6 things to digitize & automate in your Customer Service (CRM) Department

An optimally managed CRM or customer services department will understand the benefits of business digitization and business automation.
Digitization and automation are a very crucial pair for every modern 21st century business looking to maximize profits and cut costs.

The purpose of digitizing your customer services department is not for fancy, it’s actually to tap into myriads of benefits such as flexibility in decision making, lower staff turnover, access critical information from anywhere and some other benefits as outlined in this post.

In every scenario where digitization and automation technology are implemented in the customer services department, the following understated previously manual functions also have to be digitized for a complete digital experience.

Digitize all customer & prospects data

For your customer services department digitization to be complete, all your customer records must be digitized because you can’t afford to be running back to paper records once in a while.
The customer records have to be collated, imported into your CRM software and possibly backed up to an online storage facility of your choice or they should be entered directly into your CRM software.
Your customer records consist of the following and more:

  • Customer bio-data: this includes the names, pictures, phone numbers, email, and more
  • Customer complaints and requests: there should be a section in your CRM app for you to detail customer complaints and applied resolutions.
  • Customer documents: this are documents you generate for each customer based on the specifics of your contract with them.
  • Customer Messages: these are messages you have sent out to your clients over a period of time.

Digitize your sales or subscription form (KYC Form)

Sales form, subscription form or KYC form (Know Your Customer) is the form you give prospective customers to fill once they decide to do business with you.
Digitizing this form will save you from the manual process of having to scan the paper form and send via email to your intending customer.
When they receive it, they will print it out, fill their details, scan it and send it back to you – which is a tedious process and can very easily discourage the customer from going ahead with the deal.

But when digitized, you can easily send a ready link or URL to your intending customer, once they click on that link, it’ll load your sales form, they can easily fill in their details on the form and submit. As soon as they submit, you will get a notification that someone has just filled your form. Makes life easier.

Carrotsuite business management software provides a sales form link for you to send to your intending customers, you can add extra fields of your choice to the form or create an entirely new form, get the direct link and send to them.

Automate customer birthday notifications

Birthdays are memorable occasions in the life of most or all of your customers which should be celebrated with them.
Many companies even go further to felicitate with their customers on the birthdays of their kids and spouse. Does your company have any system for remembering the birthday of your customers?

This is why it becomes very crucial to automate this important function so that you maximize the opportunity presented by the customer’s birthday to show that you are interested in their welfare and not just their money.

Automating this birthday notification can be in two ways:
– Send them automated birthday messages via SMS & emails on their birthdays
– Set up auto-notifications for your staff or their account officers to be notified about upcoming birthdays of all or specific customers.

Carrotsuite business management software makes provision for you to configure messages (SMS & Email) which will go out automatically to your customers on their respective birthdays.
Also, you can configure Carrotsuite to specific account officers of the birthdays of a specific customer or customers with a specific total transaction amount. For example, notify Mr Chris of birthdays of clients with equal to or greater than $500,000 total transaction amount.

Automate payment reminder notifications

Sending payment reminders are a very crucial task which must not be left to chance or taking lightly because the cashflow of many businesses are heavily dependent upon these reminders.
Therefore, sending these reminders must not be left to the mood or unpredictability of your staff’s human nature, it has to be automated so that a machine which doesn’t have feelings is put in charge of this critical task.

A lot of companies still send out payment reminders manually, they even have staffs dedicated to sending out payment reminders. This should be automated as quickly as possible.
Payment reminders are supposed to be dynamic (it should stop sending when a client has completed payment) and be specific (indicate the actual amount the client has paid and how much is outstanding).

With Carrostuite, you can setup your payment reminders and the frequency you want them to go out; daily, weekly, monthly, bi-annually or annually. Then compose your message or use the default message already specified. After which you can relax, it will send on its own based on your settings.

Digitize all customer & prospects data

Your customer documents include all legal documents you have given out to the client before and after his sales contract is signed. For example contract of sales, agreements, etc.
It will save you from big paperwork headache later on if you could take out like 2 minutes to scan those documents and store their soft copies online.
At best this makes your business look professional and organized, at worst, you may not need it but its there for you and your customer should you ever need it.

A higher level of digitizing customer documents is using electronic signatures on a soft copy document. This implies that instead of sending out hard copies of your documents to be signed by your clients or other party, you just send them a link to the document soft copy where they’ll only need to review it and attach their signatures so the deal is done.

On Carrotsuite you can upload soft copies of your clients documents so that they can see it from your portal when they login to their account

Digitize your leads & sales activity

Many companies still blanketly rely on the memory and discretion of their sales reps when it concerns dealing with their prospects and leads. This is so old-school.

Every new prospect and lead must be documented in a CRM software. Every interaction and decision reached, every day must be inputted regardless of any opposing excuses. This should be mandated across all your reps.
If this is not pushed earlier, the negative consequences can be very serious to the business. Your leads are the primary sources of your business’s future cashflow and must not be treated with levity.

Your sales activity has to be digitized so that even if the expected sales are delayed or fall through, you can still glean insights and wisdom from crosschecking several interactions of your sales reps with prospects and leads. Read more about this here: 7 Setbacks Your Business Will Face Without A CRM

If you want to grow your business fast, you must take quick actions to start digitizing and automating your customer service department, because without this, you will be saddled with bottlenecks and so many human errors that could have been avoided otherwise.
Digitizing and automating stuffs in your customer service department will drastically increase your speed of delivery so that you can get much more done in less time.
Your customer service staffs will enjoy working in a digitized and automated customer service department because it will greatly reduce their stress of always running about to find customer files or documents, this will reduce their complaints and make them stay with your business longer.


What other issues or manual processes do you think should be digitized and automated in your customer service department? Please comment them below. Thanks

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