For as long as I can remember, there has always been an acute lack of "bi-directional accountability" when it comes to complex problem resolution. This lack of closing the loop affects people within corporate organizations as well as external relationships, such as customers, partners, and affiliates.

Here is a perfect example that occurs all the time - you call your customer to provide them with one or more updates to a particular situation. They are not available so you leave them voice-mail.

A week later, your phone rings and guess what? It's the irate customer you called last week asking you where the updates are that they specifically asked for. You passionately profess that you did in fact leave them the information on their voice-mail ("you should have gotten this information"). What happened to the bi-directional accountability? There was an obligation for you to supply the information and an obligation for your customer to acknowledge that response, but the trail was cold (in fact, non-existent).

The constant battle with accountability management is sorting through who said what, when, and under what circumstances. In the case of voice-mail, for example, someone can always make the argument that "the system ate your voice-mail" - what are you going to say to that?

If you take the initiative to implement appropriate systems for accountability, you should be certain that they have little or no capability for intervention. For example, if someone gives you a hand-written note, it can be lost or thrown away, destroying the evidence.

Typical benefits of systems that provide accountability should include:

• traceability
• reportability
• auditing capability
• archiving

Many of today's better CRM providers include features that enable detailed activity management with security features that prevent activities from being deleted. These activities can also contain category triggers that can be tied to notifications when activities are generated, further enforcing the model of accountability. In the perfect scenario, the category triggers will generate notifications and they will be logged for auditing and archiving purposes. Activities should have the ability to be tied to a main driving factors, such as a helpdesk ticket, issue, defect, IT request, etc. Taking the steps to facilitate accountability through software implementations is one of the most critical factors for reducing operational costs - something that every CFO and CIO in business today will be motivated to achieve.

Leandro Goldberg is a frequent blogger and CRM Advisor Email: lgoldberg@supportfusion.com Company: http://www.supportfusion.com Blog: supportfusion.blogspot.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Leandro_Goldberg