Your sales pipeline, sales & support functions, and customer experience can all be improved with the simple integration of customer engagement automation.
CRM’s are designed to answer the common challenges that many businesses have. They act as a single source of truth that combines leads and customer data from multiple teams, systems, or processes, provide transparency between sales and support teams, inform executives of the company’s sales pipeline, make it easy for teams to track customer conversations and follow up, and enable scalability for growing businesses.
There are many CRM options for businesses at the startup level, enterprise level and every level in between. However, despite the prevalence of CRM tools used by businesses, many still struggle with using them effectively – primarily due to the manual requirements of many tasks. Simply having a CRM available does not mean that humans will use them!
Can I See the Updated Sales Pipeline Please?
For executives, having confidence in the sales pipeline is critical. It’s also one of the features of the CRM with slow/low adoption rates among users. Many sales teams are required to manually key in their leads into a CRM but inaccuracies are common such as incorrect data, incomplete data, or no data at all.
Call it human error or human oversight, the inability to have a clear picture of the sales pipeline can impact operational budgeting and investment decisions. It can also result in a stressful environment for executives and team members.
Instead, imagine a world where customer leads are captured from multiple engagement channels such as your website, Facebook, Google My Business, SMS, and even missed phone calls, and are automatically sent to your CRM without requiring human intervention.
You may already have something like that, but can your lead capture automation also hold an intelligent conversation with your prospect or customer, potentially fulfilling their need real-time without the need for costly human follow up?
Customer engagement and communication automation tools (or ECATs) provide the link between prospects and customers to your company before they ever speak with or message a live person. ECATs use automation to hold intelligent conversations with customers, helping them complete common tasks like answering basic questions about the business, scheduling appointments, learning about products and services, and accessing promotions.
Not only does automation engage with and capture customers, but it can also satisfy customer needs, saving time for both the customer and the sales and support teams, increasingly important for understaffed teams.
Automation Improves Lead Quality, Maximizing Sales Rep Time
Using an ECAT to engage with customers results in more high quality leads. Alternative solutions consist of simple contact capture forms that result in a large number of low value leads that waste sales reps’ time.
Instead, engagement using time-saving AI automation provides a useful and friendly way for people to interact with a business. Pre-built conversation flows are designed to provide relevant information about a business and drive towards the desired outcome – a purchase, a lead capture, an appointment request, or some other call to action event.
Leads captured through ECATs have detailed conversation history information, allowing sales to respond deftly knowing the full context of the customer’s need. This maximizes their time and allows them to focus on the highest quality leads.
Automation Solves Speed to Response and Reduces Cost of Sales
Speed responding to a lead matters. A lot. According to a Vendasta report, businesses have only 5 minutes to respond to a lead as the likelihood of closing a sale decreases by 80% starting in the 6th minute!
To really emphasize the point that consumers require an immediate response, 78% of them will purchase from the business that responds first with conversion rates 391% higher in the first minute. The first minute! Does your business respond that fast?
Unfortunately for businesses, 55% of them take 5 or more days to respond to their leads. That’s 7,195 minutes too late and a waste of marketing dollars.
Businesses that use automation benefit from the strategic advantage of immediate engagement which relaxes the 5 minute rule, providing sales teams greater flexibility on response times. These businesses are able to respond instantly to leads through acknowledgment, engagement, and the ability for customers to easily self-service many of their needs.
Additional benefits are that automation reduces the need for live chat engagement, increases closure rates, and reduces the overall cost of a sale.
Automation Enables Customer Self-Service, Reducing the Need for Live Follow Ups
Immediate engagement also benefits customer support requests as it provides for faster resolution resulting in reduced customer support costs, time saved, and increased customer satisfaction.
In a perfect world, the consumer inquiry to customer satisfaction is a seamless journey. In the scenario where a consumer has a question about your product or has a service request, they might reach out to the business via phone, SMS, website, social media, or Google Messages. Through automation, they are assisted automatically, 24/7, and their contact information and intent is automatically captured in a CRM for sales or service to follow-up on, if necessary.
All of this is possible at a low cost using AI-powered automated engagement.
Multi-Channel Communication Automation Consolidates Customer Conversation Histories
The advantages to multi-channel customer engagement are not just in the ability to hold intelligent conversations where the customer is and on their own time, but also the consolidation of those conversation histories into one customer record.
This consolidation helps prevent multiple lead and support entries for the same customer as well as provides the most comprehensive view into the customer conversation history.
The Agentz Automated Assistant ECAT Solution for Small Business
Agentz is the answer for the SMB who needs help engaging with more customers, capturing leads in a CRM, and solving inquiries real-time so as to increase the productivity and efficiency of their sales and service agents. Agentz elevates the value of CRM systems through improved lead capture and sales pipeline functionality by reducing the amount of service requests requiring human intervention.
Purpose-built for small to medium size businesses, Agentz automates customer engagement through an easy setup that requires no engineering support. Agentz ensures that businesses don’t have to worry about missing a call, SMS, website inquiry, or social media message.
White Label Agentz As Your Own
Automation doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive. Ask how Agentz can help your business or, if you are a CRM provider, how your customers can operate their sales and support more efficiently using low-cost, high value automation.
Sold standalone or as part of a product bundle, Agentz helps partners and resellers improve the efficacy of their existing products, grow their revenue, and make their customers even stickier.
Agentz wants you to be successful. Our partner programs include product customization, training for your teams, and even assistance with your marketing materials. Get started today and let Agentz help guide you through your product roll-out.