Working with clients: 6 instruments for CRM automation 

Today, we talk a lot about client retention and loyalty. The key step in making clients loyal is building a correct model of communication. However, client communication is not only based on finding right channels and providing a good marketing. It includes a big routine work in automation. Here are 6 key instruments that can help you automate your work with clients. 

1. CRM as a foundation 

All communications with clients definitely need to be started in CRM. Working with Excel spreadsheets or other non-specialized solutions for customer accounting can lead to loss of contacts, leads and revenue. 

The main advantage CRM provides — it automatically records the client’s request and does not allow you to lose it. Everything that happens after you get your data depends on your sales or support processes: you can build funnels for working with the client, initiate sending offers and assigning communication tasks to employees.  

Large and medium-sized businesses, as a rule, use CRM, which can be quite strongly customized for their individual business processes. Others are quite satisfied with standard universal CRMs. Anyway, this is the solution that forms the basis for further client work. 

2. Pre-configured scripts for calls 

When you use this instrument, all incoming calls can be divided by number / source / region / channel, and distributed among sales employees. This means, the calling customer gets connected to the support as quickly as possible. This helps avoid queues on the line, and resolve client’s questions quickly. This instrument allows assigning “personal managers” to certain contacts in CRM, and the calls from these numbers will be made to them directly. 

Think about out-of-the-office hours: you need a special call processing scenario for them in order not to miss client calls. For example, you can appoint a weekend support person, and send all urgent calls to him, while saving other calls for weekdays.  

3. Work with missed calls 

Non-working hours are not the only occasion to miss the client’s call. In the middle of the working day, the support manager can miss it simply because they went on a break, forgot to change the status, or were busy with another client. Or there are so many calls that the call center does not have enough time to accept them all. 

The CRM can be a helping hand in this case. For each missed call, you can automatically set the task to the manager to contact the client later or even create an auto-call. For example, the system can automatically connect your employee with the missed call client after a designated time. And if it doesn’t work for the first time, the system will try it later. This approach helps to deal with the human factor minimize the chance of losing a client. 

4. Filtering calls 

This solution is good for the “unnecessary” calls. For specialized departments (sales or support), some calls are not too important: the calls to back-office, information and spam calls. In order not to stuff your CRM with such “gibberish” calls, filter them by number at the level of your telephony system and CRM. This would allow you to collect clearer statistics on the results of working with calls. 

5. Faster speed of request processing 

Stop thinking that when working with clients, only the speed of the employees’ reaction matters. Your teams also call your clients. Automation of the outcoming calls shows its results when you start working with large data volumes. When calling to the clients who do not reply or reply slowly, the speed of employees can be increased by an average of 33%.  

Such functions as storing the history of communication with the client in the CRM, 1-click calls from the CRM instead of manual dialing and solutions for automatic outcoming customer calls can become a great solution for saving your teams time. 

6. Monitoring and statistics 

If your business doesn’t provide good enough results, there might be many questions you want to know an answer. Do managers work good? Are there any bottlenecks in the distribution of calls? Are you losing calls? Do the employees work out calls with sufficient quality? Do they bring the client to the transaction? Statistics can resolve all these questions. Especially, when these statistics are automated and data-based. Good CRM with automation features can provide you with the whole set of useful reports that help you realize what really happens. 

In general, automation helps saving your time and resources, and this is the necessary step to make after a simple CRM implementation. If you are still thinking, which automation instruments can be helpful for your company or even separate department, contact our experts who will help you with audit and further instruments choice.