Practically every business is chasing automation. It makes work faster, smoother, and a *lot* cheaper. CRM automation in particular is used for sales, retention, customer service, and more besides.
What is a CRM system for?
CRM’s aggregate customer data. Knowing your customers well is just about the most important part of running a business, so most businesses collect all the data they can. But there’s a problem. All that data is hard to interpret, so collecting more won’t necessarily lead to great outcomes… unless you can automate the way you use it. This is a core part of CRM strategy.
Understanding CRM automation
There are a couple of areas to focus on with CRM automation. Some actions you’ll want to automate concern record keeping. This isn’t the exciting stuff, but automating these actions will save you a ton of time.
These are things like:
- Moving leads through your pipeline
- Updating a customer’s record
- Keeping up with KPIs
There are other actions that are a little more exciting and which have an impact outside of the CRM.
These are things like:
- Putting outbound calls in the schedule
- Sending messages
- Offering next actions
Why bother with CRM automation?
Most businesses are principally focused on cost savings when it comes to automation. There will definitely be a big cost impact, but that’s not the only benefit. These include:
Making more sales
You have to act fast to close sales. As many as half of all sales go to whichever vendor responds first. This is where CRM automation comes into it. Your automated CRM can place or schedule a call the moment you get a lead. Then, your auto dialer places the call and connects the lead to one of your sales team. So long as you’ve integrated your core systems, any expression of interest from a customer can generate a follow-up.
Happier, more productive agents
The retention rate for contact center agents is shockingly low, often around 25%. As a result, businesses lose knowledge and experience and spend giant sums on training. That high attrition is often driven by boring and repetitive tasks like data entry. Naturally, automating huge swathes of that work means agents can focus on the more interesting parts of their job – helping people.
Higher customer retention
Customers leave you – that’s just a fact of life. But does it have to be so many customers? Is there a simple way to reduce that number? CRM automation enables you to place outbound calls or messages based on any trigger. So, for example, you might automatically apologize for any late deliveries.
With high-value customers, you might place phone calls just to check in with special offers. And, when customers do decide to leave, you can get in touch to give them reasons to stay. Really, the sky’s the limit. If you retain just one person in one hundred, it’s still likely to be worthwhile.
How lab billing solutions can improve your revenue?
Your marketing campaigns go further
CRM automation and marketing automation aren’t 100% the same thing.
But there’s not exactly a world of difference.
It may be more useful to think of automation throughout your customer-facing communications, especially as more and more marketing comes out of the contact center.
You can automate marketing processes processes like:
- Email campaigns – making sure you stay in your customer’s thoughts
- High value customer comms – messaging designed for your VIPs
- Re-engagement – snagging customers who have stepped away
- Reviews – businesses love customer feedback!
- Onboarding – on top of winning customers, you need to keep them interested
This begs the question – does your business need an automation tool just for marketing?
I’m inclined to say ‘no’.
Sure, your business has specific needs which aren’t the same as any other business’s needs. But in most cases, when a vendor separates marketing and service tools it just because they want to sell you more than one tool!
But there are other kinds of automation software that can meet a wider range of challenges.
No-Code automation platformsare increasingly common because people within the contact center can use them (without writing code, obviously!)
That means that you could create any of the processes we’ve described here without major tech skills. It’s more like lego – you just clip together the pieces you need!
You’ll slash your costs
And this is where we’re started.
It’s simple really; there are tasks that humans are better at and tasks that machines are better at.
Want to offer great and personal service? You need empathetic humans.
Want to perform a simple process at a massive scale, without error? That’s one for the machines.
None of this means that contact centers don’t need humans – it means that businesses are getting much better at giving different resources the kinds of work that they’re best equipped for.
About babelforce
babelforce is 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.
