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The Role of Automation in CRM

 

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For many professionals, life without a CRM is inconceivable. Over 91% of businesses that have more than 11 employees use a CRM, and an effective CRM can increase sales, boost customer retention, and shorten your sales cycle.

However, you may have noticed that CRMs are changing. In particular, more CRM programs are automated services that promise increased efficiency and reduced costs.

Automation is one of the hottest CRM trends right now, but what exactly is it? And how might it improve your customer service offering?

Automation in CRMs

Automated CRMs are designed using AI-driven machine learning programs. These AI programs use algorithms to spot patterns based on massive amounts of categorized data, and actively “learn” as they are given more accurate inputs.

Automation that uses machine learning can mimic the ways that humans think and operate. However, machine learning still requires some amount of human input to categorize data and place boundaries around the way that data is used.

Benefits

Clearly, having a program in your CRM which can “see” and analyze thousands of data entries in the blink of an eye is beneficial. However, if you’re not familiar with the idea of automation, it can be hard to know exactly how it will benefit your workplace — here are a few examples.

Greater Efficiency

Fifty-one percent of customer service agents say they spend “most of their time” on mundane tasks, compared to 34% of customer service agents who do actively use automated technology.

If you haven’t had the chance to use automated tech in your workplace, you might feel uncomfortable allowing AI software to speak to your customers. But, what if you’d never have to help a customer reset a password again? Or, you would longer have to repeat the same answer to an FAQ for hours upon hours every day?

It’s easy to imagine that automation in the customer service experience will play a major role in the coming years — particularly as technology advances and customers become more used to speaking to AI tech.

Management 

Automated management sounds like the thing of dystopian novels. However, automation in the management process can help managers become more empathetic and understanding. That’s because automated CRMs will give managers access to raw data, so managers don’t have to spend their time manually sifting through data.

Of course, it is then up to management to use automated data to make a performance evaluation. The key here will be to use this data to give useful, objective feedback that works in tandem with other motivational strategies that treat employees empathetically and fairly.

Reduce Labor Costs

Workplace efficiency is vital to any organization that sells a product or service. When you’re forced to sift through CRM data to find an old client, that workplace efficiency drops. Automation reduces labor costs by preemptively contacting these old clients through email campaigns or by automatically changing the categorization of a client so they are easier to find.

Automation also reduces the cost of contacting clients when you wish to “warm” them up again. AI can recommend when and how to contact old clients. This reduces the amount of time you need to spend sifting through previous customers and allows you to focus on more pressing operations. 

Challenges 

Of course, blindly automating your business's operations won’t win any favors amongst employees or customers. Nor will it necessarily improve a business’ bottom line. That’s because automating CRMs still face a few key challenges.

The Human Touch 

Meeting your customer’s basic needs is crucial in today’s markets. That’s because the pandemic has changed the way customers act, and has increased their desire for empathetic customer service. In response, business leaders across the nation have doubled down on their commitment to empathizing with customers, and are designing their operations around “ease and emotion”.

However, automation can kill the human touch, as decision-making based on data clearly lacks the empathetic approach that customers desire. This doesn’t mean your business should avoid automation entirely, it just means that you need to be strategic about what you automate in your CRM.

For example, you may want to start using an automated chatbot in your customer service strategy, but you should probably still offer an easy, direct way for customers to speak to a real customer service agent. This means that you will improve your efficiency, but won’t discourage customers who are looking for a human touch.

Growing Pains

Automated CRMs need data to be effective. This is because automation programs are most effective in a large business that have thousands of data nodes for AI to learn from. So, if you’re a smaller business, automating your CRM might not yield as many benefits as you’d imagine.

Of course, automated CRMs can still pull raw data from information outside of your lead generations and client profiles, but businesses need to recognize that automated CRMs aren’t at their most effective if you simply “set it and forget it”. Instead, businesses should treat automated services like new employees who need guidance to keep from instilling bad habits and to overcome growing pains.

Conclusion

Automation promises to revolutionize CRMs. Given enough time and the right inputs, an automated CRM probably can improve your business operations and will improve the efficiency of customer relations. This will allow employees to automate mundane tasks, and spend more time working on solutions that can give your business a competitive edge.