Automate your Data Capture with Bigin

Remember when businesses had to use simple ways of storing information?

Grocery stores had to track pricing and stock information on paper or using primitive point-of-sale systems. Educational institutions recorded students' and staff's attendance and personal details in a registry. Factories used paper timesheets to capture the exact time employees arrived to and departed from work. Look at any kind of business and you'll find that, once upon a time, capturing, storing, and securing data wasn't so easy.

However, thanks to computing technology, cash registers, registries, and timesheets have become a thing of the past. The business world has moved on to spreadsheets—the software equivalent of cash registers, registries, and timesheets. Entrepreneurs of small and medium businesses are especially reliant on spreadsheets as a repository of their business data.

Why do you need automation?

For small and medium businesses, lead generation is everything. Without a steady stream of new prospects, there's the risk of sales drying up, which in turn means no revenue.

At present, most SMB owners use spreadsheets to gather and store all information about their leads and customers. The common practice is to create entries manually in the spreadsheet whenever there are new leads, and update the entries as and when leads covert into customers. Naturally, this system takes up a lot of time and effort, and is also prone to mistakes and omissions, which is why you need a CRM that will automate this process for you.

Bigin is what you're looking for 

As an SMB owner, all you need is some extra time to focus on crucial business decisions. For instance, as more leads come into your sales funnel, you want to nurture them and push them forward in their conversion journey. However, you and your team are stuck adding lead details to individual spreadsheets and swapping them from one spreadsheet to another, depending on what stage of the funnel they're in. Routine tasks like these don't require a lot of planning, but are still important and demand a lot of time and effort. 

Enter Bigin.

Bigin is a CRM tool exclusively developed for small and medium businesses like yours. It offers automation features that save you and your team the time and effort spent manually capturing vital consumer data from various sources, including your website, emails, cold calls, and more.

Sign up for a free trial and experience for yourself just how much time you can save once the data-capturing aspects of your business are automated!

What features are we talking about? Here's the list.

Contacts from webforms 

For SMBs, websites are a major source of new leads. Usually, when you have a website with a signup or contact form with which your visitors can leave their details, you'll receive an email whenever a prospect leaves their information on the form. This information will then have to be manually added to the spreadsheet you use to record your leads and customers. Once added to the spreadsheet, you can finally start your lead nurturing and sales efforts. But sometimes, when you take too much time in the process, you've already lost the lead.

We've seen it happen with many entrepreneurs, so we automated this process for you in Bigin.

All you need to do is build and generate a webform from within your Bigin account and embed it into your website. Whenever a new lead submits their details on the webform, the details are automatically added to the contacts in your Bigin account. The steps involved in setting up webforms are simple and super-easy to learn. Once your webform is up and ready, leads are continually added to your Bigin account without you ever having to worry about missing out any prospects visiting your website.

Bigin add-on for Gmail

According to Campaign Monitor, 64% of small businesses use emails to reach out to leads and customers.

While acquiring customers through email marketing is one aspect of growth, they only contribute to your revenue when you retain them as customers and extend their journey with your business. So it's important that the contacts in your inbox have a dedicated space in your CRM as well. This is to ensure that they receive and engage with your marketing and sales emails and keep moving forward with your business.

For this reason, we've introduced a Bigin add-on for Gmail. Once you install this add-on, whenever you receive an email from a prospect you can immediately check if they're already a part of your contacts module in Bigin. In the case of new prospects who aren't already contacts, you'll be able to add them to your contacts module with just a few clicks.

This feature ensures that you have a centralized record of your contacts in your CRM, and that your marketing efforts are consolidated and reach all your contacts.

Email-In

Consistent follow-ups and strong customer support go a long way in successful customer retention. Most customers prefer email as the communication mode for their product queries, service requests, and other support. Usually, customer-facing teams consolidate these queries and add them as tasks to the CRM for follow up, but with Bigin's Email-In feature, this is automated as well.

Whenever you receive an email with a request or query from your customer, the email is automatically converted into a new record and added to the relevant pipeline in your CRM account. This way, all requests and queries are recorded in to your CRM, which ensures effective management and timely resolution of issues. Consistent customer satisfaction is the secret to achieving long-term customer retention, which brings the big dollars into your business.

Built-in telephony system

For small and medium businesses, sales calls play a vital role in moving leads and prospects through the sales funnel. These calls help businesses understand their customers better and build stronger relationships.

If your team members handle calls to your customers through their individual phones, there will be no centralized record of the details that were collected during these calls. Knowledge about the customers will be scattered unevenly among the team members based on the calls that they handled at different points in time.

With Bigin as your CRM, this situation never has to happen. Bigin's built-in telephony system has an automatic call logging feature and lets you record relevant notes and tasks associated with each call. Whenever a fresh call is scheduled with a specific customer, your team can gather the full context by checking previous records. This ensures that the team members are better prepared for calls and able to make more personalized efforts for customers.

Automate your way to growth 

Manual data entry can seem simple while your business is still small, but automation is your way forward. Investment in CRM software that automates your routine and repetitive tasks drastically improves your team's efficiency and performance in multiple ways, some of which we've discussed above. So introduce automation early, improve your efficiency, and accelerate the growth of your business.

Sign up here for your free trial with Bigin and experience firsthand the benefits Bigin's automation features can bring to your business.