What You Need to Know About CRM Automations

What is CRM automation?

CRM automation software is a technology solution that helps businesses manage their interactions and relationships with leads and customers.

It simplifies certain processes in the sales cycle, such as lead generation, customer service, and customer retention, off-loading busy work from your sales and marketing teams. Ultimately, CRM automation results in an enhanced customer experience and fuels the development of your business.

CRM vs. marketing automation software

CRM and marketing automation software are related but distinct technologies. While they can be used in tandem to guide customers down the sales funnel, they have a key difference.

CRM software has a more involved role in the customer lifecycle. From generating leads all the way to post-sale support, it assists your marketing team, sales team, and customer service team.

Marketing automation software, on the other hand, has a more focused role. As its name suggests, it concentrates on automating marketing processes, such as email marketing, social media marketing, and landing page creation.

Depending on the CRM software you use, it may also have marketing automation capabilities. Overall, marketing automation can be seen as a subset of CRM automation.

Ways to use CRM automation

There are many ways to use CRM automation tools to improve your business. While certain CRM tools improve the productivity of your sales and marketing teams, others help you glean better customer insights to level up your business strategy.

Some of the most common ways to use CRM automation to grow your brand include:

Data entry

Data entry is one of the most error-prone and repetitive tasks in the sales process. It takes up precious time that can be better used on high-value activities that directly contribute to closing deals and driving revenue.

CRM platforms eliminate the need for manual data entry. They typically have a number of robust data automation capabilities, including:

• Data capture forms: CRM software automatically captures customer information from your web forms, email campaigns, and other marketing activities, saving them in one central location.
• Data synchronization tools: Synchronizing customer data across the departments and teams within your organization, they also ensure that everyone has the most up-to-date information.
• Data quality checks: CRM software can perform data quality checks to ensure that only accurate and complete information is saved.

With more time on their hands, your sales reps can spend more time making phone calls and improving their customer interactions.

Customer service automation

We all know the importance of customer service. Providing top-notch, round-the-clock customer support is a great way to maximize customer satisfaction, but it can be hard to achieve.

Help your customer service reps reduce response times and improve answer consistency and accuracy with CRM automation software. CRM automation platforms can enhance the performance of customer service teams by:

• Offering 24/7 availability
• Using a ticketing system to track and manage customer inquiries
• Sending immediate automated responses for frequently asked questions
• Providing chatbots for real-time customer interactions
• Having a knowledge base with easy-to-access information

Logging customer activity

A CRM system also includes the ability to log customer activity, including interactions from emails, calls, and chat sessions.

With a comprehensive and accurate record of all customer interactions, your customer service reps gain valuable insights to make informed, data-driven decisions and identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling.

Overall, evaluating these activity logs enables a deeper understanding of customer behavior and preferences, empowering your business to personalize future interactions and enhance the customer experience.

Send follow-up emails

Sending follow-up emails to customers sets you apart from the competition while offering an opportunity to gather customer feedback and foster repeat business.

Automated CRM systems are equipped with features that make sending follow-up emails easy. Not only can they personalize the content of a follow-up email using stored customer information, but they also make sure to send it at the most opportune time.

Certain CRM automation can even manage your email lists to see which of your customers have already received follow-up emails and track their open rates.

Benefits of CRM automation

CRM automation brings a variety of advantages to your business. Some of the most favorable CRM benefits include:

Effective data management

From data entry to data reporting and data security, CRM software assists in effective data management.

Its data entry automation eliminates busy work from your schedule and minimizes errors, while its reporting and analytics capabilities allow you to quickly understand the status of your customer interactions through interactive dashboards and real-time visualizations of key metrics.

Most importantly, to keep your sensitive customer data safe, many CRM tools also feature data encryption and backup tools.

Improved collaboration

CRM automation fosters collaboration across your organization. It provides a centralized platform for team members to access, manage, and share information.

Additionally, with an audit trail of customer interactions, CRM automation also increases accountability, holding individuals to higher standards for their customer service and sales activities.

Increased efficiency

CRM automation decreases the administrative tasks that need hands-on attention and frees up time for more customer-facing activities. Rather than concentrating on documenting every interaction along the sales pipeline, your sales team can put in the hours needed to strategize for the future.

More customer insights

Using machine learning and predictive analytics to evaluate customer data, CRM automation can identify trends and patterns to provide more insights into future customer behavior. It can also track key metrics such as your customer churn rate, customer acquisition cost, and customer satisfaction score.

More informed decision-making

With all of your customer data and insights easily searchable and at your fingertips, making informed decisions becomes easier than ever. Take out the guesswork in your customer interactions using CRM automation.

Better customer experience

CRM automation creates a seamless experience for your customers. Rather than waiting for a response from your customer service team, they can use self-service tools to get the answer they need right away. With optimized canned responses for frequently asked questions, they will always get a clear and accurate explanation as well.

Even when customers are interacting with different members of your customer service team, they will enjoy increased personalization due to the accessible customer logs that are updated in real-time.

Higher sales and revenue

By implementing CRM automation, businesses can see increased sales and revenue growth. As customer satisfaction increases, you will enjoy more repeat purchases and customer loyalty.

Additionally, positive customer experiences often lead to free word-of-mouth marketing, which can help your business attract new customers at almost no cost.

CRM automation reduces your IT costs in the long run as well. Without the need for manual data entry and processing, you cut down on the costs associated with their hardware, software, and support.

Start using CRM automation

Nowadays, CRM automation is already adept at assisting businesses in a number of tasks, including streamlining and automating customer interactions, improving data management and reporting, boosting collaboration and insights, and driving sales and revenue. With continued advancements in the field, CRM automation will likely become an even more crucial tool for businesses to stay competitive and meet the demands of today's customers.

Want to create a CRM strategy for your business that works? Other than identifying your target audience and outlining your customer journey, you also need to find the right CRM platform that fits your budget, business size, and goals.

Mailchimp’s marketing CRM software helps you create stronger relationships with your customers from day 1 with pre-built email templates, A/B testing, and predictive segmentation. It also supports a wide range of programs, services, apps, and tools, so you can easily integrate your survey data, subscription data, and more.