How to Automate Your After Call Works and Boost Productivity

Remember the good old days of the early 2000s, an era before CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software and automation were the key drivers for business growth.  

Everything in business operations and for maintaining customer relationship was manual and hence more time-consuming during those times. 

For example, while having a telephone meeting, sales reps had to fanatically take notes, and thereafter complete a lot of after call works to create a record for that call and even manually complete any follow-up tasks. 

These after call works included organizing your notes, saving the notes, preparing and sending follow-up emails, checking off the business calendar with any follow-up meetings, and more. 

Now the time spent on these above-stated activities involved a huge drain on your employee’s productivity, which even Forbes confirms by stating:

"Online systems save time, energy, resources and headaches for busy call-center representatives, allowing them to reach higher levels of productivity and efficiency. Over time, this often translates to better employee retention and enhanced profitability for the organization as a whole.”

It was not until the middle of the 2000s that the sales and marketing automation industry started taking shape, which could automate much of that after call works. 

In modern times, we have access to tools that can automate nearly most tasks involved in post-call administrative jobs.

Therefore, if you are not leveraging post-call automation to streamline your after call works; this article will guide you on how you can generate the most value out of sales and marketing automation tools. 

What is post-call automation?

Odds are you must be using a CRM like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM if you are a startup or a small business. 

Most companies nowadays are moving to an all-in-one CRM solution, because in addition to providing traditional CRM capabilities, all-in-one CRM software also includes built-in sales, marketing, and help-desk automation modules for their businesses.

That means once you use an all-in-one CRM you get loads of extra features and therefore do not need to invest in multiple silo software systems to accomplish various business functions required for your business growth, which even include post-call automation features that streamline your post-call tasks. 

Here are a few of the most important things you can do with post call automation tools:

Track call histories

When you are calling your leads, prospects, or customers using and telephony integrated easy to use CRM, you simply need to navigate to a person’s contact record in the CRM database and click on “Call”. 

After which the CRM system automatically dials the number and once the call ends it automatically attaches the call history for the contact. 

Therefore using this automation whenever you want to check the last time you spoke to the person, a complete list of all calls ever made to that person appears in the list with call records that include the date, time and even duration of those calls. 

Log call notes

Because you are working with your easy to use CRM, the system allows you to take notes on the screen while you are on the call. 

These notes can include requests for information, tasks that you need to complete, important needs of prospects, pain-points of your customers and more. 

Now using automation integrated into easy to use CRM , when you complete the calls, all these notes are automatically tied to the call record in that contact’s call history, which can easily remind you the key takeaways you took notes during the conversation. 

This way automation helps you to never misplace or forget any important information from the calls.  

Schedule meetings, tasks, and automated reminders

Once you finish your calls and your prospect or customer agrees to a follow-up meeting, easy to use CRM when integrated with automation functionalities lets the user enter time and date of that meeting and allows the system to automatically add it to the CRM calendar, and thereafter schedule an automatic reminder that will be sent to you at a specific time before the meeting.  

Using automation in a CRM, you can even opt to send an automatic confirmation email to the other party involved before the meeting which can be sent a day before the meeting, or any time you want. 

Attach call recordings

Another useful feature which is included even in most Salesforce Alternative CRM software platforms is automatic call recording, whereby the easy to use CRM will record the entire conversation, which is particularly useful for finding important key points of the conversation that you might have forgotten or missed as these recordings are automatically attached to the call record in your call history list. 

Doing this not only helps to reduce any conflicts that might arise between you and your customers, but also aids in creating a better customer experience for the users of your brand. 

Conclusion

These days’ smart business owners have realized that the more process they can automate, the higher their productivity levels will be. 

Hence if you are still using manual and traditional methods to manage your after call works, we recommend that you must right away look into implementing an easy to use CRM for your business with built-in post call automation tools, as there are several affordable Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions available today which will be worth far more than the cost of the system for finding rapid revenue and business growth. 

How to Re-Engage Your Alternative Financing Customers Using MCA CRM Software

Be it Merchant Cash Advance or any other business, customer retention is as critical for a company like customer satisfaction, if not more.
Therefore, to put things in the right perspective, it has been found in a research conducted by Harvard Business School, that increase in customer retention rate by just 5 percent can boost profits by 25-95 percent.

However, to retain a customer for a prolonged period of time does not just happen on its own. This is because; to retain customers it needs periodic re-engagement with the customers to remain on top of their mind.

Now that we have established the fact that your MCA business needs to retain its customers for long term success of your company, let us take a look at some of the ways you can keep your customers engaged to increase the chance of retaining them:

So how do you improve your customer retention plans?

1. Personalization Is Key

Although it might not be practical to compose a separate message for every single customer but segregating customers into groups using MCA CRM software (based on history, location, loan preference, business size, etc.) and thereafter sending group-specific messages can also go a long way in establishing an emotional connection with your customers.

Merchant Cash Advance CRM software systems make it easier for MCA businesses to not only retain important information about each customer in the CRM database , but it even allows businesses to send their customer personalized messages and emails based on that information.

2. Add rewards

One of the very first questions that pop in our mind when someone asks us to do a favor is: “What is in it for me”?

Even though attending to a small feedback-form most often takes nothing more than just a couple of minutes, most customers do not bother to write a review, or fill out customer feedback forms unless they get something in return.

Hence a great way to guarantee reviews or feedbacks from your existing MCA customers is by paring your request with a reward.

In fact, offering rewards to customers for their reviews and feedbacks helps in two ways:

• Primarily, customers feel more connected with your Alternative Financing business since once they are assured of the reward they feel it necessary to spend a few moments to think about your services and thereafter write the review.
• Secondly, the customer will return to your business once you make necessary changes in your workflow based on their suggestions, which shows your care and encourage a sense of responsibility towards your customers.

3. Great service assures higher chances of retention

The greater your service is to your customers the very first time, the higher are your chances of retaining your customers over time.

This is because when it comes to service, as always quality is a factor that beats speed.

This statement can be substantiated by the statistics that more than 86 percent of customers in any business are willing to pay more if that guarantees an enhanced customer experience, as reported by Oracle.

Another aspect that delivers great customer service is making customers feel that they are known by your organization.
Although casual conversation with customers might at times seem unnecessary, however, there are many experts those believe that customers like it when they are shown that they are important and are not rushed for accepting your services.

Choosing the right platform for customer service is also very critical. Since for certain businesses email might be still the acceptable means for communication, while for others, live chat may be an absolute necessity to conduct their business.

4. Share customer feedback on social media

Sharing contents that are engaging on social media networking websites play an important role in improves the chances of customer retention for your Cash Advance business.

Additionally, sharing reviews of the existing customers on social media networking websites have also proved to be a powerful tool for the purpose of engagement as customers find it more credible when hearing from people who have actually used your MCA service.

5. Schedule your interactions with your customers

You are most likely to make your follow-ups with your customers and if you have a schedule monitoring tool like Merchant Cash Advance software that allows you to set up follow-up emails and calls.

As a matter of fact, Merchant Cash Advance CRM software that comes with integrated appointment scheduling tools can go a long way in making sure that you meet the expectations of your customers.

Conclusion 

Therefore an MCA CRM solution not only makes life easier for Cash Advance businesses who are trying to enhance the CRR (Customer Retention Rate) of their firms, but it also helps in improving overall Customer Experience (CX) by providing valuable insights about the customers at a periodic interval for rapid business growth .