Companies use various strategies to analyze customer data to improve relationships with customer. One such process is CRM or customer relationship management. It encompasses various methodologies that define storing, managing and analyzing customer interaction. These analyses are later used to improve customer experiences and thereby improving business strategies, customer retention and sales.
CRM as a software is used to consolidate user information into a single database, to improve management and access to the data. This tool also scans various media to scrap customer interaction, like mail, phone calls, social media, and is responsible for automating various workflows, and tracking the performance of the various measures taken in accordance with business growth.
However, the right set of automation is very much needed to sustain and reap thorough benefits from CRM. The top six automations which should be kept in mind are discussed below.
Top 6 main CRM automations
1: Contact Entry Automation
According to Dun and Bradstreet’s 2016 marketing benchmark report, 3-4% of the data decays every month, pertaining to the fact that contact data gets outdated very quickly. This means the contact data needs to be updated and verified at a much faster rate. Manual entry not only makes it tedious and time consuming but it also compromises the integrity of the system. Now there are various sources and channels through which the data can be fetched. Automating as many as channels and sources as possible would make a huge difference.
According to many CRM veterans, collection of contact information should contain leads from websites and social media, scanning business cards and emails, and also integration with major third party sources like the e-commerce sites and so on. In some cases, a desktop agent can also be used to gather more information from the user and also handle some of the customer requests.
2: Sales Management Automation
The main use case of CRM comes from the fact that it enables faster and more focused growth in business by assisting in the creation of leads. For this to perform effectively there are various key points which need to be taken care of. The main focus should be in evaluating key leads, automatic qualification and also lead nurturing. A good CRM tool should have enough capability to automate segmentation of leads based on their individual interests and needs and also keep the leads engaged using various modes of communication, like emails, sms, and so on.
A good CRM tool automation should also evaluate customer engagement and score them based on their interaction. Based on these scoring, the tool should also be capable enough to adjust the segmentation and the engagement procedures to better cater to the type of customer and their respective interaction.
3: Business Processes Automation
Apart from sales, a CRM tool also assists in helping other business processes inside the company getting in line with the customer interactions and thus helping in understanding the requirements of a customer. This leads to better focus on the actions needed to be taken. One process in the sales department might require support from some other department and various other scenarios might co-exist in a single business environment. Automating all these workflows would not only ease the process but also improve the overall business procedures.
4: Forecasting and Analytics Automation
A CRM tool is expected to analyze various customer patterns and provide automated insights using advanced but trustworthy analytics. The reports should be easily readable, with various dashboards so as to help the sales team with more visual reporting. Additionally, some alerts could also be inset in the system. Without the proper sewing of all these tasks, the working of a CRM tool is never complete.
5: Customer Service Automation
Customer service is a huge umbrella under which a lot of things come, but listening to what the customer has to say is the most important. The best place to listen to all the exchanges is the social media. Hence, this automation takes care of identifying requests in social media posts and then directs it to customer services for further actions. Many a times customers are lost with the particular set of options and that is when a proper CRM automation tool can come in handy and understand what exactly a customer wants and provide the sales team with an alert or action items.
6: On-boarding and Location-based Service Automation
Customer experience depends a lot on continuous interaction and its quality. And this could be a challenge as and when some new recruit needs to take responsibility of customer satisfaction.
With the help of a good CRM automation, business processes can have better workflows with prompts and tips. This in turn will help speed up the process of on-boarding a new recruit by making it simpler for them to follow the guidelines through each step in the sales cycle.
Further, targeting customers based on their geographic locations is the best way of engaging a customer and gaining their trust deeply. Hence, some CRM systems include technology that can create location based marketing campaigns based on customers’ physical locations. Some ways to fetch information on geo-location is to integrate with popular GPS apps.
So, is your business ready to reap more benefits with these automations? Leave your comments here.
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