Creating and maintaining great customer experience is harder than ever in the digital era. With consumer giants like Amazon and Apple consistently providing best-of-breed customer service, expectations are raised for all organizations.
Meanwhile, social media platforms allow customers to freely voice their feelings about a brand, so organizations must work harder to ensure they respond to both negative and positive feedback. They have to go above and beyond expectations if they want to attract new customers and maintain existing ones.
Nowhere is the pressure to achieve a great customer experience stronger than in sales and marketing departments, where success is directly linked to brand recognition, new leads, and customer acquisition and retention. With process automation, some of this pressure can be alleviated.
From a good-to-great customer experience
Automation is a modern solution for the adage, “Work smarter, not harder.” One survey found that enterprise workers spend less than half their time on their primary job duties. The rest of their time is spent on email, administrative tasks, in meetings, or on interruptions for non-essential tasks.
Automated marketing and sales processes can remove the tedious parts of many tasks, allowing employees to spend more time nurturing prospects. Sales and marketing departments that embrace automation have seen up to a 451% increase in leads.
Several sales and marketing processes can be expedited through automation. Here are some that can have the most immediate impact on worker productivity and business efficiency, which ultimately translate to a great experience for the customer.
Marketing processes
- Customer communications: A great customer experience relies on the business being able to efficiently and effectively talk to its customers. Automation can take care of low-priority yet time-consuming conversations with customers, freeing up employees to focus on providing customer experiences of higher value.
- Chatbots: Bots can handle more than 75% of customer interactions, including automated responses to frequently asked questions. Programming chatbots to answer customer questions instantly or send them to the relevant employee or resource can greatly reduce the amount of time employees spend on customer support.
- Trigger-based messages: Set up automated communications like emails or texts for order confirmation or estimated delivery times; create dynamic messages based on customer activities on your site, and send re-engagement messages to customers who haven’t opened an email or who abandoned a purchase.
- Product launches: From campaign drafts to final review and approval, marketers want as little back-and-forth as possible to give product launches the attention they need. Rather than planning new product releases through email and meetings, automated workflows can track, schedule, and manage tasks, keeping everyone informed and updated. With improved communication and consistent messaging, employees can ensure the customer knows everything there is to know about new products, which leads to increased interest.
Find out how New Belgium Brewing Co. made this happen
- Brand awareness: Consistency is key when maintaining your brand image across multiple platforms and mediums — from your website to social media to print. Automated workflows help employees and partners access, update, and distribute brand elements for use in different contexts in record time.
Find out how a European oil company saved $20,000 per year in printing costs
Sales processes
- Generate contracts: Sales teams race to draft new contracts or change existing ones quickly, while complying with regulations and policies. Automating contract-centric processes creates real advantage, improving how quickly information is shared among employees and systems and helping to maintain information accuracy. Automation allows sales teams to hand new contracts over to the customer efficiently and accurately, starting new relationships off on the right foot.
Find out more on sales contract management
- Boost conversions: Your CRM system is a vital tool for sales success. Automated workflows use document generation and audit trails to streamline creation and retrieval of sales documents. Document generation enables employees to pre-populate documents and contracts with relevant information and route them to the right place to close deals sooner. With an audit trail, any interaction — from review to approval to sign-off — can be accessed at any time.
Find out more on why you should automate the sales process
- Client onboarding: Onboarding a new client is as important as onboarding a new employee. Automate workflows and populate the forms involved in background checks, initial deposits, and welcome information. Ensure documents are handled securely and paperwork is minimized to make the process as smooth as possible.
- Contract review, approval, and sign-off: Simplify and speed up any sales process that requires approval or signature through e-signature. eSignature lets customers and clients sign off on documents without requiring a written signature, allowing document processes to be completed much faster. This is a real advantage for sales teams looking to improve their speed of service.
Find out how Nintex eSign makes this happen!
Help your employees help your customers
The Nintex Platform helps employees in every department and organizations in every industry improve their business processes and provide a great customer experience.
Get a demo of the Nintex Process Platform to find out how you can better the customer experience you provide, by improving the processes that happen inside your organization.
