Customer relationship management (CRM) automation is the process of streamlining sales and customer service operations to track and manage customer engagement. Automating a CRM can cover a variety of functions in marketing, sales, and service activities. The purpose of CRM tools is to facilitate the management of all the interactions and external relationships that are essential for business success. Thanks to robotic process automation (RPA), you can easily automate the integration of all customer and third-party data into various systems, including SalesForce, HubSpot, Zendesk, or other CRM tools.
Using a CRM makes your life much easier and helps your company to grow. Research shows that sales representatives working in companies that use mobile CRM software achieved 65% of their sales quotas, compared to 22% of companies that don't use mobile CRM software. When someone contacts you through a form, you can automatically follow up with an email or text message. You can also send an appointment scheduling link that syncs with your calendar so you can schedule appointments with new potential clients even while you sleep. While CRM automation tools perform a lot of functions, we've listed the 5 main functions you should consider when investing in a CRM tool:
- Lead Management: Automatically capture leads from various sources such as web forms, emails, social media, etc.
- Transaction Management: Automate the process of tracking customer transactions and orders.
- Forecasting: Automatically generate forecasts based on customer data.
- Activity Workflows: Automate tasks such as follow-ups, reminders, notifications, etc.
- Account Management: Automatically manage customer accounts and profiles.
Many automated CRM systems allow integrations with various platforms, such as ERP, help desk, calendar, email systems, project management tools, and more. The more you can optimize processes and information between teams, the more successful your organization's CRM system will be. CRM automation helps sales, marketing and service teams by accelerating business processes through automation. Marketing automation serves the top and middle of the funnel. It also focuses (surprisingly) on automating the recurring tasks faced by the marketing department at various points in the customer lifecycle.
This encompasses everything from the moment they first enter the system to the moment they become customers and beyond. While CRM and marketing automation are different, they work well together because their functions complement each other to help maximize the efficiency of marketing and sales departments. Due to the rise of SaaS CRM platforms, CRMs are now an affordable option for industries and companies of all sizes. Automated CRM systems also help law firms to respond more quickly to sales opportunities, greatly increasing the chances of qualifying those potential clients. Salesforce offers excellent CRM automation solutions through its Salesforce Sales Cloud tool. Ideal for medium-sized and business organizations, this CRM offers basic and advanced functionalities to automate your sales portfolio.
Zoho CRM is a cloud-based CRM automation platform that targets the SMB and startup markets. It offers all the basic automation features such as lead management, transaction management, forecasting, activity workflows and account management. With basic and advanced features such as event tracking, call tracking, email automationOpen in a new window, business management and lead scoring Freshsales offers best-in-class CRM automation solutions. The CRM also offers a free subscription for up to 1 million contacts plus simple integrations for third-party tools. In conclusion, automating your CRM system can help you save time and money while improving customer satisfaction.
It's important to understand how CRM automation works and its benefits before exploring what solutions can enable this technology for your organization.
