Automating Business Processes with CRM
Welcome back to the “Improving Your Business Performance With CRM” series. In this series we cover five crucial features provided by modern CRMs that help improve process efficiency and sales volume within your organization. In this article we will discuss how a modern CRM can improve internal processes through automation. Previous installments covered improving data transparency and data integrity with CRM.
What is A Business Process?
As we discussed previously, CRMs allow for data transparency and maintaining data integrity across your organization. We are now ready to take the use of CRMs to the next level and describe business process automation. A business process is a collection of operational tasks that ultimately achieves a goal or objective. Part of these tasks include simple duties such as entering new records or parts of a record, creating related records, calculating formulas, and emailing updates. These are essential responsibilities for an organization to function. However, if certain processes within your organization have been refined over the years and formalized into a clear and consistent set of rules, then why not allow technology to execute these processes instead?
What is Business Process Automation?
Business process automation (BPA) is the technology-enabled automation of operational tasks. Imagine a world where entering the same data repeatedly is taken out of the hands of your human assets and given instead to machines to tackle. Quantify the amount of time your operation or sales personnel take to enter and update their contact, customer, partner and contract information. Once you have a number, consider how much more productive your human capital would be if they were given that time back in their day to handle more value-added processes or be more focused on revenue growth?
Improving Business Operations
BPA improves quality and consistency of work because machines do not tire out or cut corners to complete a task. After working ten hours a day, you may not have the same energy at 7 p.m. that you did at 9 a.m. Therefore, the work you complete late in the day may not have the same quality it had when your business day started.
With BPA, you never have to worry about the quality or consistency of certain tasks being executed. BPA reduces turnaround time since the automated tasks will be executed the moment it is triggered. BPA allows for metric visibility, which begets accurate reporting for management. Perhaps most importantly, BPA reduces costs since less personnel are needed to handle entry level tasks.
CRMs make automating business processes easy and painless. Modern CRMs provide an intuitive interface in which you can set the rules and triggers for when a task should be automated. You can set schedules for the automation and dictate the type of automation you wish to have completed. “Set it and forget it” is the contemporary phrase used for such features in modern day software. It means once you set the automation, you never have to think about it again and can go on tackling processes that require a more hands-on approach. The many benefits of BPA are only limited by your imagination. Modern CRMs can help make all your business process automation ideas a reality.
