What Happens When Your CRM Software Crashes?

If your business depends on Twitter for any part of its customer relationship management strategy, this morning probably felt a little quiet. The popular social networking platform experienced a brief outage today, apparently due to a denial of service attack powered by an army of compromised PCs.

Of course, the same thing can happen to just about any part of your customer communication platform:

• Your e-mail server can crash, backing up incoming and outgoing messages into a queue.
• The trunk line to your call center can get severed, leaving call center agents unable to receive phone calls or connect to networked CRM systems.
• A denial of service attack, like the one targeting Twitter, can hit the servers that host your own CRM applications.

As a customer service professional, I've experienced combinations of all three. (Imagine the horror of a client discovering that a gas company crew has run a backhoe through a phone company data cable on the morning of a huge product launch. I lived that!) That's why your CRM software strategy should include some fallback plans, anticipating some typical worst case scenarios.

• Have "downtime forms" pre-printed on paper that allow customer service agents to collect key information that can be scanned or manually entered into CRM systems once normal service has been restored.
• Maintain a clear communication strategy for emergencies or service outages. Many companies use Twitter to alert customers when phone or website service becomes sluggish or unavailable. If your company relies heavily on e-mail, Twitter, or web forms, have a plan in place to deploy an overflow call center to handle heightened call volume during on Internet interruption.
• If your CRM software integrates with multiple messaging sources, consider automating some common requests using web forms or e-mail. On a normal day, this can help your team serve customers more efficiently. When dealing with a crisis or a partial outage, promoting automated tools can help customers choose the most efficient way to get their needs met.

As Seth Godin recently wrote, there's really no such thing as a "perfect storm" that can excuse a failure to provide customer service. Training your team to manage CRM systems through extraordinary events can communicate to customers that you're there for them when the chips are down.