Business Automation: the CRM

The vast majority of small and medium-sized Italian companies, in fact, manage strategic business information very often through what we would call primitive tools, such as Excel spreadsheets or other rudimentary databases, perhaps integrated with some management software that manages some fundamental business process such as accounting, inventory or production.

Adoptingbusiness automation, therefore, becomes the first and most immediate way to regain efficiency in business processes, which can mean both greatly increasing one's market competitiveness and becoming more efficient from an internal process perspective.

Let's give some examples:

Customer tracking. With a good automation system, it is possible to receive and track the whatever medium customers use to send inquiries, Internet or mobile, and respond in real time. In fact, speed of response is one of the main drivers for potential customers to choose one service or product provider over another.

Personalization of services. Thanks to automation, it is possible to automatically offer a customer an offer of a product or service due to the profiling received on your site from that specific customer or due to the type of request, giving the customer a clear perception that you are offering a service or product customized to their needs without the use of any human intervention.

Invoicing. It is possible to automate the generation of recurring invoices by tying the issuance of the same invoice to certain conditions that must be verified. For example, it is possible to create a process such that when a service or product is completed, and the predetermined conditions are verified, the invoice is issued automatically.

Data collection. An additional process that can be fully automated is the information collection process. Through an Online Form, it is possible to request and thus collect data from potential customers, automatically transfer them to a CRM that, at the same time, is able to create tasks to be assigned to employees, in relation to predefined responsibility criteria, and monitor their execution. Thus, automation makes it possible to keep track of the status of task processing related to the provision of services to customers.

To achieve all of the previously mentioned benefits, it is necessary to have two components that are strongly integrated with each other. 

The first of these is a Fully customizable CRM both structure and content of the databases containing the business information involved in the processes.

The second component is automation tools that can trigger defined processes upon the occurrence of certain conditions and/or changes in the state of information contained in the CRM.

Zoho's platform allows for both components, providing a CRM with extensive customization capabilities and huge automation features with which to make autonomous every process related to the information contained within the CRM.