Intelligent workflows

Create CRM Workflow for Contact Centers: Steps to Get Started

There’s no denying the fact that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is one of the key money-makers among the various business tools.

In fact, every $1 invested in a CRM earns an impressive return of $8.71! However, such results are only possible if you can realize its true potential by leveraging CRM workflows. What are those? Let’s take a look!

What is a CRM Workflow?

Customer relationship management workflow or CRM workflow is a serialized collection of tasks or activities that need to be completed to successfully perform a business function. You can think of it as a breakdown of a business process into tasks and subtasks which is then organized into a flowchart from the initial trigger to the desired outcomes.

Types of CRM Workflow Automation

While a CRM workflow lends visibility to the business process, its true value lies in automation. Here are a few CRM workflow examples that can clue you in on how to actualize CRM workflow automation:

Lead Generation

CRM is the heart of all lead generation activities. Whether you perform outreach over online platforms and emailing or cold calling and traditional media, all the information that you capture thus should get stored in the CRM.

As such, the CRM workflow would primarily revolve around patching together all the various lead generation channels, that is, email, calls, social media, third-party vendors, etc., and connecting them to the CRM database.

Once you create the workflows, your sales and marketing team will spend more time acquiring leads and less time making data entries. At the same time, you would be establishing a single source of truth and minimizing human errors.

Lead Qualification and Scoring

While the CRM workflow for lead capturing and storage is so intuitive that one hardly thinks of it as “automation” in the strictest form, CRM workflow automation truly shines in the lead qualification and scoring department.

With the customer data readily available in your CRM, the next course of action would be to sort them on the basis of factors like purchase intent, decision-making authority, budget, urgency, etc.

You can set up a rule-based algorithm in the CRM workflow to assign a weighted score against a lead indicating the probability of conversion. Using this score as a reference, you can prioritize the available leads and focus on the ones that will fetch revenue.

Drip Marketing

Once you have identified the high-value prospects, you would want to nurture them until they are ripe for sale. CRM workflow automation can also assist in this regard by automating drip campaigns.

Drip campaigns involve periodic outreach to ensure that you remain at the forefront of your customer’s minds. CRM workflow tools will calculate the number of days elapsed since the last interaction, the customer’s preferred channel or contact, the last activity, etc., to run an if-then-else loop that formulates a winning drip campaign.

Sales Cycle

Lead generation and lead scoring are CRM workflow automations at the grassroot level. However, you can also automate end-to-end CRM stages workflow in case of larger operations like the sales cycle in its entirety. Once again, the if-then-else logic will come to play in defining the CRM workflow, and you can automate it using your customer journey insights.

For instance, someone who visits your website will be presented with the opportunity to sign up for your informative newsletter. Once they do so, you can use this data to welcome them and share relevant content through email. When the customer begins to display purchase intent, a sales rep can hop on a call with them and close the deal. Now, it’s all about onboarding and retention!

Clearly, CRM workflow automation offers next-level scalability and agility with minimum manual intervention.

Account Management

Remember how we talked briefly about customer onboarding and retention above? Account management is precisely that. Interestingly, you can also use CRM workflows to manage the same.

Whether it is welcoming a new customer and giving them a walkthrough of the product or executing re-engagement campaigns and pushing for repurchase when a subscription is about to expire – you can automate everything with CRM.

Simply define the customer’s action or inaction and the corresponding periodicity, and you can comfortably manage customer accounts as per their expectations.

Customer Support

About 9 out of 10 consumers consider customer service as a clinching factor when determining whether or not they wish to transact with a business. Moreover, 90% of customers view immediate responses as “essential” or “very important” while evaluating the customer experience. With this backdrop, customer service should feature as a priority when it comes to workflow automation in CRM.

CRM workflows can be instrumental in maintaining customer-centricity. For starters, the CRM can capture all the preliminary details regarding the issue and assign a priority to the concern based on the customer lifetime value.

At the same time, it allows the setting up of custom workflows where you can establish a ticket assignment system. Such operations workflows match customer concerns with the appropriate agent to reduce time to resolution and enhance customer satisfaction.

Customer Lifecycle Management

As we’ve seen, lead generation and lead scoring are subsets of the sales cycle, which can be automated entirely through CRM workflows. Similarly, account management or customer support are smaller units of customer lifecycle management.

Whether you are engaging with a qualified lead or a loyal customer, this custom workflow takes into account the state of the customer. Typically, a customer may lie anywhere in the discovery, education, consideration, conversion, post-purchase, or advocacy stages of the buyer’s journey.

Based on where the customer stands, the CRM stages workflow will try to keep them moving through the sales cycle. It may queue education after the customer has discovered your brand or tag a customer account as an advocate after noticing positive engagement such as the sharing of branded content or referral codes. The primary objective is to elongate the customer’s life.

How to Create CRM Workflows for Contact Centers?

Now that you have a clearer idea of what is a CRM workflow and how you can set up CRM workflow automation let’s take a deeper look at how to get started with CRM workflows. Here is a quick step-by-step guide to creating workflows using CRM:

Identify

Not all workflows need to be translated into CRM workflows. For instance, CRM workflow automation may prove to be useful in upper funnel stages as it can help process multiple requests at the same time. However, doing so in the lower funnel stages can cause your business to lose its human touch. As such, one has to review all contact center processes and identify the ones that can be made into CRM workflows.

Typically, universally successful workflows that empower a number of teams without affecting the performance of others can be a great starting point for effective workflow management.

Implement

Once you have identified the business workflows that can be powered by the CRM, it is time to set them up. You will obviously require CRM workflow tools at this stage.

Here’s how you will go about setting up custom workflows in your CRM:

  1. Open the CRM workflow tools and select the option for a new workflow.
  2. Give it a unique and distinguishable name. You can choose from the template CRM workflows available or create a custom workflow from scratch.
  3. Next, define the trigger for the workflow.
  4. List down the activities that follow the trigger conditions.
  5. Allocate the call center workflows to a department, team, or employee.
  6. Save and activate the CRM workflow.

Run and Test

After you have set up the CRM workflow, it is time to give it a whirl. Use a few pre-determined metrics to test how these workflows affect your business. Measure their performance to see whether they are helping your teams achieve their goals or posing a hindrance.

Also, run tests on these call center workflows to locate any bottlenecks or flaws that need to be addressed to improve efficiency.

Educate

Education is key to the success of your CRM workflow. As such, you need to educate and inform your teams about how the workflow will affect their functioning. It would help to have a quick training session where you can help them ease into the changes and derive maximum value from this innovation.

At the same time, you can take this as an opportunity to capture feedback from your employees on the said workflow and find ways to improve it.

Reiterate

Finally, you have to make it a habit to analyze, measure, and revise the different CRM stages workflows and optimize them from time to time. Doing so ensures that you are no longer stuck using outdated practices or introducing workflow changes that amount to nothing.

The review, revise, rerun, and retest cycle will improve your workflows, streamline operations, and drive organizational growth.

Tips for Efficient CRM Workflow Management

Now that you know all that there is to CRM workflows, let’s check out a few tips for streamlining their performance through workflow management:

  • Choosing the right CRM platform is the bedrock of the anticipated efficiency and productivity of the workflows. Ensure that all the key stakeholders are involved in this critical decision-making process.
  • Understand every agent’s strengths and weaknesses, and allow them to play to their advantage. Your CRM should have access to the agent profiles to find the perfect match.
  • Identify any task dependencies that can elongate the workflow or render it inefficient. Then, define the workflow such that the dependency precedes the task.
  • Determine KPIs and metrics on the basis of the highest objective and work your way down to the benchmarks that work with the goal.
  • Make use of notifications and alerts so that agents know immediately what is expected of them.
  • Review the CRM workflows by stepping into the shoes of your customers and visualize the value it brings to the table.

Closing Thoughts

CRMs are as only as usable as the skills and capabilities of the business operating them. With CRM workflow, it is possible to extract more value from your CRM platforms and win over your customers.

At the same time, it eases the workload of your employees and fosters greater satisfaction. With such two-fold benefits, what’s stopping you from CRM workflow automation?

FAQs

What is CRM workflow for contact centers?

CRM workflow for contact centers is a diagrammatic flow of how a call travels through the organization toward success and how tools like CRM streamline such movement.

Why are CRM workflows important?

Here’s why CRM workflows are important:

  • They are a digital copy of business processes and maintain an auditable electronic record of all interactions in real time.
  • CRM workflows help identify issues of duplication and redundancy, which may be a drain on your resources.
  • It connects customers with the right kind of agents, which improves customer experience and employee productivity.
  • It grants a high-level view of the roles and responsibilities of each individual within the organization and their respective contributions.
  • They leave room for automation and analysis to improve and expand all your workflows.
What are the benefits of workflow automation in CRM?

CRM workflow automation fetches the following benefits:

  • It minimizes human errors and takes hold of repetitive and unproductive tasks.
  • It boosts employee satisfaction by distributing only complex tasks, that too proportionately.
  • It brings disparate teams and platforms on the same page and encourages collaboration through seamless integration.
  • It reduces operational costs while maintaining a high degree of scalability and agility.
What are some practical CRM workflow automation examples?

Some common CRM workflow automation examples are as below:

  • Lead generation
  • Lead qualification and scoring
  • Drip marketing
  • Sales cycle
  • Account management
  • Customer support
  • Customer lifecycle management
What are some call center workflow management tools?

The following are some call center workflow management tools:

  • JustCall
  • Exotel
  • Webex
  • Freshdesk
  • Twilio

Anushree is a seasoned business leader with nearly two decades of experience in the SaaS industry, specializing in customer-facing roles across the globe. As the driving force behind our Customer Success division, she is committed to fostering a culture of customer-centricity within her team. Dedicated to maintaining a high-impact Customer Success function, Anushree serves as a vital conduit for open communication channels for customers, capturing invaluable customer feedback and aligning it with our product vision. Her focus on seamless customer experience ensures that customers enjoy a rewarding journey from start to finish.

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