InfoStrat's Townsend Report

Parature is Microsoft's leading customer service tool in the Dynamics family. It supports multiple channels for customer service, including online self-service, social, phone, chat and more. 

Queues are one of the fundamental concepts of Parature and other customer service products.  They define a structure for presenting tickets to customer service representatives so they can be handled by the right person at the right time. This blog post expands on the material in the Parature knowledge base.  Here is an article with instructions on the steps to create and modify queues.

The most fundamental queue is the customer service representative (CSR) queue.  The queue is a holding place for tickets before they are grabbed by a CSR to work on the issue.   Once they are grabbed, the queue has served its purpose and the ticket will disappear from the queue.  Multiple CSRs could use the same queue, or queues could be personalized for a single CSR, depending on how your CSRs map to the issues …

Customer relationship management (CRM) doesn't help a company if it is not adopted by users, and that adoption starts with the commitment of senior leadership.  For sales, the top management is often a vice president for sales, followed by managers for specific lines of products or services and, ultimately, account teams.

Without CRM in place, sales leaders often rely on spreadsheets as the basis of forecasts and pipeline meetings.  With CRM, the first step is to throw away the spreadsheet, and make CRM the authoritative source for all sales pipeline information.  Sales leaders must convey that if the opportunity is not in CRM, it doesn't exist for sales discussions or eventually for commission payments.

Using CRM as the system of record for sales doesn't mean you have to give up the functionality of spreadsheets.  Dynamics CRM can export views such as open opportunities to Excel, allowing further manipulation and analysis in a spreadsheet.  The spreadsheet may also be f…