Introduction

CRM automation is a predominant technology trend that almost all businesses are adopting at present. From obviating manual data entry to automating repetitive tasks to streamlining sales processes, the advantages of CRM automation are plenty.

Vtiger CRM with its automation features, offers many benefits to marketing, sales, and support teams, helping them become more efficient and productive.

Read on to learn about the automation features that Vtiger CRM provides to each customer-facing team.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation in Vtiger CRM includes features for generating leads and sending marketing campaigns. Let us look at the features one by one.

• Webforms: These are online forms that you can display on your websites. Companies usually use webforms to capture leads’ information. When a visitor submits a webform, Vtiger CRM automatically captures their details into a lead record. This also helps you avoid manual data entry. 

So, how does it work? Simple- create a webform on the CRM, copy its code, and embed it into your website’s source code. Apart from leads, you can create the following records using webforms -

• Organizations
• Vendors 
• Deals
• Projects
• Project Milestones
• Cases
• Internal Tickets

• Email Campaigns: When you want to send emails to your contacts in bulk, you can use the Email Campaigns feature. It is apt for sending marketing emails such as promotions and offers. You can also set up autoresponders for contact replies. Autoresponders are automatically sent depending on the conditions you set up.

• SMS Campaigns and Reply Actions: SMS Campaigns are similar to email campaigns, only sent to a contact’s phone number. They have a larger open rate than email campaigns. You can also set up reply actions for situations where a contact replies to an SMS message with SMS Reply Actions.

Sales Automation

Many features in Vtiger CRM help sales teams across different tasks such as meeting a client, getting a quote approved, and so on.

• Appointment Pages: The advantage of using appointment pages is that you do not have to send back-and-forth emails to schedule a meeting. You get a ready-made schedule of your workday, week, or month and share it with your leads and customers. They will pick a free slot from your schedule to meet you. Slots that are already books are not shown on an appointment page. 

• Approvals: Whether you want to send a quote for your manager’s approval or need the approval to hire a new member in your sales team, Approvals does it for you. Managers must configure the following to use the Approvals module successfully.
  • Approval conditions - on what basis or under which situations should records be sent for approval.
  • Your managers - who do you report to or who must approve your requests.

• Journey Templates: A journey template is the sequence of tasks a sales representative must perform to close a deal. It is automatically generated when you create a sales pipeline in the CRM and are mapped to the pipeline. All you must do is add journey tasks to it based on your sales process. 

Vtiger CRM shows journey tasks on a deal along with a progress bar indicating the percentage of progress in a deal’s journey. The bar moves forward every time a sales rep completes a journey task. 

• Sales Insights: Vtiger CRM automatically generates reports about funnel progression, a sales rep’s activities, closed deals, etc., in the Sales Insights module. The reports give you insights into a deal’s progress, your company's sales, and your sales team’s performance. This eliminates the need for sales managers to call for frequent meetings to get updates. 

• AI-Guided Selling: Vtiger’s AI engine, Calculus, helps sales reps close more deals through predictions and recommendations. Calculus also helps sales managers become coaches by automatically analyzing calls and emails, and flagging them for review to facilitate proactive coaching. 

Help Desk Automation

If you belong to a customer service team, then you can automate the creation of cases, answer customer queries automatically, and get a ready-made report of your team’s performance. Read on to learn how. 

• Customer Portal: The Customer Portal is a one-stop point for your customers to get all the updates about their cases and other records. Wondering how it automates your tasks? 

Customers' need to contact you with their query reduces because all the relevant information is available on the portal. Customers can also submit cases and queries from the portal, which automatically creates a case record in the CRM.

• Help Desk Insights: Charts and graphs under Help Desk Insights are automatically produced by Vtiger CRM. They show information related to cases and a customer service team’s performance related to cases. Some details that Help Desk Insights provides are -
  • Average first response to cases
  • Number of unresolved cases
  • Number of violated cases
  • Number cases grouped by the channel they are generated from

• Internal Ticket Insights: Internal tickets in Vtiger CRM allow your company's employees to quickly raise their issues and requests. The performance of the internal support team that serves your employees is recorded in Internal Ticket Insights in the form of charts and graphs. Vtiger CRM collects data from your CRM records to generate these insights automatically. 

• Live Chat and Chat Insights: You can offload FAQ to the Live Chat widget that you can obtain by installing the Vtiger Live Chat extension. When customers enter keywords, FAQs are auto-populated on the widget.

Moreover, customers can reach out to your customer service representatives using Live Chat. Vtiger CRM records details such as the first response time, chat rating, duration, missed conversations, etc., from customer conversations. It then used this information to automatically generate Chat Insights, allowing customer service managers to gauge their team’s performance and work towards improvement.

• Mailroom: Bring complaints or queries that customers write to your customer service email address into Vtiger CRM by setting up -
  • Mailroom rules in Vtiger CRM
  • Auto-forwarding in your email service 

Auto-forwarding redirects your emails to the CRM using your mailroom address. Mailroom scans the forwarded emails and automatically creates a case record based on the rules you set up.

Other Automation Tools

Apart from marketing, sales, and help desk-specific features, Vtiger CRM also offers a plethora of automation tools that can be used across teams. We have listed them below.

• Actions: This is a one-stop destination for all your notifications, alerts, and reminders. Actions acts as a personal assistant who remembers all the dates and deadlines for you. You can get automated notifications related to your events, tasks, deals, and almost anything on the CRM. You can also configure custom alerts and let Actions take care of reminding you about your essential tasks.

• Assignment Rules: When there is a new deal to pursue or a new case to work on, you must assign it to a sales or support rep. Use assignment rules to assign records automatically. You can opt for one of the assignment modes below.  
  • Round Robin - Records are assigned in a round-robin fashion. The first saved record is assigned to the first selected member, the second record to the second member, and so on. 
  • Least Loaded - In this method, records are assigned to a team member having the least number of open records.

• Calculus: Calculus is an AI-powered tool that offers predictions and recommendations for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service teams. Calculus improves conversations with customers leading to higher conversion and happier customers. 

• Workflows: Workflows are one of Vtiger CRM’s main automation features. A workflow has three components - Trigger, Condition, and Action. When a workflow is triggered, and conditions are met, the actions are automatically executed. 

Using workflows, you can,

• Send emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages to your contacts, co-workers, etc.
• Create events, tasks, and other records.
• Update CRM field values to a new value.
• Generate push notifications on CRM users’ mobile phones with the mobile app.
• Invoke custom functions.

• Syncing from external applications: Bring all the relevant information on your third-party apps into Vtiger CRM with the click of a button. You can sync data between CRM modules and other applications such as Tally, Office 365, QuickBooks in real-time. This helps you maintain a single record of all the information related to your business.