Today, we can hardly find a successful e-commerce business without a CRM system in its tech stack for organizing and easily accessing customer data and, ultimately, delivering a better and more personalized customer experience.
However, as your business grows, the amount of data also increases — sometimes exponentially. Thus, your team has to spend more time just keeping customer data visible and accessible instead of doing more business-focused tasks; as a result, your company may miss potential business opportunities and, consequently, profits.
Fortunately, innovative technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) can help teams overcome this challenge. With CRM for e-commerce, in particular, RPA can be integrated into it to automate the input of customer quotes, order tracking and many other details. This way, it’s possible to free up time for sales, marketing and customer support specialists and improve those teams' overall efficiency.
Below, we give a few more reasons why e-commerce companies should consider implementing RPA into their CRM, along with tips on how to make the adoption process smooth and cost-effective.
How can your e-commerce CRM benefit from RPA?
Enhanced employee productivity
By RPA, we typically mean software robots programmed to carry out repetitive and time-consuming tasks usually performed by human workers. For instance, enterprises can integrate RPA and CRM to automate data extraction, data manipulation and lead management, resulting in decreased workload and enhanced productivity.
For instance, you can deploy a bot that would look through your designated information storages and automatically discover leads’ contacts and details. Then, the bot can input this information in a structured data file and upload it into your CRM. If necessary, the bot can notify team members that the procedure is over; then, all they have to do is start nurturing these leads.
Improved accuracy and data quality
In general, the fact that data is collected and processed by bots eliminates the human factor and reduces error risks. After all, bots don’t get tired, so even after completing the same task for the thousandth time, they do it as well as before – of course, if appropriately configured. Such accuracy is one of the reasons why RPA is popular in such spheres as finance, where teams can safely delegate financial reporting and other data-heavy tasks to bots.
Moreover, bots can gather accurate data from multiple sources simultaneously and then upload it to a CRM system. Thus, the company can get a more adequate and complete picture of its customer base and market reality, so that team members can make more intelligent business decisions — for example, when planning marketing campaigns.
Advanced scalability and flexibility
By itself, RPA technology is very scalable; if needed, teams can deploy more bots to cope with the growing workload and data volumes. Therefore, after adding RPA to your CRM capabilities, you will be able to scale by integrating bots into other elements of your business ecosystem.
Despite all the advantages described above, you should still understand that adopting such technologies as RPA may be disruptive, therefore it may be hard to predict the effect of such a transformation, especially on employees. Still, you can mitigate risks if you take the right approach to RPA adoption.
How should you approach CRM-RPA integration?
Your approach to RPA adoption can vary depending on your existing infrastructure and strategic needs. For instance, you can build a bot using one of the popular RPA platforms and then plug it into your corporate software systems. However, you should first carry out a preparatory analysis of the processes to see if the technology is viable in your particular case and define the best ways to go about RPA.
In particular, it’s necessary to audit existing workflows to determine which CRM-specific activities you can automate. For example, if your team members note that they spend a lot of time updating records or sending follow-ups, this may be a potential use case for RPA.
After you’ve identified the key workflows and assessed RPA applicability, you may start planning for the long term. For instance, you may determine how RPA will work with business systems other than the CRM and how you can help your team embrace RPA-driven processes better. Finally, using all of the above information, you’ll be able to build a clear RPA adoption strategy.
Final thoughts
Customer data management is critical to e-commerce businesses, so none can evolve and succeed without some sort of CRM system in place. While such solutions enable teams to manage customer information, they still have to spend much of their time manually collecting and organizing customer data. This is where RPA may come in handy. By integrating RPA into their CRMs, e-commerce companies can not only improve employee productivity but also improve data quality and reduce the chance of error – all leading to improved customer relationships.
Roman Davydov is a content manager at software development company Itransition.
