What is CRM workflow automation?
Workflow automation is typically referring to the processes encompassing the stages of creation or execution within your business and how you can apply automations to routinely complete tasks. This includes the design and execution stages and aims to create automations for manual task processes you may have, meaning you can route files, data and more to the relevant people quickly and easily based on a set of pre-defined rules structured around your business operations. More and more organisations are opting to utilise workflow automation as it has enabled them to scale growth over time due to being increased efficiency whilst also reducing resource allocation costs from using automations.
Benefits of CRM workflow automation
Before implementing automations, you must carefully consider which of your processes fits the profile. Investigate your processes to identify which of these are routine based meaning they follow the same process each time. These are the easiest to implement and doing so can be beneficial in different ways:
Reduces cost
Save time and money on labour expenses. Utilising automations will free up valuable time for your staff to focus on other areas. This can increase efficiency in many departments, such as sales, admin, and marketing.
Eliminate human error
We are all human and we all make mistakes. However, having a succinct automation process in place makes sure your process is followed to the point, every single time, eliminating human error and the time required to identify and resolve these issues. If you have processes within your business where you must rely on their accuracy, automations are the best-case scenario to achieve this.
Increased productivity
As mentioned before, integrating a powerful CRM capable of automations can ultimately increase efficiency across departments. Keeping all your data, proposals, quotes and everything else in one centralised, easy-to-access location, helps keep all your staff on the same page.
Increased job satisfaction
Increase the efficiency of how fast you can close and deliver on deals, keeping your clients happy, as well as your staff.
Workflow automations tailored to your operations
Depending on the CRM you go with, some software allows team members to design customised workflows specific to your process requirements.
Data and action tracking
Many of the actions in your workflow process can be tracked and subsequently utilised with real-time reporting capabilities. This makes it simpler to identify weak processes in the workflow to optimise it further.
Effective marketing
Integrating these workflows can give you the ability to automate your email campaigns to a degree. For example, welcome new customers with automated email responses, or subscribe them to your marketing lists automatically.
Integrations to other applications
Some software vendors, including Zigaflow, come with powerful integrations to some of the popular apps used by business users. These include email applications, allowing you to get your email inbox operational within your CRM, along with other software providers.
Types of automations
When considering implementing automations for the first time, it's critical to break down where you should start your journey. Some important types of automations include:
Customer service automation
customer support is a vital aspect of your business, but unfortunately, it can take a lot of time away from your staff. Integrating a ticketing solution that automatically orders and stores customer comments or issues, will speed up the process leading to happy customers.
Documentation automations
Manually updating and delivering documents to clients is a tedious task that consumes a lot of time. Workflow automations aim to automate as many of these processes as possible, increasing efficiency when updating customer information meaning documents can be approved and delivered to clients quickly.
Collative data automations
When utilising business management software, automatic data tracking can alert staff with reminders to complete a particular task based on the data provided, ultimately improving your turnaround time.
Marketing/Sales automation
Your sales team is essential in bringing new business to your company. However, there can be many hurdles in their way, since they must identify potential clients, analyse data on them manually and then follow up leads can be hectic, having a centralised database within your CRM to store all these details, and possibly follow up actions that need to be taken, is a huge benefit to these automations.
Why utilise this?
Integrating effective workflow automations into your operations is a modern way to improve, manage, and simplify your routine tasks. Many companies are quick to dismiss the possibility of using this technology due to the assumption it is too complex to implement. Although it is true that it can take some time to properly integrate into your processes, the time savings you can make with automations when managing leads, documents, schedules and supporting your clients, will save you much more time in the long run. Zigaflow's CRM can save you valuable time within your day-to-day activities, to learn more about our automations, feel free to book a demo.