Preparing for growth requires a combination of strategies deliberately pushing a company towards new achievements.
CRM automation is one strategy that keeps showing up wherever remarkable growth is taking place.
This post will expose the importance of CRM automation by unearthing the various benefits you’ll reap from adopting this strategy.
You’ll also get some hints on how to get started with CRM automation.
What is CRM automation?
The most complete definition of CRM automation has two sides: internal processes in a CRM application run with the data it collects and commands that the CRM system issues out when triggered by policies.
Internal processes can be as simple as moving a customer down a sales funnel after they have opened an email. Commands a CRM sends out can be connected to scheduling calls when integrated with other applications such as auto-diallers.
Regardless of the complexity of your business processes, these two capabilities facilitate enhancing productivity and other attributes of your business. But before we get to that, let’s examine how CRM automation plays a part in growth marketing.
Fitting CRM automation into growth marketing
Growth marketing focuses on customer relationship maintenance. The actions associated with growth marketing aim to reduce customer churn while increasing leads.
CRM automation makes managing the movement of customers through funnels faster, and keeps them hooked to your services. The reasons detailed in the next section paint a clearer picture of just how this comes to be.
Why does your business require implementation of CRM automation?
Implementing CRM automation unleashes these benefits. Each with brief explanations shed light on how they result in growth.
• More efficient customer support process
• Better sales process
• Increased agent morale
• Higher customer satisfaction metrics
• New marketing opportunities
• Increased chemistry between departments
More efficient customer support process
When a CRM has all your customer details, along with up-to-date information on their accounts, it becomes easy for your agents to offer product support.
Physically searching through Excel spreadsheets by agents is rendered redundant as the CRM presents all relevant events in advance thus enabling auto-scheduling when customers abandon support queues.
This kicks off an outbound calling strategy to keep more customers impressed by efforts at the very least and eliminates cases where customers feel neglected.
Better sales process
In line with how a growth marketing strategy would unfold, data leads from a company’s website, social media and email campaigns converges in the CRM. From there, timely follow-ups through automated outbound calls and emails to improve the probability of data leads turning into potential or actual customers.
Even after closing the initial sale, it is possible to cross and up sell customers tagged for drip campaigns through signing up for more products. This facilitates deepening your relationship with clientele, making it harder for them to consider your competition.
Increased agent morale
The obvious benefit from CRM automation is that customer support agents don’t have to manually search for customer information. Proper execution of automation eliminates the task of taking notes after every call.
The CRM records conversations and uses NPU to suggest solutions to customer issues. Customer support agents seldom want to do data entry but often find themselves stuck between spreadsheets instead of actually supporting customers on the phone.
Automation yields lower average handling times while increasing the number of calls handled which makes for more fulfilled customer support agents after implementation.
Higher customer satisfaction
Growth marketing and CRM automation metrics change depending on particular strategies crafted. The important metrics include; Net promoter score, Customer effort score, and First contact resolution. CRM automation improves all the metrics significantly.
First contact resolution increases because each customer speaks to an agent already aware of their entire account history. Customer effort drops when you call customers instead of having them wait in line for support. Both factors make customers happy to spread friendly words about your business.
New marketing opportunities
Even with no new leads coming in, CRM automation gives you the opportunity to re-engage with past customers. Having all the insights at hand makes it possible to propose new relationships and rebuild business.
All this with no new marketing tools required helps in focusing on customers you already have and those who previously used your services and saves you money.
Increased inter-department chemistry
CRM automation strategy eliminates the possibility of two departments having conflicting versions of a client’s account which makes satisfying customers tougher than it need be.
The chemistry and consistency provided by a central storage (silo) of customer information makes pursuing CRM automation a reasonable endeavor resulting, ideally, in a seamless transition of customer information (and state) through departments.
Once sales close the sale, operations (actors) know what the customer needs, and billing knows when and where to send invoices. These are just a few ways that CRM automation adds value to a growth marketing strategy.
Getting started with CRM Automation
Creating a CRM automation strategy is the first step towards reaping the benefits we’ve discussed above as leaving a growth marketing strategy in the hands of human agents exposes it to a wide range of errors.
The desired results in such an instance also won’t measure up to the least possible with automation. Setting out clear goals and opting for the most cost-efficient way forward is the best way to approach automation.
Most companies probably use several business applications for the various processes they carry out daily thus system integration is the way forward. However, this is never as quick and affordable as they’d desire.
Unless they look into no-code automation tools. No-code integration removes the need to hire programmers, while encouraging hands-on solutions from users of the systems. APIs from common software applications carry data between your CRM and other applications, thus attaining automation.
Lemuel Operario works at babelforce, a global cloud communications platform focused on No-Code integration and automation. It allows non-technical people to build even the most complex integrated processes for customer-facing teams, particularly in the call center.
