CRM Functions – CRM is becoming an inevitable part of every business. This is true in terms of the three functionalities that CRM offers, thus making the business process work better. The three CRM functionalities are Sales Force Automation, Marketing Automation, and Customer Service Automation.

CRM Functions – Sales Force Automation

SFA (Sales Force Automation) is an essential aspect of customizable CRM tools that automate and streamline sales inventory, forecasting, leads, analysis, and performance. The automation tool includes web-based and in-house systems.

SFA is built with two core components:

Content Management System

Sales lead tracking system

First of all, it includes features like account management and sales market research. While the sales-force automation system helps in improving sales strategies. As well as, boosting the productivity of sales experts and help them identify new opportunities. With SFA you can easily manage contacts, pipelines, accounts, and related activities. Additionally, Another great feature is forecasting the functionality of helping sales reps to generate accurate and timely forecast reports. Finally, these forecasts can help in fueling informed decision and manage quota performance across teams and areas. Moreover, Sales Force Automation helps in meaningful functionalities, such as alerts, notification, activity management, and task management.

Summarizing the Benefits of SFA

Saves a lot of time

Tasks like generating estimations to proposals, getting quotes and aligning orders get automated. Thus, saving a lot of time.

Sales Forecasting

SFA understand past and current sales trends and number of opportunities in the pipeline.

Up-Selling and Cross-selling

SFA lets you understand the customer orders history, which you can effectively utilize to improve prospects.

Lead Management

SFA extracts lead from marketing campaigns, website visits or outbound calls. According to which, they notify sales reps about the arrival of new leads in the pipeline.

Overall, a survey conducted by IDC showed that investing in SFA software:

Increases deal closure by 30%

Reduces sales cycle by 18%

Cuts down the sales administrative time by 14%.

CRM Functions – Marketing Automation

Another one of the core CRM Functions is Marketing automation. It frees marketers from monotonous tasks and helps brands in increasing their bottom lines. In fact, 77% of CMOs at top-performing companies implement marketing automation to increase revenue.

Marketing Automation helps in:

1 – Improving customer experience

Thus marketing Automation helps in figuring out the behavior of the visitors and send them personalized emails. Hence, these highly behavioral triggered emails can help in creating personalized customer experience thus boosting the conversion rates. According to Econsultancy, 93% of companies see an uplift in conversion rates from personalization.

2 – Increase sales

Marketing automation helps in upscaling. It is obvious, that automating email campaigns are more efficient than creating and sending emails manually. Automation makes campaigns scalable regardless of team size. You can develop a series of campaigns to increase the revenue at every stage of the purchase.

3 – Boost ROI

Marketing Automation reduces the need for resources that work on repetitive tasks. Overall, this allows you to streamline your team’s tasks and cut staff costs. Free resources can now focus on high priority tasks. This can help in bringing value to the business. Thus, improving ROI.

4 – Increasing customer retention

Marketing is not only about attracting customers. But also, making them part of your brand for a lifetime. Marketing Automation works on retention and loyalty strategies. Thus increasing customer lifetime value. Besides that, automation also sends requests for the reviews, feedback, exclusive offers, spending segments, as well as trigger re-engagement campaigns.

5 – Commencing Strategic Thinking

Marketing automation takes over repetitive tasks, making a lot of space for creative ideas and strategies. This allows each member to reach their full potential, improving the ROI of marketing efforts every year. To conclude, marketing automation entangles bulk modern marketing practices such as lead generation, segmentation, cross-selling and up-selling. And of course, ROI analysis.

CRM Functions – Customer Service Automation

Customer Service is an important part of modern business strategies. As a result, customers have a lot of options to choose from in terms of the quality of their products or excellent customer relationship management. Reducing the tedious process of customer service, CRM software has the facility to enable marketers to distinguish their products and services. Above all, they can do so through personalized communication with their clients in a challenging business environment.

Benefits of Automated Customer Services:

Routine Communication

An efficient way to manage customer communication is to automate it through a customer-scheduling program. You can easily set a reminder, that can be automatically generated.

Follow-up

After a business transaction, it is always a good practice to make your customers feel satisfied. An excellent way to accomplish this by providing a satisfaction survey. In fact, such surveys can help in providing excellent responses to your products or services in a measurable way.

Increasing the reach

Once there is a compiled list of contact information, businesses can reach out to their customers in multiple ways. Overall, with customer service automation the information can be maintained, sorted, collected, and stored in the database. Businesses can grow the list of potential clients with the contact form that they have. Therefore, the key is to find ways to empower customers to initiate contact with the enterprise.

CRM Functions – Conclusion

With customer service automation, companies can easily improve their customer relationships. It supports managing history and escalations, trouble ticketing, customer case tracking, responding to customer inquiries, management of product problems, and sharing customer service information across the entire organization.

Certainly, every customer wants to feel like the entire business is revolving around him. With CRM’s key features you can make this a reality. Due to this, just make sure CRM doesn’t make your business process complicated. When it comes to complete customer satisfaction, keeping things simple for them is the best choice. To make your business process simpler, first, you need to make a research. Look for simple CRM functionalities that suit your business. Furthermore, keep in mind, even if your business processes are complicated, your CRM doesn’t have to be.

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