Automate Business Processes CRM for Productivity Businesses are constantly innovating methods to streamline their processes from raw materials acquisition, production, marketing, sales, operations, finance, and customer support departments.
Lack of automation in some of these departments may lead to overburdening the workforce with repetitive duties or omitting critical details due to overreliance on manual processes.
The inefficiencies resulting from a lack of automation can delay delivery timelines and affect business profitability. As such, with the milestones already achieved in operating online businesses, today, you can automate nearly all business-related tasks and improve the productivity and speed of your small business.
We will discuss in this article some of the business processes you should be automating using CRM if you are not already doing it.
Why Use a CRM Tool for Your Business?
Automation is a vital factor in business transformation. It empowers an enterprise to run workflows by connecting applications between various departments.
Automating tasks with CRM software minimizes manual hours drastically and boosts the entire process to drive a competitive edge. If you want to automate your business with CRM, you do not have to invest in complex technologies or develop multifaceted workflows.
Those days you had to integrate many automation tools for various business processes are behind us.
Instead, as an online business, you can utilize an all-in-one CRM software that can automate repetitive duties such as follow-up with customers, email creation and scheduling, answering inquiries, and marketing.
With that in mind, here are the business processes you can automate with CRM today.
Sales and Marketing
The entirety of the sales process involves hunting for leads and nurturing them before closing the sale. That means communicating with potential buyers, comprehending their likes and dislikes, identifying their one big problem, and offering a solution that will make them clients.
In a typical organization, the process demands numerous players from the sales department and a couple of hand-offs to address the prospects and convert them into clients. However, every business needs workflow software for automating their sales and marketing process.
What would your life be like if you had access to all the information about potential customers on record?
If you can access every detail of their history with a company, what kind of products or services might appeal most to them, and how much money you have spent on marketing campaigns.
A solid CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system like Phalera can store this data. That way, it does not get lost in spreadsheets or documents on the company network.
Automating sales workflow using CRM should be a requirement if you want to be more efficient and cost-effective.
Not to mention, interconnecting devices, automated call logging, paperless contracts, and digitizing workflows amongst various sales tools permit your sales and marketing team to utilize more time selling the products instead of wasting time on manual data entry.
Some marketing activities CRM can help you automate:
- Scheduling appointments with new and existing clients
- Sending thank you messages
- Sending follow-up messages
- Organizing contacts into groups for targeted campaigns and leads
- Asking for reviews after purchases
- Unlimited page templates for newsletters, lead magnets, and web pages.
- Scheduling email marketing campaigns
Human Resource Onboarding and Offboarding
Employee onboarding is a long, strenuous process, and with modern workforces frequently changing their jobs, the hiring process is advancing in frequency.
The younger employees do not want physical processes with instructors dictating commands. Employers can take advantage of the trend by automating parts of the employee onboarding process.
When you automate employee onboarding and off-boarding processes, you can save the resources spent on screening all the candidates when the company is recruiting. It saves time for other essential human resource functions.
Finally, quick and automatic onboarding and off-boarding minimize operational expenditure and facilitate easy employee management, access, and provisioning.
Client Invoicing and Quotes
Financial statements account for every penny- monitoring expenses and finances is critical to avoid any money leaks. A minor blunder in calculating and deducing financial reports can result in incorrect insights, leading to wrong decisions.
Rather than spending your time sending and following up on payments, you can automate the invoicing for your clients right inside the Phalera CRM.
All these processes can be directly tied to your customer contacts when you connect your billing software to the CRM. You will be able to send invoices and follow-up reminders automatically.
Other accounting and finance activities you can automate are:
- Payment collection
- Following up on failed charges/declined payment methods.
Automating payments and reporting using CRM helps the organization draw truthful insights. In addition, automated financial reporting aids in monitoring transactions, budgeting, and controlling expenditure once it surpasses the predetermined level.
Task Assignments
Sustaining all the employees motivated and performing at their best is a surefire technique for success. Defining the processes for task entry, assignments, and deadlines can keep your employees vibrant and inspired.
A CRM allows you to collaborate and manage projects; you can generate progress reports, track tasks, send automated aides-mémoires, and uphold transparency with employees and the company.
Besides identifying the stage of customers in your sales pipeline, you can use the CRM to assign tasks.
Automating the task management process using CRM tools provides efficiency and allows the managers to concentrate on other critical activities like marketing.
Some activities you can automate here include:
- Assign tasks to various team members according to the customer behavioral data in different sales funnel stages.
Customer Service Management
Automating customer relationship management using CRM can help customer service managers to keep track of every customer engagement with the business.
First, this will eliminate the possibility of bugging your leads with repetitive emails or calls. An automated customer relationship management process can accelerate the customer resolution cycle, from incident generation to recording all the conversations and escalating the raised issues.
Implementing such a system can manage the whole customer support process in real-time, resulting in efficient customer service management and, eventually, customer satisfaction
Social Media Management
Your brand is an essential part of the organization- which calls for caution with your marketing strategies.
Currently, most companies are developing so much content for various digital platforms, so it is necessary to automate the process for easy monitoring.
You can add content, schedule, and publish to your connected social media platforms. The best part, with Phalera CRM, you can determine, map, and send your content to their target audience at the best times, then check the performance.
The CRM can further help in community management activities like comment moderation and responding to inquiries from numerous platforms all in one location.
E-Commerce
Using a CRM can take the customer experience to a new level.
Other than managing and tracking leads and closing sales, if you run an e-commerce store, you can use it to utilize purchasing behaviors.
There are a few different ways that CRM can automate the e-commerce process. For example, abandoned cart reminders can automatically send an email to customers who have left items in their cart without checking out.
The CRM can ask customers to leave product reviews after they have made a purchase, and it can also recommend related products to customers based on their past purchases.
Ultimately, these automated features make it easier for e-commerce businesses to manage customer relationships and increase sales.
Conclusion
If you are not automating your business processes with CRM, you are doing it wrong.
Time-saving automation should be high on your priorities for business efficiency gains. The good news is that CRM software provides solutions for various automated needs.
If you want to explore what kind of difference automation could make for your organization, now is the time to try out Phalera.
You will be able to see for yourself how quickly repetitive tasks can vanish, and sales opportunities can increase with the help of intelligent automation working behind the scenes.
Get started today and be well on the path to taking your business processes to the next level!