CRM Automation: Definition, Benefits, and Examples

Your teams need to focus on the important stuff — generating leads, closing sales, and solving customer issues — but too often they’re weighed down by repetitive manual tasks. Take sales: During an average week, reps spend only 30% of their time selling. So what else are they doing? Things like entering customer and sales data, prioritizing leads, and generating quotes — all important tasks, but also time-consuming ones.

The good news is CRM automation can help lighten teams’ loads. When your customer relationship management (CRM) software includes integrated automations, you can streamline and sometimes eliminate manual processes, helping your marketing, sales, and customer service teams become more efficient and productive. Add artificial intelligence (AI) to the mix, and you can really pump up their productivity. Let’s look at how CRM automation can help your business succeed.

What we’ll cover

• What is CRM automation?
• What are the benefits of CRM automation?
• What are the features of CRM automation?
• How CRM automation helps businesses
• Improve your business with CRM automation

CRM automation is the process of streamlining essential but repetitive manual tasks in marketing, sales, and customer service operations. Tasks that are ripe for automated workflows include creating contacts, scheduling meetings, creating appointment reminders, sending emails, creating sales quotes, and arranging service calls.

If you take it a step further and use a CRM that’s powered by predictive and generative AI, you can automate more complex processes, as well as analyze data and create forecasts.

Here are the top ways CRM automation can improve your business.

CRM automation makes your teams more effective and productive, freeing them up to focus on more high-value work.

• Streamline campaign workflows. Keep campaigns running continuously and on time by using automation to schedule ads, send emails, and manage social media posts.
• Automate A/B testing. Use CRM automation to test campaign elements like ad treatments, landing pages, and email designs. Let your marketing AI crunch the numbers on your performance data, and then use the results to execute and optimize your campaign with confidence.
• Automate lead scoring. AI can analyze lead data, behavior, and engagement history, and assign a score to each lead based on how likely they are to convert. This helps you zero in on the most promising leads and nurture them.

• Create and manage contacts. Automatically capture emails, events, and other types of engagement activities directly in your CRM. Automation can alert sales reps when a meeting is requested or a competitor is mentioned online, or flag high-priority emails in a seller’s inbox.
• Monitor and prioritize leads. AI for sales can highlight the leads most likely to convert, and recommend a follow-up action based on what’s worked before with that customer, or with similar customers. It can also identify at-risk leads and suggest the best way to close the deal.
• Accelerate deals and improve decision-making. AI ensures accuracy in products and pricing across all customer touchpoints, and helps you respond quickly to market conditions with new products, bundles, and promotions.

• Resolve routine requests. AI-powered chatbots that are integrated into your CRM can help customers solve simple requests so agents can work on more complex cases.
• Resolve cases with a single agent. Customer service AI can automatically route cases to the agent best suited for the issue, and recommend relevant replies, articles, or next steps. It can also understand and take action on a customer’s request instead of relying on preprogrammed scenarios.
• Improve customer interactions. Generate replies, answer product questions, create knowledge articles, and summarize a case after it’s closed with AI automation.

Nearly half of sellers say longer sales cycles are among their top challenges. CRM automation can help shorten sales cycles by automating administrative work, and by using predictive AI and generative CRM to research competitors, score leads, and create more accurate sales forecasts. This means your marketing and sales teams can spend more time and energy nurturing relationships and closing deals.

CRM automation might also help you retain talent: Nearly a quarter of sales pros who are thinking of leaving their current job cite overly complex sales cycles as a reason for their discontent.

For service teams, self-service tools like AI chatbots help boost customer experience by quickly identifying and addressing simple issues. Self-service works for customers, too: More than 60% of them prefer to use it to solve basic problems.

Self-service tools, as well as automated service responses and AI-generated offers and recommendations, free up reps to do their best work: handle more complicated cases, support a wider range of products, and, perhaps most importantly, build customer relationships. Customers still want to know there’s a human on the other end, and service agents, who also act as your brand ambassadors, have more time to make and build those connections.

There are many CRM features that can help your business become more productive and efficient. When looking for a CRM with automation capabilities, be sure these are included.

CRM automation lets you create workflows to keep your customer profiles up to date across marketing, sales, and service, so teams can use the latest insights to make informed decisions.

CRM software can automatically alert team members when certain actions have been taken, such as when a new contact has been created, a meeting has been requested, or a service case has been closed.

The benefits of CRM automation don’t just make it easier to communicate with customers. CRMs also help you better communicate internally. That’s because AI lets you automate complex multi-user processes into streamlined workflows. And communication platforms that fully integrate with your other apps allow you to collaborate in a shared workspace, automate processes without coding, and generate workflows via conversational AI.

CRM automation can help identify, track, and score leads, and create a personalized to-do list for a seller. It can also continually monitor the overall health of each opportunity to help sales teams stay focused.

Let’s look at some ways that companies are making the most of CRM automation right now.

Delivering the right message at the right time is a standard marketing goal, and insurance brokerage firm Holmes Murphy is using CRM automation to nail it. The marketing team uses AI to analyze prospect behavior to create smarter and more personalized marketing campaigns. For example, AI can analyze email or push notification engagement data for each contact and predict when they’re most likely to engage, so you can schedule smarter send times.

In addition, the company used AI to streamline its renewal process and flag at-risk accounts, giving teams more time to focus on retaining clients. The result: It saved about 44,000 hours and $6.9 million.

A new school year means new textbooks for students — and an onslaught of service requests for book publisher Wiley, which hires extra customer service reps to handle the back-to-school crush. Now, AI-powered chatbots are pitching in, helping customers resolve common issues and reducing the number of seasonal agents needed. Reps can close cases faster since generative AI drafts accurate responses to customer queries, and temporary agents can be onboarded twice as fast, saving $230,000 a year. When a case is complete, AI creates a call summary, which Wiley can use to spot trends, provide product feedback, and deliver better customer experiences.

Financial advisors at RBC Wealth Management used to set aside three to four hours to prepare for new client meetings — that’s how much time they needed to pull customer information from up to 26 disparate systems. Now, with one CRM system that integrates with their third-party legacy systems, they have a single view of each customer, and can get timely AI-driven insights and recommended actions for each one. For example, AI can create an alert if a priority client is overdue for a call, and then an automated workflow can quickly set up a meeting. This helps advisors spend less time on admin work and more time building their business.

RBC also uses Slack, an integrated productivity platform, to streamline internal collaboration. The operations team uses it to work together to solve tricky service issues, and advisors use it for conversations relevant to their work, such as planning and retirement goals.

CRM automation lets you streamline necessary but repetitive manual tasks in marketing, sales, and customer service, giving your teams more time to focus on high-value work. By using AI to lighten their loads, you’ll create more effective and successful teams.

Missy Roback is an award-winning writer and editor with deep experience in journalism and marketing. She’s also a published fiction writer, a singer-songwriter, a vintage fanatic, and a devoted cat lady.