A company implements CRM software to scale and grow. Businesses that want to grow in the industry are eager to implement automated CRM software. If you are keen to implement it, it’s excellent news for business growth.
Typically, businesses use MS excel or manual records to store data. However, this traditional form of customer relationship management might become tedious with time, especially if the industry is facing quick expansions. A CRM system allows companies to ease customer relationships, improve sales, and boost growth.
Let’s look at how automated CRM has emerged recently and the benefits it offers for the development of companies.
What is CRM Software?
You must have heard companies talking about integrating CRM software. Have you ever thought about CRM software? In a nutshell, it refers to the tools that allow a company to organize data and manage records efficiently. It leads to better performance and lower customer churn. Typically, every business undertakes several tasks and processes that are manual and repetitive. The ideal way is to streamline these tasks through automated software instead of taking care of them manually.
CRM software allows a business to simplify complex tasks, especially when it comes to handling customer relationships. This automation can be done across various departments in a company – from sales and marketing to HR and finance. CRM automation has multiple functions.
CRM tools have undergone rapid advancements in the last few years owing to AI and ML. As a result, businesses can achieve their goals much faster. Did you know that close to 64% of marketers and brands believe in automating internal metrics and attribution rates? Businesses rely on CRM because it makes their job faster, easier, more accurate, and more efficient. CRM allows companies to gain more value and reduces the need for hiring labor to carry out manual tasks. It will enable employees to focus on the broad picture, including decision-making and strategic thinking.
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5 Reasons Companies use CRM Automation
CRM software is designed to help customer service professionals and sales executives, primarily. They use CRM automation software to carry out tasks like management of customer relationships, lead generation, order tracking, etc.
Commonly, CRM automation is used in the following ways to improve business efforts:
- Data entry: Most sales executives spend a significant part of their day recording and logging data manually. Installing CRM automation software allows this manual task to be easily managed in less time. CRM software also helps in reducing errors in manual data entries.
- Personalise Emails: With CRM automation, users can personalize emails and email sequences. They can create drip emails that are sent to prospects and customers, which are triggered upon the happening of certain events. The data captured in your CRM can help you engage with leads in a highly personalized manner, making a prospect or customer feel valued.
- Log Interactions Automatically: CRM software should be able to log email and phone correspondences automatically into the system each time you engage with a lead or a customer. CRM allows businesses to maintain updated contact records of customers collected during the lead generation and interaction stages.
- Automate Customer Service: When chatbots and CRM software are used to engage with customers and leads, it allows better visibility into responding to queries and resolving customer issues.
- Workflows: CRM automation allows businesses to save a considerable amount of time. The software automates processes related to sales functions – these include personalization of emails, qualification of leads, following up with clients, and auto-generating invoices or reminders.
5 Benefits of CRM Automation
CRM automation has several benefits. From easier collaboration among teams to seamlessly handling several tasks, here’s a look at the primary advantages it provides to users –
- Forecasting Sales: Brand managers can quickly pinpoint bottlenecks in the sales cycle. A good CRM automation software allows businesses to promptly filter out sales volumes, track and analyze data, and understand where the company needs to improve.
- 360-Degree Customer View: CRM automation allows businesses to create holistic customer profiles. It enables employees to access stored customer data immediately and monitor relevant information. It also helps in updating information based on customer interactions.
- Email Marketing: Through CRM automation, businesses can integrate email marketing seamlessly. The data captured in a CRM tool can be used to personalize emails and newsletters and create subscriber lists. It is a handy tool to improve internal sales, from analyzing email-related data to monitoring email engagement and conversions.
- Lead Distribution: Through CRM automation, a business can quickly understand which leads are qualified and which ones need to be nurtured to reach a qualifying stage.
- AI Insights: CRM automation offers profound insights to businesses into their performance and market reputation. Through AI insights and automation, companies can effectively make decisions and calculate the risks involved in their moves and strategies. AI insights go a long way in improving employee productivity, tracking and measuring internal performance, and even understanding hindrances in the sales process.
CRM Automation – Use Cases
Historically, CRM automation has developed various uses across different verticals and industries. Here’s a look at the use cases of CRM automation –
- Healthcare: Hospitals and medical institutions have integrated RPA or robotic process automation and streamlined record keeping through digital software. It helps them to improve internal efficiencies and serve the patients efficiently. Hospitals have a considerable amount of paperwork and administrative information to deal with; CRM helps sort through all this data in a highly efficient manner. It helps fix appointments, invoicing, pull up historical patient data, and even verify insurance. It also goes a long way in reducing the overall patient wait time.
- E-commerce: E-commerce has changed the game for the retail industry. Every e-commerce company thrives on customer engagement and uses data for actionable insights and to improve sales. CRM automation allows e-commerce companies to track customer behavior, understand the purchases a customer makes, sync information, improve communication, and allow seamless order tracking. From a business perspective, a brand can manage its inventory, segment the customers, streamline workflows, and trigger email sequences to ensure continued customer engagement.
- Legal: Lawyers and law firms have a massive amount of paperwork to handle – from managing clients to managing invoices; CRM automation allows lawyers to streamline manual and administrative tasks to focus on the bigger picture. CRM automation helps to increase efficiency as it takes up tasks like tracking hours and timesheets, scheduling appointments, and coding jobs. With CRM automation, law firms can easily prioritize leads and scale workflows in generating contracts, billing, and managing risks.
- Banking and Finance: In the banking and finance sector, CRM automation allows institutions to implement more customer-focused strategies. Banks and financial institutions interact with employees and clients, and CRM software enables them to store, manage, and track such data effortlessly.
If you are wondering if your business needs to automate its CRM, the most relevant answer is that it depends on the business’s needs. Do you think your business has streamlined operations and automated tasks in such a way that customer data and information can be handled seamlessly? Do you think your business has room to manage communication and customer interactions more effectively?
CRM has numerous use cases and benefits, as evidenced by the wide range of applications it has across the world, industries, and domains. Without a CRM strategy, less than half of marketing leads get converted to sales. If companies, businesses, and enterprises are looking to scale and need software, they will choose to automate CRM, irrespective of the field. It will equip them with tools to handle manual and repetitive administrative tasks efficiently. The adoption of CRM in a business also helps in portraying a more professional image of the business to its clients and employees.
If you feel that lead generation can be handled better or if reporting and managing data have become extremely tedious for your business, then perhaps it’s time to automate your CRM software. From proper contact management and sales pipeline tracking to customer service functionalities and high-level reporting, CRM is immensely useful to facilitate business growth.