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10 Uses of CRM Automation

10 Uses of CRM Automation

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is when a business monitors all their customer or lead interactions and saves the personal information about them that was entered, such as their name, phone number, and address. A CRM will focus on capturing this information throughout many different channels while recording the interactions that customers made with your website. From there, you can interact with your customers based on real data, which you can use to your advantage as a business.

marketing automation uses

Of course, businesses have plenty of customers to deal with and manually interacting with each one of them can be difficult. It might work for a micro-business, but not if you want to grow to a small- or medium-sized enterprise. Essentially, CRM automation allows you to do all sorts of neat stuff that you couldn’t otherwise because of the size of your business. Centralised data lets you edit customer information en masse, and keep track of which employees are performing well (and which aren’t).

To give you a better idea of how useful CRM automation can be, below are the top 10 uses for it!

  1. Enhanced Sales Management
    Every sales manager in an organization has established sales goals, right? By using CRM software, you can keep track of your progress toward achieving these goals. Then you will know if your sales efforts are paying off, or if you need to readjust your sales strategy based on your analysis. Centralised data lets sales managers (in, say, a call center) quickly access data like call length, number of leads processed per day, number of successful sales per day and more!
  2. Boosts Employee Performance
    CRM automation can help you track the performance of an entire sales team as well as an individual salesperson on a team. This is useful for sales managers who want to see which salespeople are performing well and which ones need improvement. CRM software lets you check out sales stats like sales per day, value of sales per day, number of calls made/emails sent before they close a lead… Anything that might help. Everything is in one place, so if you need to keep an eye on particular employees, it’s easier than ever.
  3. Saves Time
    Anywhere you have automation, you’re saving time. CRM automation is designed precisely for the purpose of saving time and ensuring that all your contacts receive prompt and effective communication to keep them coming back for more. Not only that, but centralising where you keep customer data is going to make it easy for different teams/departments to access that data without having to ask around (e.g. marketing data, demographics and so on).
  4. Better Customer Service
    Customers, quite rightly, expect a level of service that matches what you claim to offer. But if you run a small or medium sized business and you have hundreds of customers, but only one or two customer service reps… Well, you can do the maths. It’s tough to keep up. But automation makes it that much simpler, first by firing off a quick email in response to a complaint to let the customer know that you got their message. Your reps can then use customer data to find out their preferences, past purchases, any previous tickets that they’ve opened and more.
  5. Adding Contacts is Easy
    CRM might seem like a big address book filled with customer and lead contact information, but this doesn’t mean you need to manually add each contact. CRM automation makes it easy for you to import contact information right into the system. This could be a contact list that you have on a spreadsheet and then import into the CRM. This is convenient if you have a list of hundreds of contacts already and you don’t want to add them manually. As for future contacts, you will have online forms set up on your website for people to enter in their own contact information. Once it is submitted, this information will already be added to your CRM for future use.
  6. Updates/Mass Updates to Your Records
    Having all of your data on employees and customers in one place doesn’t just make it easier to find. It makes it easier to edit too. Say some of your employees switch department; you can update their data to reflect their new positions in one centralised record.
  7. Round Robin with Inbound Contacts
    With data on all of your sales team and all of your leads in one place, CRM software also makes it possible to allocate leads ‘round robin’ style to maximise efficiency. That way inbound leads have less waiting time, work is assigned fairly, and your team get more done in a day!
  8. Client Grading (Hot/Cold)Contacts
    In the same way that you can assign leads to different members of your team, you can also grade them based on how likely they are to buy from you, or where they are in your sales funnel. This can inform how you communicate with them over the phone or through email, and how much time you spend trying to sell to them… Again increasing how efficiently you sell.
  9. Boost Up-Selling and Cross-Selling
    The very best CRM software doesn’t just help you close deals. It help you up-sell and cross-sell on those deals, too. CRM software can infer from a customer’s current purchase what else they might be interested in, whether that’s a better version of the same product or a similar product that data may suggest they’d also like. Think of Amazon’s You Might Also Like… feature– it’s not a million miles from that, and it’s going to help you profit more from each sale.
  10. Inventory Management
    Since you can see which products your customers are purchasing the most, you can also see which products they are not purchasing. If you have been advertising certain products for a long time and are just not getting any sales from your customers, the CRM system will clearly show this. From there, you can decide whether you want to remove certain products and add other ones which are similar to the products that are selling very well.

Not only that, but data can help you control how much stock to bring in, too. Does past data indicate that you sell plenty of woolly hats at a particular time of year (probably Winter), to the point that they’re your best selling product? Better get more of them in next year!