Finding ways to increase efficiency and save more dollars per hour spent are two main challenges that business faces every day. You can’t lead a successful business without making profits. Controlling your expenses, including time commitments, is an important part of building a financially healthy company. The process of finding ways to save time and speed up work is called business automation and, apparently, with the advent of technology, business automation has taken the world by storm.

There are thousands of methodologies and tools that can help you do things faster and smarter. Yet, while many businesses figured out how to automate workload-heavy processes, they often omit minor improvements, that when combined, can greatly improve your efficiency. In this article, we’re going to explore all the little ways to automate your business with the help of CRM. You might think that you have fully automated your business, but here are some things that can make your work life even better:

1. Appointment reminders

Trying to provide perfect customer experience and at the same time maximize your profits? Appointment reminders are texts and emails sent to customers who booked an appointment with you or one of your team members. Appointment reminders help clients remember the scheduled time and date, and they also help your business avoid downtime.

Appointment reminders are especially useful for service-based businesses such as clinics, hair salons, and dog groomers. With appointment reminders, customers will appreciate an added level of personal attention, while you can be sure that every hour is paid for. For some types of businesses, that experience huge losses from missed appointments, appointment reminders can become an indispensable part of a work process. When you automate appointment reminders in CRM, your customers are notified of their planned appointments without any input on your part. You can focus on what you do best, while the CRM helps your customers get to the right place at the right time.

2. Call-back requests

Another thing that you can automate is call-back requests. When the customer is feeling lazy to contact you or fill out the contact form, you can simply ask them to request a call-back. This is an easy and quick way to win a potential lead and it also saves time for the customer. Call back requests go directly to the manager in charge instead of sitting in the company’s shared inbox, so you don’t lose the valuable time and can catch the lead while the interest is still there.

It takes only a few minutes to set up a call-back request feature on your site. No technical skill is required. Call-back requests make customers feel cared for, as they create an impression that you will always be there for your customers.

3. Recurring Invoices

If you have a retainer contract or repeating jobs, you can set your CRM to issue automatic recurring invoices. Recurring invoices save time and ensure you always have the money in the bank. As more and more people are opening solo-businesses, recurring invoices become an essential part of an entrepreneur's arsenal.

With recurring invoices, you don’t have to spend time creating duplicate invoices and filling out the same information over and over again. Moreover, recurring invoices allow you to free some mental power - once recurring invoices are set, you can forget about that part of client management and direct your focus to all the things you actually value in work. Recurring invoices also help you ensure an hour worked is an hour paid for - you’ll never forget to send an invoice again.

4. Client reactivation

Sometimes we think that the opportunity was lost when in fact it could have been regained. Client reactivation is the practice of reengaging your past or inactive clients. Have clients made a purchase once but aren’t coming back for more? Or maybe you have a new product offer that you think might interest existing active clients?

The idea of remarketing lies on the premise that familiar things are easier accepted by the human brain compared to completely new things. So, if the client already contacted or bought from you once, they might not remember it but the mind unconsciously stores that information, and next time you contact that customer, they will inadvertently feel more sympathetic towards your brand. With Bitrix24, you can segment your customers and then re-engage them with an email sequence. Alternatively, you can connect your Google Adwords and Facebook Ads accounts to your CRM and show remarketing ads to the chosen customer groups.

5. Recurring tasks

When your team is working towards a shared goal, it’s important to be on the same page. If your team members constantly miss their deadlines, making you look bad and jeopardizing the fate of the whole project, you either need to be a better project manager or get a tool that will do the project management for you. Recurring tasks feature in Bitrix24 allows you to automate the process of task creation. Simply create a task, activate the repeat option, set the repeat task frequency, assign the task to a responsible user, and you’re good to go.

Recurring tasks eliminate the need to follow up and remind people about tasks that occur on a regular basis. Such things as payroll management and paying tax charges involve other team members and have to be done every month. When it comes to such projects and tasks, recurring task feature can partially take the burden of project management off your shoulders.

Final Word

Automation is all about eliminating complex, redundant steps in the business workflow and making them simpler. It might be done manually when you strategically determine which steps can be removed or ignored, but it can also be done with the help of technology.

However, getting the most out of technology is also a challenging task. Your CRM offers so many different ways to automate your business, that it’s easy to get lost and confused in the abundance of features. In such a situation it’s important to always inquire further about CRM automation features and then experiment and learn. Hopefully, this article has given you some tips on how to utilize automation features in Bitrix24 to a full extent.

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