CRM Automation: Your One-Stop Guide

Life is short, and when a solution presents itself offering to take the tedious and mundane activities out of it, it’s definitely worth giving it a go — and this is precisely what CRM automation offers to you and your business.

Furthermore, CRM automation is a definite sign of business growth. The majority of startup companies introduce CRM systems when they get at least 10 employees. The need for CRM automation increases even more as your list of business contacts grows. Manually sorting through tons of data including leads, internal communications, customer inquiries, documents, and other notifications, can be a nightmare to work through, and that’s where CRM automation can save you a lot of time and money.

So What Is CRM Automation?

Customer relationship management (CRM) automation is a system’s ability to automate repetitive tasks that are usually handled manually to provide a more seamless workflow and boost productivity. CRM automation can encompass various functions across marketing, service, and sales operations.

It’s crucial to understand how CRM automation works and what its benefits are before taking steps to incorporate it into your business.

How Are CRM Automation And Marketing Automation Different?

Marketing and CRM automation have their differences. Marketing automation solutions are normally used to take the boring and repetitive tasks off the marketer’s hands.

For example, instead of sending out welcome emails and newsletters to a massive list of contacts 24/7, the marketer can automatically send out trigger-based emails.

However, marketing automation and CRM automation aim for different sectors of the sales funnel, with marketing automation targeting the top and CRM automation aiming for the bottom of the funnel, where people are near the conversion stage or are already paying customers.

The two differ in terms of software features and capabilities.

CRM automation provides features such as auto ticketing, visual sales pipeline, contact management, automated order management, sales metrics reporting, and more.

The features offered by marketing automation, on the other hand, include lead scoring, win probability, drip campaign and broadcast email marketing, social media campaign management, and lead generation.

But that doesn’t mean that every automation software has to be limited to certain capabilities.

CRM automation systems offer a package of CRM and marketing automation. They are immensely helpful for businesses with high sales, customer support, and marketing departments that are searching for time-saving solutions.

Benefits Of CRM Automation

CRM Automation carries enormous benefits for big and small companies alike. Here are some of the main ones:

1. Increased Productivity

CRM automation can do wonders for streamlining your business processes. Processes that normally take a painful amount of time are completed with one click so that your teams no longer have to deal with mundane tasks.

Instead, they can focus their energy on crucial activities such as lead generation, client calls, and deal closing.

CRM sales automation leads to a healthier bottom line as it drives people’s productivity with unmatched success.

2. Enhanced Pipeline Performance

CRM and marketing automation are exceptional tools for a more effective sales pipeline. CRM automation makes faster conversions possible as you can generate more leads and put them in sales qualified leads (SQLs) or marketing qualified leads (MQLs) categories.

With CRM automation at your disposal, you can target your promotional content to these key categories, set up follow-ups, and advance towards the sale.

3. Reduced Sales Cycle

CRM automation connects the most talented sales teams to the best leads. It automatically deals with customer data like contact information, email communications, customer behavior, quote generation, etc.

CRM dashboards provide a clear view of your sales funnel, with in-depth customer info, which greatly cuts down the time of the sales cycle.

4. More Customer Engagement

Another benefit of CRM automation is that it connects great clients to great customer service teams. It does so by providing details such as past business interactions, past purchases, and other information about these customers. This is how customer service providers can adjust communications to drive customer engagement, retention, and loyalty.

5. Higher Customer Satisfaction

CRM Chatbots are a great way to address customer concerns and questions. They can be set up in your CRM automation system and are fully customizable, so you can guide people through pressing questions or offer a phone call to talk to a sales rep. In turn, this leads to higher customer satisfaction because problems are addressed quickly and adequately.

6. More Accurate Marketing Campaigns

CRM automation can extract great amounts of precious data to help you make the best marketing decisions. Automated insights show which parts of your marketing campaign are most successful, what opportunities to explore, and which aspects of your campaign your customers enjoy most. These insights remove a lot of the guesswork from your business choices.

Key Functions Of CRM Automation

What should you look out for when looking for a CRM system that can take your business to the next level? Here’s a list of the must-haves:

1. Task assignment

As your team grows, employees will be assigned specific sales and customer service tasks.

Making sure everything runs smoothly via intricate Excel sheets can be a nightmare, but with the help of CRM, you can accurately automate the assignment of tasks in one interconnected system.

The system gives you peace of mind that each task will be timely assigned, so everyone on the sales and customer service side has enough time to complete their work.

With the help of streamlined task management, operations are simplified, which drives productivity and worker satisfaction.

2. Contact Management

Contact management is a vital feature included in most CRM automation systems. It serves as a maintenance tool for prospect and customer contact data, including names, contact details, email, social media networks, corporate information, and more.

3. Documentation management

Sales operations can create overwhelming amounts of documentation such as proposal requests, invoices, quotations, sales templates, contracts, and transactional information. It's vital to sort these documents where they can be accessed and handled with ease, and CRM automation can take that weight off your shoulders.

4. Lead management

This feature gives sales departments the ability to monitor lead activity. With CRM automation lead management, you can identify leads, administration of lead pipelines, lead scoring, lead workflow management, and lead tracking.

5. Re-engagement

What do you normally do when a lead or customer leaves their cart right before a potential purchase?

According to studies, cart abandonment is becoming more common, and this is bad news for businesses of all sectors.

However, by using automated re-engagement in conjunction with CRM automation, you can remind people that they haven’t completed their purchase, which might push them to return and do so.

Automated re-engagement can also be used for marketing campaigns to find out why people have left their carts behind on your webpage.

You can also make your initial offer more alluring by sending your customers an email containing an exclusive discount code that can be used if they return to complete their purchase.

6. Data Synchronization

The tools offered by CRM fit in perfectly with many other kinds of software, including marketing automation. Data synchronization between two automation features can be set up quickly and seamlessly so the marketing department, sales reps, and customer service teams won’t have to handle outdated info. Data synch allows for a much more efficient work environment where everyone is kept informed on what is happening in your campaigns.

7. Invoicing

If your business has become so overwhelmed with work that you forget to send invoices for payments, invoicing automation is your knight in shining armor. It makes sure that every invoice is sent out to your customers right after a purchase is made.

In addition, you can monitor the invoice so you can rest assured that it’s been sent out.

As your business grows, so will your invoices, and automated invoicing is the best shield against invoice-related customer dissatisfaction.

8. Connectivity

Every CRM automation system worth its salt, needs to allow for integration with third-party applications and functions such as project management tools, calendars, email systems, and more. Email integration allows sales teams to monitor their discussions and segment their contact lists the right way. Calendar integrations are great for call scheduling, meetings, and reminders with potential and existing customers.

9. Visual Pipeline

With CRM automation, you can visualize your company’s sales process or pipeline.

Being able to visualize the entire sales pipeline journey can be of immense help to sales teams and customer service representatives. This function is also known as sales force automation.

In addition, a visual sales pipeline can be of help if your small business is regularly going through bottlenecks where multiple groups of leads don’t get through to the end of the funnel.

When you pinpoint the cause of the bottlenecks, you can push your leads through the entire funnel.

10. Analytics & Reporting

Analytics and reporting are the wheels of CRM automation because they allow for the optimization of sales operations and decision-making based on valuable data. They play a key role in automating your CRM, which includes sales forecasting, sales performance analysis, and more.

11. Notifications

Automated notifications keep you and your colleagues up to date about high-priority tasks, including sales calls, customer support tasks, and marketing tasks.

You have the option to decide which notifications your employees receive and when, including lead follow-ups, and sales call reminders.

So, if a lead is about to go into a new stage of your funnel, you will immediately receive a notification to seal the deal.

12. Integration

Multi-app integration is crucial as you may have to import and export data from other apps such as calendars and email integration.

Integration with calendars and email is necessary as it allows you to monitor your conversations and provides functions like one-click email based on events. In addition, it has capabilities that offer sales team collaboration across your entire company.

13. Call Scheduling

Sales representatives have a lot to deal with in terms of phone calls, but to be able to move leads onward, they must also have the time to talk with new leads.

And that is why auto-call scheduling in your CRM is such a priceless feature. With everything being automated, your reps don’t have to sit down and check their calendar because they can rely on call scheduling.

14. Content marketing

CRM platforms usually allow for social media monitoring and management. They can combine your company’s social media feeds into one comprehensive view, so you’re always in the loop on what potential and regular customers are saying online and what issues they're struggling with.

15. AI Chatbots

The sales process needs human interaction. But as an addition to this, Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots take the sales process to a new level. The functionality of sales AI is always evolving, and now Chatbots can even communicate naturally with real people while answering questions, guiding customers along their journey, and sending them to sales representatives. AI also allows customers to get the support they need at a time convenient to them, even after business hours.

Popular Industries Using CRM Automation

Nowadays, CRM automation is being widely used by various businesses thanks to cloud computing and powerful AI tech. Let’s take a look at the most common use cases for CRM automation in the 2020s.

1. Healthcare

Medical institutions use CRM automation to manage patients and their records. Hospitals, private practices, and clinics employ CRM to keep patent records up to date, send out appointment reminders, and handle insurance paperwork, among other things.

Hence, CRM automation, provides a much smoother experience for doctors and patients alike.

2. Fitness

In response to the Covid situation, the fitness sector turned in-person training sessions into online virtual ones.

CRM automation is of great help to fitness businesses struggling to adapt to the new reality.

The system gives workers the freedom to focus on key aspects like customer engagement and retention. For example, rather than manually adding customers to the system, the automation process does this for you from leads, emails, or in-app transactions.

And since the gym industry is customer-oriented, CRM automation allows for seamless interaction with techniques like auto welcome packages and training session reminders.

3. E-Commerce

The e-commerce sector has always been a step ahead in terms of digitization, so it has also quickly embraced CRM automation. These days, companies of all sizes use CRM automation to reduce operating costs, collect valuable customer insights and nurture leads. With CRM automation, everyone can operate an online store on their own with automated sales processes running in the background.

4. Legal

In the legal sector, CRM automation mainly handles processes related to a lawyer’s work. This allows them to take tasks like document reviews, time tracking, appointment setting, and other processes off their plate.

CRM automation allows law companies to make client management easier while prioritizing new potential clients by collecting the most relevant data. It also enables them to set up scalable workflows to automate tasks such as contract creation, risk and compliance management, and billing.

5. Retail

CRM automation gives businesses the ability to keep track of their range of products. It can generate tons of data related to products, purchases, leads, targeted campaigns, social media interactions, and a lot more. Valuable time is saved by processing data management and reporting, all with the help of CRM automation.

6. Sales

CRM automation helps you streamline the sales processes with ease. By auto-tracking customer interactions, you can have a crystal clear view of the sales pipeline. It can also handle bad lead handovers, balance the amount of content being sent to customers, and more. With the CRM system taking these processes off the sales teams’ hands, they can convert leads much faster and easier.

7. iGaming

CRM automation is used by iGaming businesses to manage their customer relationships with maximum efficiency. It helps online casinos and other gaming businesses streamline work processes, enhance support, and boost profits while ensuring a smooth and enjoyable player experience. In addition, CRM provides priceless insights about users, their spending history, their habits, and other data, to help businesses make better decisions in the future.

Examples of CRM Automation

The following is a list of some of the most powerful CRM automation tools that are currently packing the most heat.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a CRM automation solution that helps businesses identify high-value leads that are worth prioritizing so you can focus your attention on closing the deal with them.

Pipedrive can be used to create websites, manage emails, keep track of and maintain strong relationships with leads, promote your products and services, and manage the sales process.

In addition, you can receive customizable metrics and reporting to help you understand how your company is performing against its key goals.

Pipedrive is supported by mobile devices so you can handle business matters on the go.

The software allows for the automation of mundane tasks, customization of the purchasing processes for niche products and services, and multi-channel information synching. Pipedrive can be seamlessly integrated with other tools such as those offered by Google, and others.

CleverTap

CleverTap is an extremely polished platform, which brings users real-time behavioral analytics and user engagement, that can be used to gain deeper insights into their customers' minds to engage them more effectively.

Prominent companies using CleverTap include Dominos, Gojek, Mercedes-Benz.io, upGrad, and many others. The software has the ability to extract precious user behavior data based on your optimal KPIs, business goals, and individual user preferences.

Backed by powerful analytics, its marketing engagement suite influences the customer’s behavior and drives them to perform certain actions. CleverTap has a wide range of powerful tools that help you in your business journey. Its smart campaigns boost user engagement and retention while deeply enhancing monetization. CleverTap lets you schedule campaigns upon trigger activation, ensuring that users are given sufficient value when opportunities present themselves.

Braze

Braze is a CRM solution that has the tools needed to grow strong bonds between people and their favorite brands. It helps companies bring a human feel to customer interaction through high-end technologies, bringing forth better experiences, increasing retention, ROI, and extended value.

Marketing and sales teams can use Blaze to deliver the most carefully personalized multi-channel messaging experiences across multiple devices.

By presenting statistical analyses of performance, the software boosts transactions, and loyalty, and helps businesses optimize their customer relationships consistently.

Blaze is best suited for companies of all sizes who need a tool that can help strengthen customer relationships and loyalty with cross-channel campaigns.

WebEngage

WebEngage is a CRM solution that simplifies user engagement and retention while strengthening its effectiveness for consumer tech companies and SMBs. It also has tools that help businesses drive revenue from their loyal customers and anonymous users thanks to well-rounded, super-personalized engagement campaigns across various communication channels.

WebEngage is an ace when it comes to powering user engagement across many industries, including Media & Publications, EdTech, Foodtech, E-commerce, Gaming, BFSI, Fintech, and Healthcare.

SalesForce

SalesForce is a giant in CRM automation. Founded in 1999 by then Oracle vice president Mark Benioff, SalesForce provides a cloud-based, multi-feature, multi-platform solution that provides various products for different business needs.

Salesforce offers many high-end features including advanced marketing automation, around-the-clock customer support, and strong account and contact management, giving you access to a full view of customers, including their activity history, vital contacts, as well as their communications.

In addition, SalesForce offers ease of use, third-party integration, automated workflows and approvals, a wide range of customization options, and much more.

Hubspot CRM

Hubspot CRM is known as one of the most respected CRM solutions on the market. The software is a perfect fit for mid-sized companies in need of a well-rounded CRM tool that can help them manage their leads.

Hubspot CRM’s key features include Sales Hub, CMS Hub, Service Hub, Marketing Hub, chatbots, email marketing tools, lead generation funnels, and contact management.

Companies can receive crucial, in-depth, and custom reports and analytics to help monitor their progress. In addition, teams and marketing communications can be managed across various channels from a central location.

With Hubspot CRM, you can make sales forecasts, polish your customer service, and automate mundane tasks. The software is extremely easy to navigate and is compatible with a wide range of integration options including the big ones: Salesforce, WordPress, ZenDesk, Slack, and MailChimp.

Freshworks

Here we have a data-driven solution that helps businesses boost their productivity by streamlining and automating repetitive and manual processes so that reps can focus on customers and deal closing.

Freshworks lets you customize your lead routing rules to secure the assignment of high-value prospects to the best reps. In addition, you can optimize contact management and lead generation tasks with ease.

Next, the software provides users with the ability to create customized chatbots to collect precious customer insights, send automatic messages to website visitors, and perform AB tests.

Freshworks can analyze customers’ historical data to find leads that have a higher probability of converting.

You can also integrate it with your communication systems so that your employees can share knowledge and work together more efficiently. In addition, Freshworks can track team performance, monitor sales trends, and allows you to use precious data to optimize sales and marketing processes.

Monday.com

Monday.com is a CRM solution that allows for the seamless management of projects and teams while improving your workflow.

With Monday.com, you can create product roadmaps, build marketing campaigns, manage sales pipelines, streamline your recruiting process, plan content production, track progress, and manage all aspects of your business process.

The software can be customized according to your needs and you can create workflows that best suit your sales and marketing teams.

Monday.com also has a time tracking tool that can help track how long your tasks take to complete and how you can manage your time more efficiently.

Thanks to automation, you can focus your energy on pressing tasks that require more brain power, and the dashboards show you all you need to know so you can attain your goals quicker.

The software has a powerful CRM tool that integrates with all kinds of business software, including Gmail, Slack, MailChimp, and Jira.

And last but not least. Monday.com boasts an eye-popping user interface that makes getting familiar with the software a walk in the park. There are also mobile apps to help your employees keep a high spirit of productivity, even when they’re moving about.

Zendesk

If your business needs heavy support and you’re looking for a solution that can support tickets and conversations, Zendesk is your savior.

Founded in 2007, Zendesk has been a leading CRM automation software for many years and was initially created to add a twist of “zen” to helpdesk.

Ever since, many competitors have started challenging the software, all of which have focused on a different aspect:

• Intercom: Offers a human live chat experience with customers
• Hiver: Allows for the use Gmail inbox as a powerful support mailbox
• Groove: Focuses on the shared inbox experience

All of these solutions are viable CRMs. However, they are quite different from most examples on our list and do not hold up to what Zendesk has to offer its users.

Smartico.ai

Smartico.ai is a leader in providing state-of-the-art Gamification and CRM automation software solutions. Its CRM tool combines player analytics data with machine-learning algorithms to help sports betting and iGaming businesses have a deeper understanding of players and their needs while also providing valuable data insights to ensure retention and loyalty, and much more.

As a leading Gamification & CRM Automation solution, Smartico offers:

• Various intuitive challenges and gaming techniques.
• High-value incentives that encourage long-term loyalty and retention, elevate player value, strengthen engagement, and boost user acquisition.
• Multi-Currency/Language/Deep Brand Support.
• Missions – Engage players with fun real-time solo or multiplayer tasks.
• Points – Encourage players to keep coming back through point-based incentives and unlockables.
• Badges – Stand out from the rest with sleek badges and earn free spins for each earned badge.
• Levels – Players gain experience and special perks after each successful level or tournament completion.
• Incentives – Motivate players to come back for more with unique rewards and bonuses.
• Marketplace – Players can actualize their points by cashing them in for free game spins or other awards such as online shopping vouchers.
• Mini-Games – Players can reset their senses through short, award-earning games.
• Tournaments – Set your own qualification rules and offer your customers a powerful endorphin rush with Smartico’s special tournament system.
• Leaderboards – Set daily, weekly, and monthly prizes and watch your user engagement skyrocket.
• Bonus Engine Integration – Cash bonuses, free spin bonuses, and more.

And that’s just a small sample of what’s on offer. Smartico can help your business grow exponentially by supplying the solutions needed to bring the motivation in your company to a whole new level.

Final Thoughts

CRM automation software can make your life easier by taking mundane tasks and clutter off the hands of your sales teams so they can focus their energy on the customers.

It can help your business reduce the cost per customer, increase annual revenues, and enhance the bottom line. Also, a streamlined CRM solution can enhance both employee and customer satisfaction.

Pick a CRM automation software that fits your needs, and get started with a free trial. You’ll see positive results real soon.

And why not start from the top, to ensure your company’s immediate success? With Smartico.ai, you are guaranteed to see a quick and massive boost in revenue, customer retention, loyalty, customer and employee satisfaction, and a lot more.

To book your free in-depth demo, and start winning today, go to: https://smartico.ai/request-a-demo