For B2B companies, repeat business constitutes a major part of your cash flow. So, to stay comfortably profitable, you’ll need to invest in maintaining long-term client relationships. Which means delivering the best experiences.
Fortunately, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel – businesses already have a pretty good idea of how to keep clients happy. It includes keeping your promises, making sure deliverables are high-quality and on time, providing exceptional customer support, and creating personalized, connected experiences.
Easier said than done, right?
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But thanks to developments in automation, fulfilling these expectations doesn’t fall solely on your team anymore. Technology is very much here to offer a helping hand. Automating client relationships – in a way that combines the best of technology and human interaction – is helping businesses consistently deliver connected, positive customer experiences.
In this article, we’ll explore the scope for automating client relationships, and we’ll cover some tried-and-tested use cases to get you started.
What can you automate in your client relationships?
If you’re planning to automate your client relationships, it’s important to find a middle-ground between improving efficiency without removing human interaction from key touchpoints.
Clients will still want to interact with someone from your team when they need help with one of your products or services, but you can use automation to, say, route support requests to the right person, or send email reminders to your support team. So you’re essentially leveraging automation in the back-end to remove friction.
This example brings our attention to an important distinction between “inward” and “outward” client relationship automation:
- Inward CR automation includes automating tasks or processes that aren’t client-facing to improve their experience, such as managing timelines, working on projects, and creating performance reports.
- Outward CR automation involves automating client-facing areas and tasks, like notifying clients about a project’s status.
You’ll typically want to prioritise a hybrid strategy for outward automation – one that combines human interaction with technology. For a hybrid strategy to work, though, you’ll need to consider both the customer journey and the way your team works. It’s important to deploy automation where at least one of these conditions is met:
- Automation directly benefits your employee. For example, if an RPA bot automatically updates customer data across different systems, or if it pulls data onto a central screen.
- Your customer directly benefits from automation. For example, automated ticket routing instantly puts customers in touch with the right agent, and automated authentication systems securely validate a customer’s identity.
However, in both cases, it’s important to consider how your customers want to interact with you. If they want to connect with a human agent – like when they need help with a complex query – then it’s important to comply. Otherwise, you risk damaging their experience and, by extension, your business’s relationship with them.
Of course, to create the right experiences through automation, you’ll need technology that facilitates your team without compromising on customer experiences. This may include chatbots, contact center automation tools, robotic process automation, financial automation tools, or dedicated business management solutions.
(P.S. If you’re a small business owner, check out these 13 helpful automation tools for small businesses)
12 Use cases for automating client relationships
Interested in transforming your client relationships? Here are some tried-and-test automation use cases to help you get started.
Client onboarding
Nearly two-thirds of customers take onboarding into consideration when they’re deciding whether to work with your business, and over 80% are more likely to stay loyal if they receive a helpful onboarding experience. Automation helps you quickly engage with new clients and nail their first experience.
1. Generating contracts and documentation
When you onboard a new client, you’ll need to prepare legal contracts and other documentation, e.g., maybe an NDA or SLA, documents explaining the invoice process, admin docs, etc.
You can use a dedicated contract automation software, a third-party tool like Make, or a combination of generative AI with your CRM to automate your contract creation. You can also create templates and use generative AI to personalize them for other kinds of documentation, like welcome packages or custom invoices.
2. Updating your internal systems and CRM
Making sure all relevant personnel have access to up-to-date client information helps your team serve your customers better. Use automation to update your internal systems the moment you close a new deal.
You can use an automation tool like Make to create scenarios for updating your CRM (like Caflou or PipeDrive):
3. Welcome emails and orientation
This one’s easy, and it’s a great way to warm new customers up to your business. Use your email automation software or CRM to set up automated welcome emails for new customers, containing essential information and any relevant documents (like offers, contracts, NDAs) they’ll need.
Client engagement
Don’t risk dropping the ball after closing the deal. Automation can help keep your clients engaged and updated throughout your relationship, showing them that you value their business and prioritise their needs.
4. Automated follow-ups
While clients are usually punctual to ask you about the progress on deliverables, they can be eerily unresponsive when there’s a dependency on them. You might need to follow up with them a few times if you need, say, clarification about a specific request or more context around an action item.
So why not automate the process? You can do it using your project management tool or email automation software.
5. Project status updates
Set up automation in your project management tool/business management solution to regularly update your clients about important milestones, changes in timelines, and updates.
6. Feedback collection
A big part of maintaining positive relationships with your clients entails really understanding how they feel. Use automation to set up forms and customer satisfaction surveys (like NPS or CSAT) after key interactions to gauge how satisfied your clients are.
Improving customer experience
Making sure you have smooth workflows helps your team consistently deliver positive customer experiences, and automation can help you out here, too.
7. Automatically creating tasks (based on client requests)
Got a new work request from one of your regular clients? Make sure their request is prioritised by setting up an automation trigger that automatically converts it into a task and alerts the project manager.
8. Automated reminders
Most project management tools include automated reminders to alert your team about delays (or potential ones), status changes, progress, updates, and more. Similarly, you can set up reminders in your CRM to make sure team members reply to queries, resolve requests, and schedule meetings on time, etc.
Customer support
9. Automated responses to FAQs
Chatbots provide interactive, self-support to your customers by answering straightforward, common questions. You can train conversational AI chatbots on your existing customer support interactions to better equip them to handle queries.
10. Ticket assignments
Does your client need a complex query resolved? Program the chatbot to hand them over to a live chat agent, and use automation to connect them to relevant personnel (sales, IT support, etc.) depending on the nature of their query.
11. Automate data entry
Forget automatically updating client data; use smart automation tools to make sure your customer’s data is always up-to-date. This means your support team has access to the right data at all times, helping them serve your clients better.
Automated client reporting
Use automated client reporting to save time and ensure accuracy when you need to compile…
12. Financial reports
AI and automation can extract and consolidate financial data, such as from invoices, project analytics, and expenditures to help you generate financial reports for each client.
13. Performance reports
Need to give your clients insights into how their projects are performing? Use automation to track and extract performance metrics into relevant reports, including milestones achieved, progress on tasks, percentage of project completion, profitability, etc.
Automate your workflows and client relationships with Caflou
Looking to craft superior client experiences with automation? Then you’ll want to consider using Caflou.
Caflou is a small business management solution that lets you manage all your essential business functions in one place, including finances, resources, projects, processes, and clients. By centralising all your work in one place, Caflou creates integrates your workflows, increasing your opportunities to automate client relationships.
For example, you can set up automation triggers to update customers via email about project status updates, and project managers can set automated reminders to alert team members about pending tasks. You can also generate reports, invoices, and offers with just a few clicks.
Caflou’s essentially aggregates your business data and processes in one place, laying a strong , integrated foundation for automating your workflows. Caflou’s automation builder, along with its integration with Make, allows you to implement client automation use cases like the ones we covered above.
“Thanks to Caflou, the company has a “backbone” where everything is recorded. The system helps us link finances and accounting with realization and customers. Organization has improved, and so has productivity.”
Igor Pavelek
Co-founder & VP Operations, Pygmalios
Ready to automate your client relationships and improve your organisation’s productivity? Get started with Caflou for free.