Aviv Business Consulting assists small and medium-sized businesses with credit acquisition and business plan preparation. Additionally, the company provides business and strategic consulting services to various companies, organizations, and entities, including project management and budget control.
Every month, the company handles hundreds of business owners simultaneously.
Now, imagine this scenario: Every new client who submits an application and enters the workflow goes through about 15 different stages. At each stage, the client needs to be updated on the status of their case, reminded to send documents, and informed that everything is being monitored. Meanwhile, new clients are coming in, and it’s necessary to get back to them and ensure they are available. Sometimes messages are left, and if clients don’t call back, further attempts must be made to contact them and provide reminders.
Good communication with clients means keeping them informed at every stage, ensuring they know the status of their case, providing information in a simple and convenient manner, notifying them when they can’t be reached by phone, and allowing them to contact the company if they have questions or need clarification.
At smoove, we love helping our clients communicate effectively with their clients.
The Need
The sales team faced two main challenges:
- New leads that required consistent contact throughout the engagement period, with updates at every stage of the process.
- Lost leads that did not answer the initial phone call and were not reachable afterward. These were hundreds of leads coming in every month, and it was very challenging to follow up with all of them, provide status updates on requests, and send document reminders. Inevitably, some leads were missed, resulting in lost business opportunities.
The idea was to ease the burden on the team by automating the reminder process, reducing workload, and connecting clients to the entire process.
The Challenge
The main challenge was creating the initial process of communicating application statuses to clients.
Previously, at each stage, details were updated in the internal CRM system used by Aviv Business Consulting, called Zebracrm. Information was communicated to clients proactively by phone and sometimes in response to their inquiries.
Regular communication with clients (newsletters, general messages) was done through smoove, but there was no integration between the two systems. As a result, the updated details for each client were not automatically synchronized.
Due to the lack of defined integration and the fact that Zapier does not support Zebracrm, there was a need to develop direct integration between the systems.
The Solution
First Process: Consistent Contact with Existing Leads
Aviv invested in developing and programming direct integration between Zebracrm and smoove to allow automatic synchronization of all information and updates entered about clients in the organizational system, and to communicate these updates to clients via smoove.
In practice, after integrating the two systems, it was possible to build automations.
For each product, an automation was created. The primary basis of this automation is an update in the CRM system whenever a new lead enters the process.
From there, every update in the organizational system triggers a response in smoove, which checks the status entered in the CRM and sends an SMS to the client with all relevant information or reminders to send documents, etc.
Some SMS messages also include the option to contact the company for further questions or assistance via a link to a landing page with an embedded contact form.
Second Process: Handling Lost Leads
In this process, when someone cannot be reached, they are added directly to a dedicated mailing list and enter an automated process of receiving emails and SMS reminders. These messages include notifications allowing them to choose a convenient time for a callback, manager alerts to relevant representatives, and reminders on the day the call is scheduled.
This approach minimizes the number of lost leads and keeps them engaged continuously.
Client Feedback
Over the past five months, more than 1,800 clients have gone through the various automated processes at Aviv Business Consulting. This is a significant number.
We spoke with Omer Erlich, the company’s business development manager who initiated and oversaw the process, to see how it’s working for them and what changes they’ve observed since implementing the automations.
According to her, there is a clear increase in responsiveness when it comes to recovering lost leads. More people are leaving their details, responding to SMS messages, and returning calls, which brings back clients who might have been lost previously.
Regarding client communication, there is a sense that clients feel much more connected. Regardless of their status, they always know the relevant details, receive regular updates, and even if the process takes several months, they are always in the loop. This connection saves a lot of proactive phone calls.
What About Your Leads?
Are you able to maintain consistent contact with your leads? Do you follow up with all clients until you reach them? Are you ensuring that leads don’t get lost? If these challenges sound familiar, maybe your business needs to switch to automation.
Contact us; we’d be happy to help.