Current eMessage > Success Story > June 2020

Success Story

Peoples Telephone Cooperative boosts productivity with CRM

When we find a company doing an outstanding job using our products to their fullest extent, we love to share! For this success story, we want to highlight Peoples Telephone Cooperative’s use of Customer Master’s CRM (Client Relationship Management) feature. The Texas-based company uses CRM in six different ways to boost productivity with more ideas in the works.

If you are not familiar with CRM in Customer Master, it is a central location to store notes on account contacts. Users instantly see a history of contacts with a customer when an account is opened. From noting billing inquiries to tracking marketing efforts, CRM helps ensure customers receive a consistent message, and it keeps all associates on the same page.

Mcxie Hurst, Peoples’ Marketing Manager, said having instant access to all the information available on the customer’s account is the feature’s biggest benefit.

“We try very hard to keep everything in one place and CRM gives us the opportunity to make notes that we would otherwise hoard in emails,” Mcxie said.

She said Peoples has been using Customer Master’s CRM feature since they converted to MACC in 2016. Initially, CRM was used to simply track billing inquiries, but as time went on the company found some unique uses for the feature. Mcxie said Peoples is now using CRM in the following ways:

• Billing Department – This team uses CRM frequently for customer communications including returned mail and payment discussions. Sometimes these discussions require the ‘Inquiry Note’ to alert the rest of the team.
• Marketing – We are correlating our fiber-to-the-home upgrades and using CRM to add a pop-up to customers who are eligible for the upgrade. This helps all our teams know immediately to offer the upgrade, which is important as we are eventually retiring our copper-based services.
• Marketing – After sending annual disclosures in bill inserts, we load a CRM note on the account as a point of reference for the future.
• Field Technicians – Peoples has current company goals which require us to track upsells. Using the CRM tags in MACC Mobile, the supervisor can track when a field technician sells our protection plans or other upgraded services in the field.
• Network Research – To track requests for speed upgrades in our fixed wireless network where constraints will not allow service, we have created a CRM note to specifically track where to upgrade the network.
• Regulatory – We track copyright violations as well.

She said in the very near future, the company also plans to start using CRM to track inquiries from customers wanting a fiber connection where the service is currently unavailable. Peoples’ employees first learned how to use the CRM feature during training they received with their initial conversion. Mcxie said the company is where it is today with CRM through hands-on usage and as-needed help from MACC’s Software Support Team.

Not using CRM? Now is a great time to start!
Want to implement some of these ideas at your company? Contact your Customer Master Software Support Representative for assistance. As CRM is a core part of Customer Master, there is no additional cost to use it! MACC’s Training Team also has a free to use MACC Minute Tutorial covering CRM on our Client Pages* and a web training course is also available.

*To access training resources, please log-in to the Client Pages first and then follow the links above.