Maintaining an accurate database of customer information is the key to great customer relationships. That’s why businesses rely on customer relationship management (CRM) systems, like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Siebel or Oracle. Whether your CRM is on-premises or in the cloud, robotic process automation (RPA) software can automatically keep your CRM maintained with the most up-to-date, accurate information. RPA takes the repetitive tasks of maintaining your CRM and automates them to trigger, run, and error-check against critical business applications, like an ERP, on a hands-free basis. Saving you time that can be better spent getting new customers or supporting existing ones.
In this on-demand webinar, we cover:
- The importance of keeping the information in your CRM up to date by syncing with your other business applications
- How an RPA solution can maximize the power of your CRM
- A demonstration of how Automate can integrate with your CRM and other business applications
Watch as Pat Cameron, Director of Automation Technology, and automation expert Richard Schoen share how you can use RPA to power your CRM with the most up-to-date data from your critical business applications. Discover how the power of RPA can help you eliminate manual tasks and time spent updating your customer database, so you’re free to spend more time attracting and supporting customers by delivering excellent service.
Why Integrate and Automate CRM?
Businesses rely on a large variety of critical business applications for their day-to-day functions. With all these disconnected systems, it is crucial to provide a central source for information. CRM systems provide this benefit, but that makes it all the more critical to get the most accurate information into your CRM. If each of your salespeople kept track of everything in a spreadsheet and only reported in once a month, you would lose visibility to their potential customer base and lose the ability to track where opportunities are in the pipeline.
Don’t let your precious customer data get stuck in silos within your various business applications or with different users. Integrating applications and updating your CRM with automation brings everything together into one place.
CRM Automation Use Cases
One of the best reasons to apply CRM automation is to help provide more efficient customer service. Help your customer service center keep track of everything that’s happening in one place. Most often, companies will have their sales and order information in their ERP system, but not in the CRM. You can automate this process and have the ERP system send records to your CRM to trigger a thank you email or a notice to a sales person to follow up with the customer. Automated communications between disparate systems can up your customer service game by automatically keeping everyone in the loop throughout the customer lifecycle.
Automation makes case management, like customer ticket tracking, easy and seamless in your CRM. For example, you can automate the input of customer quotes, order tracking, shipment tracking, and more into your CRM. This automation frees up your customer service agents, so they don’t have to spend time hunting down and inputting data from system to system. You can also easily automate contract management. Track your documents and contract expiration dates to set up a time-based trigger to kick off a process that notifies vendors or customers of renewals.
RPA Integration Methods
There are many points of entry for integrating RPA software with your CRM. Three of the most common options are below, but your organization and processes will determine the best approach for automation.
- Using an API or web service is the most efficient and easiest way to connect your systems. Most CRMs, like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, have this option.
- Integrating directly with your database isn’t as efficient of a method as using an API, but it can work, especially with on-premises systems when you know you can safely interact with the database.
- User interface automation works when there are no APIs and you want to extract information from a Windows desktop or web browser to save time on data entry.
Automate’s CRM-Friendly Features
Automate, the RPA software from Fortra, is used to automate the creation, running, and management of tasks and workflows without writing any code. Automate provides over 600 prebuilt automation building blocks for many common use cases. Automate also features triggers that allow tasks to kick off from different time and event-based triggers.
If you have a workflow process you’re looking to automate right away, you can download our free trial and our team can help you get started working towards automating your most repetitive, manual tasks.
