The support organization is the voice and face of the company to its customers. But when customer problems require input or action from other departments, the support team often loses control and visibility of the issue. When customer problems do not reach resolution in a timely manner, customer satisfaction and loyalty are negatively impacted. For this reason, the support organization must step up to the plate in their role as customer champion and take control of the customer experience, even for issues routed to another department.

Common problems with interdepartmental handling of customer issues include a mismatch of priorities, no shared understanding of customer impact, and overall communication problems between teams. The solution is to create enterprise-wide workflow and visibility, allowing the support organization to always have the latest update about every problem, and to enable proactive escalation to ensure every customer issue - regardless of the party responsible - is resolved to the customer's satisfaction within any applicable service level commitments.

This white paper examines:

• Stages of the customer lifecycle
  
• Customer issues requiring interdepartmental resolution
  
• Leveraging cross-enterprise workflow and visibility to improve interdepartmental communication
  
• Numara® FootPrints for Customer Service