Sales process automation tools for customer service

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hello my name is Jeff Richards and I'm the head of training program development for sage CRM and I am delighted to be joining you uh on this uh conference with bass and thank you very much uh to the guys for B for inviting me and uh I hope everyone is enjoying the sessions so far um I've got a session for you now uh which is going to be covering and for the next 25 minutes or so looking at uh business process automation uh within Sage CRM so I'm going to switch over to my slide deck now uh and see how we can get through it so there'll be a slight change as as I switch over well that seems to have worked a little bit better than I was expecting uh We've started the presentation and that's good so this then uh with Bas connect uh this is the Sage CRM tools for business process automation now sagecrm can be configured to execute recurring tasks or processes so that a business can remove the need to do these manually the business process automation features of sagecrm allow a business to minimize costs increase efficiency and streamline processes so join us as we walk you through the tools at your disposal well that then is the idea so we're going to be us using ccrm business process features uh here automation features and this is certainly true that um I hope to talk about how we can minimize costs increase efficiency and streamline processes but I I'd actually go further than that and say that when s strm is used within a full organization customer relationship management approach you can expect not only increased productivity but there'd be reduced errors within the workflow uh within the the tasks being processed uh especially there would also be reduced time in task execution you can expect improvements and internal communication and also there would be reduced operating costs as well but this isn't a Magic Bullet to um associated with business process automation CRM needs to uh really have the whole of the organization whole of the business a aligned in support of these goals and and I want to start with really a a thinking uh exercise and if you're going to be effective in taking advantage of the business automation features then actually the first thing as an you as an organization needs to do is to have a long and hard reflective uh think about the behavior that each of your front office teams um actually performs um even before we think about making changes in uh CRM the starting point is to look at whether all of your team members know the best way of doing their job uh what are the habits that your most successful salespeople demonstrate that your least successful salespeople do not and there are some questions that we can ask ourselves so um here's a question why does some Market ERS manage to make their call Target comfortably when some struggle to meet their quota uh there's another question that we can ask why can there be such a difference excuse me why can there be such a difference in how many cases can be resolved by One support rep over another you know once we know the behaviors that explain the difference uh in internal productivity within your teams then you can do two things the first that you can train people to follow the most effective Behavior once you know what that behavior is and the second and this is where business process automation comes in the second is that you can actually capture that behavior within the processes of sage CRM so that everyone follows the same best practice and we can do this by using workflow we can use workflow to allow us to implement a strong sales process for all aspects of the sales cycle that would catch mistakes um provide shortcuts uh or would actually um uh actually capture anyone who's trying to skip steps that would otherwise um have been made manually workflow in s CRM can make sure that the sales process is followed consistently uh mistakes detract from efficiency shortcuts uh that that are really designed to convenience the salesperson actually can leave money on the table and fail to maximize the deal value and if the process is drawn from the sales team's own best practice then they're already trained thoroughly then that does provide the advantage that all team members should understand why the workflow is in place and how it will affect the company's bottom line and actually also provide uh an explanation as to why they because it's come from them as best practice should be Keen to have that as the process that which they follow so a concrete example of capturing best practice in a sales process could be to add the requirement that when a sales rep closes a deal that they ask the customer for referrals um you can you can actually um ensure that the sales reps ask is there anyone else in your your personal or Professional Network who would benefit from our Solution customer referrals are of high quality typically and a new customer would do a lot of selling for you so it's an immediate boost um to at the top of the sales funnel now another thing that that can be done uh with business automation um business process automation is is to address the question about how much time salese actually spend selling um you don't want salespeople doing admin you want salese doing selling so salese using the system shouldn't get distracted with low priority activities and confuse paytime activity that that leads to that that actually does lead to sales with no paytime activities and and so no pay activities or administrative action should be automated as much as possible now we've got some examples of this like so there should be never a need for a salesperson to prepare reports as everything should be um visible immediately from a manager's dashboard and pulled from the live system um and actually the dashboard is so important because you can arrange this so that uh if you're thinking from the perspective of a salesperson all of the high priority work should come to the salesperson from from the dashboard all of the key actions within work presses can be carried out and that includes um workflow because dashboards in CCM are not passive they allow direct workflow actions and customer contact actions can be performed directly from with inside the workflow now we do have another thing to think about within CCR because ccrm is a highly integrated and integratable system so we should always take advantage of the natural benefit of working within Integrated Systems when Sage CRM provides the front end to a sage accounting system such as Sage 300 cloud or Sage 100 Cloud then a user would have access to a 360 Dee view of the customer this actually has come from this this screenshot is from a uh UK based um accounting integration but potentially a user can see all aspects of the customer interactions and so if there's an issue with other departments such as accounting operations or technical support no salesperson would find themselves in an ambush situation only by having a complete knowledge of the customer history and current status can um full sales potential being maximized now talking about integration it's it's glib sometimes just to say oh of course we can we can do the work across Integrated Systems there are Integrations available or have been created uh by Sage customers uh for business applications as diverse as human resources system uh integration project management membership management loan management uh different collaboration software document distribution uh time and expense reporting and even root planning so all all provided by partners and um enabled by Professional Services this is all that we can do now these Integrations exist so that a company's requirements uh to grow um can be enabled but also so that they can grow without um adding in unnecessary complexity within uh uh the business uh Solutions so these can simplify and unify user experience from the front end to the back office this is all about bringing the experience and driving it from within the the uh CRM users interface and the sage CRM uh can enable organizational growth by ensuring really a consistent quality of customer experience uh there's the idea that you've got a single place that data is going to be entered so there's a single point of accuracy as well uh needed throughout the business so this idea of business process automation can stretch across systems so I'm going to illustrate this really with some stories let's let's introduce you to somebody I'm going to call her Ellen now Ellen um Works in field sales now she happens to this field sales when we could all visit people um prec covid but here she is she's waiting in reception to meet a customer and she's just sent an email now what she's done is that she sent an email to an automated system managed by CRM to check the status of stock so the email address went to stock panoply tech.com panoply Tech is the uh demo data uh demo company with inside the standard CRM environment and it's monitored by a product or or an element that comes out of the box within CRM called The Mail Manager Advanced Mail Manager now the advanced Mail Manager can be configured to check that the email has come from a registered sagecrm user then it can pause the email looking for keywords it can query the both Sage CRM and the sage accounting system to pull back the necessary information about products that and and the email would have been passed so that that you know what products are being mentioned and then that information can be straight sent straight back to Ellen and and that sort of key information about stock availability and delivery times could be made immediately available to sales reps like Ellen um who can make then appropriate informed recommendations to customers now of course that's that precludes the idea you could have been using an app and and and apps as well so hcrm um uh has uh rest apis that allow you to create the types of apps and things that that you need on uh a phone as well so ccrm allows reps to feel confident that their promises to customers can be met uh and customers to have confidence that the sale will be hassle free as well so here's another another person in uh my fictitional uh Universe of panoply Tech Christina is a sales rep now her team deals with larger Distributors and SRM is configured so that she gets an alert that certain inventory items are currently overstocked in one of the warehouses and that alert can appear on her screen we've got this feature within CRM called notification so she can get that notification shown on her screen now it can also be configured because of the apis internally that the system can already have created a group for her a list of Distributors who are likely to reorder and that group is presented to Christina to allow her to start calling them to offer a discount and that can also um that that ability to work with a list of customers and enter directly um their orders into an accounting system is very much a feature of the integration and she can also add notes and tasks for her colleagues about when a contact should next be made so she's tying in not only for that campaign that she's involved in but also an ongoing um element of account management as well and the same group of contacts that she's identified could also be sent to MailChimp for a mail campaign to support the sales team so you've got all forms of of automatic Behavior supporting this particular sales goal at the heart of a lot of what we're talking about within business process automation for CRM really is workflow so workflow provides a strong template for team Behavior Uh uh using workflow allows you to implement a strong support process for example um for all aspects of after the sales experience so it's not just about sales it's about the full customer experience whether it's complaint management standard service requests or interaction um with the accounting system as part of a returns material authorization process well-designed workflows can catch mistakes prevent sloppy shortcuts it can eliminate skipped steps that would otherwise be possible within a manual process the huge advantage that workflow makes is that it is consistent in uh it never gets bored it doesn't get distracted it takes people down the route of ensuring that uh everyone works effectively and efficiently so um if a support engineer who keeps um ending a call with a customer by telling them to reboot and try again well that sort of behavior can leave a customer with bad taste in their mouth and fail to give that customer the experience that that actually uh will lead to a renewed sale so you can you can actually uh record the steps that have to be taken by the by the support consultant and again it's important that workflow works best when it captures the best practice from within a team so imagine imagine a uh situation imagine where a customer buys a server license and a set of licenses for a particular product now um in the demo company we've within CRM you've got this demo company called panoply Tech so let's pretend there's a product called panoply Tech expense manager the customer has bought a server license and a set of licenses for that 18 months ago and imagine that there's a problem with running on uh Windows after a recent update in they send an email to the support desk the email can be sent to the standard support email account this is another type of use of the advanced Mail Manager the the advanced Mail Manager um although it's not formally part of uh workflow it plays a part in shaping the experience of the customer because you can you here you can see a case has been logged automatically by The Mail Manager into Sage CRM um the email that they sent is logged into the system as well so that the and it's also configured that there's a email sent as an automatic response to the customer acknowledging receipt of that initial email and that type of automated Behavior where the customer is reassured that their case has been received that their email has been received it's been logged and it's been allocated means that it's starting to reassure and manage the customer's expectation and it's possible that you can notify you can assign automatically a case or an issue that comes in automatically to a user and have that user notified that a new case has arrived within the system and it's been assigned to them and you can see here that on their list there's an escalation rule has detected that um and that it also lacks a service uh level agreement and therefore a case a task has been uh allocated because um some work needs to be done before the case can be managed workflow shapes the experience for both the user of the system and the customer and even before uh the support agent contacts the customer they can be reminded to explain to the customer that uh they have upgrade entitlement through their existing contract and all of this can flow into shortening the the chain between the customer and the benefit that they hope to receive because you can use things like self-service as well so delivering a high quality customer experience should be the heart of any workflow uh customers want to know what's happening uh say CRM allows processes to be made absolutely transparent with realtime data being delivered um to here an example a secure customer self-service site and you can show a customer progress towards resolution of an issue or progress towards completing that customer service request made immediately shown immediately on the self-service site and so say hcrm has uh these um web services and uh self-service apis that allow any of your systems to be configured to enable um the customer to be involved in the process uh that that is handling their their concern so they can be invited to submit more details or or even alert the company if the if an issue is resolved without further interaction so any workflow within sagecrm can also be designed to kick off uh further processes you here I'm showing you the types of actions that are available a service workflow for example could allow a representative to uh identify a possible lead and therefore start a new lead process or where a service rep has been helping the customer with an inquiry they might actually be able to directly start a sales process themselves so you can turn every body into a uh a sales user and you can turn or or or part of that sales process and you can turn um everything into a customer service experience as well so I've I've gone through a range of different things now looking at uh workflow was at the heart of of it but we've we've touched on uh self-service we've touched on uh email management as well all of these are um process automation features within Sage CRM that really should allow an organization to minimize costs increase efficiency and streamline processes I when I started work um about a thousand years ago we used to talk about um Computing offering that ability to ensure consistency accurac accuracy and speed uh of uh any of the interactions they're not Magic Bullets your company needs to be fully aligned uh around uh a customer Centric approach to support those goals but there you are you you should have had a good sense of uh what those um Sage CRM business process automation features are we're at the end of our session today so I do hope that was useful to you and please check out the other sessions that we're running uh within Bas connect and uh uh David beard my colleague and I um we look forward to receiving your questions so long for now um I'll see you at the other sessions thank you and uh have we managed to keep it I think we've I think I've actually managed to keep to time thank you