as you need. In fact, if you get your hands on a true Low-Code service CRM, you will find that if you can draw a workflow on paper, you can also achieve it in the CRM. Every step, rule, and condition can be accurately represented.
  2. You can capture important data at each stage of ticket routing. This includes ticket details, who is assigned to them, and actions taken. You get built-in analytics and reporting tools to help you visualize ticket volumes, routing paths, and resolution times. This means you will be able to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies the moment they appear. 
  3. You will never get stuck with workflows that don’t reflect the ever-changing realities of your business processes. Low-codeLow-Code platforms make it simple to adjust workflows and let you keep up with changing needs.
  4. You can make the low-codeLow-Code platform work smoothly with your existing systems, such as your knowledge bases, and other support tools. This ensures your ticket routing processes have access to relevant customer data and existing resources.

Now, would you choose any Low-Code service CRM? Or would you rather go with one that businesses like yours are already using every day, enjoying higher CSATs than ever before?

Why Amoga’s Low-Code Service CRM Is the Right Choice

At Amoga, we believe in developing platforms that empower end users. The people closest to the work are the best users of technology, so it should be simple and intuitive for them. They should be able to think like developers even if they are not developers.

This core value guided us when we built Amoga’s low-codeLow-Code service CRM. One of the most popular features our clients enjoy is smart ticket routing, which directly improves their customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. Because our platform is built with ease of use in mind, developing new features and enhancements takes one-tenth the time and one-fourth the cost of traditional methods. This efficiency means your IT team can focus on larger, game-changing projects rather than routine tasks.

Additionally, everything built on this platform complies with the highest security standards in your industry. This ensures that while your processes become more efficient, they remain secure.

If you feel your team’s ticket triage process can improve, you will love Amoga. Book a conversation with us, and we will understand your business and show you how Amoga can quickly and easily transform the way you handle ticket triage.

 

 

CTA

Fix Your Broken Sales Processes with a Low-Code CRM

If there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about process design, it’s Jack Welch. He was the former CEO of General Electric. More importantly, he was a pioneer of process design. He famously said, “An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.” We’d like to take it a step further…

Organizations also need to put those actions into processes—and then stick to them. Why? Because when processes reflect meaningful work, and when everyone follows process, it implies that all work is meaningful work. This means that every effort moves the needle toward your goals. Nothing goes to waste. This is crucial for sales teams to enjoy their work and to achieve their goals by design, not by luck. 

In competitive sales, deals are won and lost on the finest of margins. A CRM is the key to making this happen. It’s your process playbook, your memory bank, your guide to consistent, high-performance sales. But here’s a paradox: Almost every organization with a sales force of any size uses a CRM.

Yet 90% of these organizations experience high levels of stress and unhappiness in their sales departments. Turnover is through the roof – from field sales reps to territory managers to back-office staff. How can this be? Let’s understand. 

Why Do Sales Teams Struggle with Following Processes?

 

The answer is simple: over time, traditional CRMs stop being helpful and become roadblocks for the users meant to benefit from them. They burden sales teams with endless data entry. They make them jump through process hoops that don’t reflect the realities of their work. That’s why many salespersons say they can’t see the connection between the digital workflow in their CRM and their real-world tasks.

Why does this happen?

The real-world sales process is ever-changing, but most CRMs are frozen in time. They’re costly and slow to adapt. So, there never is enough budget and patience to shape a vanilla CRM into a CRM that faithfully reflects the true nature of the work. Naturally, sales teams start to bypass them. As a result, the gap between ‘what they’re supposed to do’ and ‘what they actually do’ widens. This breaks down processes. Eventually, process compliance becomes such a neglected aspect that managers give up on it altogether. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Sales CRMs can be powerful engines for growth… but only if they’re built with flexibility in mind. Enter Low-Code sales CRM – the solution that puts the power back in the hands of sales teams.

How Can Low-Code CRMs Make It Easier to Follow Processes?



Low-Code is a new way of building software where you don’t need to be a tech wizard to create, customize, or modify your CRM. A Low-Code CRM brings together visual interfaces, drag-and-drop tools, and pre-built templates for common sales scenarios. So anyone can easily build and modify their CRM workflows without writing a single line of code. In this way, Low-Code CRMs empower the people who use them every day – your sales team. 

So, how does this solve the process adherence problem? 

Firstly, a Low-Code CRM makes it easy for your sales team to use technology to their advantage. They no longer need to rely solely on memory. They don’t need to scramble through interlinked process playbooks. Instead, they know exactly what they need to do at every stage of the sales process. But Low-Code sales CRMs are not about following a predefined path. In fact, Low-Code lets your sales team build their own features and automation. So, everyone can think about what features they need in the CRM so that their work becomes easier, better, and more enjoyable. And then, they can build the feature themselves. The core benefit here is that this lets sales experts focus on what they do best – building relationships, closing deals, and driving revenue.

A Low-Code CRM is designed to be flexible so that it can evolve as your business does. It becomes a living, breathing tool – a tool that reflects the real workflows of sales processes. Low-Code is a game-changer for sales managers. If you manage a sales team, you can design your CRM to nudge your team in the right direction – not through pressure or repetition, but by creating digital pathways that lead to success. These pathways include checkpoints, progress indicators, and built-in incentives, all of which make it easy for your team to reach their goals.

Over time, a Low-Code CRM reveals the clear link between process adherence and achievement. It captures and monitors all the lead measures that help managers predict and track success. This makes it easier than ever to identify what’s working and what’s not, so you can refine your processes and improve your results.

But you’d be wrong to believe that all Low-Code sales CRM are alike. 

What Makes Amoga’s Low-Code Sales CRM Stand Out?

Our system is based on four key principles.

  1. We believe in giving your sales team the tools they need to work smarter, faster, and with more enjoyment. With Amoga, they can build their own solutions to the challenges they face every day, without waiting for IT or relying on complex coding.
  2. We free up your IT department to focus on big-picture projects that can truly transform your business. Amoga’s Low-Code platform means they can build powerful applications at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional development.
  3. We take security seriously. Every aspect of Amoga is designed with the most stringent protocols in mind. This is to ensure that your data is safe and your operations are protected. Our platform creates an ecosystem of apps that share a unified security blanket.
  4. We don’t just add to your existing processes; we multiply your progress. Amoga comes with pre-built templates for common use cases. The best part is that anyone can create their own reusable templates. This means your team can quickly build and deploy solutions that drive real results.

If process adherence is a top priority for your management philosophy, then Amoga Sales CRM is a perfect fit. Schedule a meeting with us today and discover how Amoga can revolutionize your sales operations.

 

 

CTA

Boost Your Sales Team’s Productivity with Low-Code CRM

In the world of sales, there’s a valley that separates effort from outcomes. Every company tries its best to build a bridge over this valley. But the problem is that most of these bridges look like planks of wood tied with ropes. Naturally, sales professionals find these bridges hard to navigate, and most of them topple into the valley of frustration. 

Here’s why this happens. Meaningful sales processes are inherently complex. Take, for instance, one of our clients that develops marketing automation software for small businesses.

Their typical sales process involves 12 steps:

  1. Generate leads through digital marketing.
  2. Engage with interested customers.
  3. Explain the unique selling points.
  4. Respond to queries.
  5. Send quotations.
  6. Conduct follow-up meetings upon request.
  7. Update and share revised quotes.
  8. Close agreements.
  9. Send payment links.
  10. Confirm payments.
  11. Deliver the product.
  12. Onboard the customer.

These are 12 steps, with 11 gaps between them, through which most deals fall. New sales professionals on your team will take months to truly learn the process and to truly master all the different processes, departments, and applications that overlap with these steps. As a result, the expected increase in productivity remains elusive. Of course, every organization tries different flavours of sales CRM, but the results are far from impressive. 

Now, let’s explore why traditional Sales CRMs fail to deliver the solutions they promise.

Why Do Traditional Sales CRMs Fail to Solve This Problem?

The promise of traditional CRMs crumbles under the weight of their own rigidity – that’s the biggest flaw. These CRMs are hard to customize and costly to adapt, but why is this so crucial? The sales process is not simple. It involves comprehensive process design, including a SWOT analysis of the company or product, identifying customer fits, precise market positioning, sales steps to follow and much more. These intricate steps cannot be standardized from one company to another, even if they are in the same industry.

Furthermore, as businesses evolve, their sales processes must also adapt. Traditional CRMs fail to keep up with these dynamic needs because of their rigid, monolithic design. They become an iron glove that everyone must wear, yet they fit no one properly. Instead of aiding productivity, they become a maze in which people remain lost. What happens next is that salespeople become eager to bypass these systems. Within a few years, even the best of old-school CRM systems are reduced to mere repositories of vanity data – a far cry from the ‘sales engines’ they promised to be.

However, Low-Code sales CRMs offer a promising solution. They fulfil the promise of CRM as a true sales engine, and they do so by changing the ‘change your process to fit the CRM’ paradigm to ‘shape your CRM to fit your processes’ paradigm. And this shift triggers a snowball effect that eventually makes everyone in your sales team do more with less. 

How Do Low-Code Sales CRMs Provide the Solution?

It might seem like a tall claim, but this is true: Low-Code sales CRMs work by making it nearly impossible for your sales teams to fail. Low-Code means everyone can develop the feature or enhancement they need so that the CRM makes their work faster and more enjoyable. Such a CRM is so flexible that you can envision any sales process as a series of well-defined tasks, and then stitch together those tasks in the CRM, to create a faithful digital replica of the on-ground workflow.

This is a game changer for any sales professional, because:

  1. They don’t have to think of a hazy, distant goal of ‘closure’ and instead know exactly what to focus on ‘today’.
  2. They don’t have to remember complicated workflows and will never miss a follow-up with their leads – whether to request a meeting, to get the agreement signed, or to get the invoice paid.

This is also the essence of how a Low-Code sales CRM becomes the ‘sales engine with super fuel’ that your organization needs already (or will need very soon when you need to ramp up the sales team but won’t have the mind space to mentor everyone). The transformation from being ‘just a CRM’ to being a ‘sales engine’ relies on whether the CRM can bring out two key principles: 

  1. Everyone does the work that matters
  2. Everyone knows how well they are doing that work

First, let’s talk about doing the right thing. 

Traditional sales teams depend heavily on having highly motivated salespeople. Leaders hope that their team’s drive and hunger will overcome the complexities of the sales process. However, this is not a strategy. A much better solution is to use a well-designed CRM system that makes it easy for anyone to create structured pathways that can guide salespeople through each step in a way that digressions become impossible. 

For instance, a salesperson will know that they need to send an edited quotation back to a potential customer within their workday, rather than daze about whether the deal will be closed or not. When salespersons focus on meaningful conversations focused on the micro-moments that are valuable to customers, they naturally reduce risks of deal attrition and reduce their reliance on luck to close deals. 

Such a system shifts focus from lag measures, like the number of closures, to lead measures that drive everyday activities. Lead measures are actionable steps that salespeople can take daily, such as the number of customer visits or follow-up calls. It’s proven that when teams focus on the activities defined by lead measures, the system ensures that the lag measures, like deal closures, will naturally follow.

Secondly, knowing how well everyone in your team is doing, is crucial. This is where scorecards in the CRM come into play. Scorecards provide real-time feedback on performance and nudge salespeople to stay on the right path. For example, consider the sales process we discussed earlier, and consider how thoughtfully designed flowcharts ensure that salespeople stay on course in spite of the protracted process. Here are some example scorecards:

  1. Lead Generation Scorecard: To show salespeople how their lead generation efforts compare to their peers.
  2. Customer Engagement Scorecard: Measures the number of customer visits and follow-up meetings and helps salespeople understand the importance of staying engaged with potential clients.
  3. Quotation and Closure Scorecard: This scorecard highlights the crucial steps leading to closure and for that, it monitors the time taken to get quotations and agreements signed off. 

These scorecards serve as daily motivators. They ensure that salespeople know exactly what tasks they need to focus on. They also provide a clear benchmark of performance relative to their peers. The best part of using such a Low-Code CRM is that even if management sometimes fails to articulate specific goals clearly, these scorecards ensure everyone is on the same page and working towards the same objectives. The gist is that you need a CRM that doesn’t just track data but actively propels your team forward; one that leaves no room for missteps. 

These thoughts drove us when we designed our Low-Code Sales CRM. Our vision is to create a tool engineered from the ground up for productivity, yet flexible enough to give control to the end users. That’s precisely what Amoga’s Low-Code sales CRM delivers.

What Makes Amoga’s Sales CRM Stand Out?

One of the main goals of Amoga’s Sales CRM is to empower every member of your sales team. Even those with no coding experience can develop CRM features that suit their specific tasks. This reduces reliance on external software development teams. This is crucial because the core development team can then focus on more complex, game-changing functionalities rather than resolving everyday bugs.

With Amoga’s Sales CRM, growing sales teams no longer need to worry about high costs and delays. Developing with Amoga’s Low-Code platform takes one-fourth the cost and one-tenth the time compared to traditional methods. Plus, everything operates within an enterprise-ready, secure environment, eliminating the risks of shadow IT.

Our clients have experienced these benefits firsthand, and we are eager to understand your specific sales challenges. Please don’t hesitate to book a conversation. Let us show you how Amoga’s Sales CRM can transform your sales process.

 

 

CTA