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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 a CRM application runs with the data it collects
- Commands that a CRM system pushes out when triggered by policies (events)
Internal processes can be as simple as moving a customer down a sales funnel after they have opened an email.
Commands a CRM can send out can be connected to scheduling calls when integrated with other business applications (such as auto-diallers)
Regardless of how complex your business processes are, these two capabilities can enhance 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.
How CRM Automation fits into Growth Marketing
By definition, growth marketing focuses on customer relationship maintenance. The actions associated with it aim to reduce customer churn while increasing leads.
CRM automation makes all this possible. Not only does it make managing the movement of customers through funnels faster, it can also keep them hooked to your services.
The reasons detailed in the next section paint a clearer picture of just how this comes to be.
Why your business needs CRM Automation
Through implementing CRM automation, you unleash the following benefits. Each with their brief explanations will 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. Instead of searching through Excel spreadsheets, the CRM presents all relevant events to your agents in advance.
Add to this how CRM automation enables auto-scheduling when customers abandon support queues. This kicks off an outbound calling strategy sure to keep more customers impressed by your efforts (at the very least). That most of these actions take place automatically eliminates cases where customers feel neglected.
Better sales process
In line with how a growth marketing strategy would unfold, leads from a company’s website, social media and email campaigns converge in the CRM. From there, timely follow-ups (automated outbound calls and emails) improve the probability of leads turning into customers.
Even after closing the initial sale, you can cross and upsell customers tagged for drip campaigns. Them signing up for more products deepens your relationship, 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 search (manually) for customer information every time. When automation is executed properly, it also means they don’t have to take notes after the call.
Typically, the CRM would record conversations and use NPU to suggest solutions to customer issues.
Customer support agents seldom want to do data entry. However, they 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. All of which makes for more fulfilled customer support agents almost immediately after implementation.
Higher customer satisfaction
Both growth marketing and CRM automation have metrics that change depending on the particular strategies crafted.
Of importance are:
CRM automation improves all three metrics significantly. First contact resolution, or usually coined as first call resolution (FCR), 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 waiting in line for support. Both factors should 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, you can propose new relationships and build your business back. All this with no new (stand-alone) marketing tools required.
Focusing on customers you already have and those who previously used your services saves you money.
Increased inter-department chemistry
Without a CRM automation strategy, it’s possible for two departments to have conflicting versions of a customer’s account. This situation 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.
The results, ideally, would be 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 to send invoices.
These are just a few ways that CRM automation adds value to a growth marketing strategy.
How to get started with CRM Automation
Creating a CRM automation strategy is the first step toward reaping the benefits we’ve discussed above. 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 (which is wy 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.
