COVID-19 has swooped everyone off their feet. Right from the economic superpower to already financially deprived countries, Coronavirus has caused a severe disruption in day-to-day lives. Not only this but also companies which were once filled with employees in premised are deserted entirely. To ensure health and safety, the Prime Minister of the nation addressed its 1.3 billion people to stay at home under 21 days lockdown. Organizations, therefore, have taken up the remote working culture allowing businesses to continue working from home.
Kalyani Chaudhari, Marketing Manager, Sage Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
However, remote working has its own set of challenges. Although most companies have gotten used to it since past few weeks, few others are still struggling to survive the COVID-19 waters. Managers are facing issues while coordinating with teams, sales representatives are unable to maintain smooth communication with their prospects, customer support teams are dwindling between documents to find the right solution for their clients and the marketing teams are swamped with continuously changing communication parameters on social media and other digital platforms.
But, thanks to digital transformation, most companies have already adopted enterprise solutions. One of the major transforming factors is Business Process Automation.
Business Process Automation is the process of automating key business of any organization by managing information, data and processes followed in order to reduce costs, resources and investments. But when business executives think of implementing process automation, they only think about a few organizational tasks such as auto-response to emails or auto-generating invoices. Though these processes are of help, it doesn’t completely tend to improve the impact on Customer Relationship Management.
Some companies have a dedicated system that generates auto-responses for the emails received from the client. These responses are usually based on the specific keywords found in the incoming mails. The mere mention of different keywords in the email message itself can cause the automated response that will include the most likely answer to the question asked by the customers. It is a way of addressing the client’s mail with a quick method which will either help to resolve the problem, if not then the customer can choose to escalate the request by clicking a link in the message.
- Automated Customer Tracking
Some issues can be directly solved through the automated response sent to the client, if not it will be escalated to the customer support team which can then be assigned to the respective departments in order to serve the customer. In such cases, a ticket must be created in order to track the status of the issue. Implementing BPA in CRM will allow you to create tickets against the customer along with a mail copy linked to it; which will help the customer service executives to automatically record all its related activity.
Recording all the customer activity will prevent customers from fallen in cracks and CRM systems with BPA will help your business to have a good workflow of helping the customer. The result is a better customer record, which means that customers can be helped more efficiently in the future.
- Automating Social Media
Customers may reach out to you in other ways besides emails when they are looking for a solution to their problems or answers to their questions. Nowadays, the most powerful media of communication is Social Media. Thus your business will undoubtedly get many instances to interact with the clients through social media.
Integrating CRM with social media tools such as Facebook, Linked in etc. can prove a full-time job for a team of employees. If the major touch points are fulfilled successfully, the information gathered through those interactions can be valuable in moving customers through the buying cycle or converting prospects into customers.
This can be proved profitable to most of the small to medium size organizations who do not have enough time or resources to devote multiple marketing team to social media activities.
- Website Optimization
A simple way of automating some of the business process through Website is by helping the clients to navigate to your company website or complete a purchase or make an enquiry directly through the website. Flowing the data entered on the website directly to the CRM will help your Sales team to address the enquiries and take the necessary actions to convert the enquiry into a complete purchase.
Predicting unwanted circumstances is obviously difficult, but being prepared for the worse is the right strategy for businesses to sustain and scale. Business intelligence application like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps in automating business processes for seamless operations.
Author Bio
Kalyani writes about upcoming technologies like big data, machine learning, virtual reality, AI and robotics. Her expertise lies in growing the business opportunities by market qualified lead generation through inbound and outbound practices, majorly focusing on content. Kalyani works for Sage Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a leading provider of ERP and CRM software to small and mid-sized businesses in India.
