The What, How, and Why of Automated Client Reporting | Wrk—The Only Platform to Combine Automation & A Global Workforce

While the word “automation” sometimes has a tendency to evoke a cold, unsympathetic feeling—think robots replacing humans in the workforce—this isn’t the case at all. Automation can actually enhance both your client interactions, communications, and ultimately satisfaction. In other words, automation doesn’t create an impersonal barrier between you and your client: it brings you closer together.

In a year marked by a global health crisis and challenging economic conditions, creating a sophisticated system that allows your client to maintain positive relationships with their customers is essential. In fact, the benefits are two-fold: it allows you to relay key findings to them efficiently and gives them the opportunity to achieve success and foster enhanced brand awareness. Now more than ever, businesses have to bolster relationships with their customers and understand who their clients are, what their values are, and how they are looking to spend their hard-earned dollars.

As any customer success or marketing team will tell you, a vital part of maintaining good customer relationships and communication is client reporting. Client reporting, whether at a B2B or B2C level, helps to define customer experiences, parse feedback, and visualize satisfaction levels, giving teams the necessary tools to adapt and tailor their business strategies as deemed necessary.

“Now more than ever, businesses have to bolster relationships with their customers and understand who their clients are, what their values are, and how they are looking to spend their hard-earned dollars.”

Despite having once been known as a laborious, time-consuming part of customer success operations, client reporting is now easier than ever thanks to automation. Automated client reporting streamlines client feedback and reporting, as well as data analysis, and visualization, helping you to direct your client to areas of opportunity to boost their customer communications and satisfaction levels with less effort.

Read on for more insights as we look at the what, why, and how of automated client reporting.

What is Automated Client Reporting?

Before diving into the “what” of automated client reporting, let’s take a very quick look at client reporting at the B2C level. Client reporting is all about tracking, measuring, and evaluating customer experiences. Having this understanding of customer activity and satisfaction is at the heart of developing new marketing strategies for customer growth and retention. It also helps brands to understand what current marketing campaigns and efforts are working well so that they can tackle future customer communications with confidence.

With automation added into the mix, the value of client reporting increases, as brands can more easily gather the data required for reporting and have said data automatically generated into digestible, actionable metrics. With automated client reports, you can easily consult weekly updates or quarterly business reviews (QBRs) based on data gathered through email surveys, product reviews, social media metrics, and more. This data can then be translated into relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)—such as lead conversion rates, social media engagement, and brand awareness—which measure customer success.

Automated client reporting is also becoming an indispensable tool for marketing agencies, which have in the past spent gruelling hours compiling data from a broad range of sources, analyzing it, and creating graphs and presentations for their clients. With automation, this time-consuming process is shortened to minutes without sacrificing the quality of insights.

“With automation added into the mix, the value of client reporting increases, as brands can more easily gather the data required for reporting and have said data automatically generated into digestible, actionable metrics.”

In fact, because automation solutions like Wrk’s Hybrid Automation can easily pull data from an entire marketing stack, the level of reporting can actually be superior. Reports can also be generated more regularly to represent real-time results, giving your client an up-to-date understanding of how marketing campaigns are faring. This means that not only is automated client reporting beneficial for you—by saving valuable time—it also has advantages for your clients.

Why Automate Your Reports?

When talking about customer success today, it is impossible not to talk about the elephant in the room: COVID-19. The economic impact of the pandemic has led many businesses to tighten their purse strings, cutting back on budgets across the board. This reality is being felt by marketing and customer success teams, who have found themselves having to work with less. According to a survey conducted by LinkedIn, for example, 74% of marketing teams cited budget cuts as a significant challenge since the beginning of the pandemic.

Wrk’s Hybrid Automation platform provides an easy solution to these challenges, enabling businesses and their customer success teams to do more with less. With client reporting specifically, automation streamlines not only tedious and repetitive tasks, but it also takes the leg-work out of building reports through automated data aggregation and analysis.

Instead of treating COVID like the elephant in the room, take charge with automated reporting to optimize your Customer Success strategy. **Photo Credit: Mylon Ollila**

Automating these repetitive aspects of client reporting frees up more time for your team to focus on high-value strategizing, taking into account the client report findings to come up with new and innovative strategies that both reflect these rapidly changing times and promote customer success and satisfaction.

In addition to being cheaper than conventional client reporting methods, automated client reporting has another huge financial benefit. By facilitating a culture of transparency through regular client reports, you are giving your client more bandwidth in their marketing budget to more effectively allocate precious dollars to areas where they will have the biggest impact. For instance, if a client report reveals that most of your clients’ customers are engaging through a specific social media platform, you can advise them to focus their budget there to really capitalize on the trend. To sum it up, client reports can help your client budget better for future marketing campaigns and allow you to provide detailed reports outlining how they should best spend their money with agility and assurance.

How You Can Automate Client Reporting

Finally, we come to it, the how. Fortunately, the answer here is simple: Wrk. Our Hybrid Automation solution, which can be used across virtually any business process, has a specific and highly effective approach. Wrk’s solution breaks down large-scale undertakings, such as client reporting, into small, highly automated tasks. This creates a streamlined, user-friendly workflow that can be tailored to your specific needs. The “hybrid” element comes in for the tasks that cannot be automated, or tasks that it would be less efficient to automate, which are delegated to our global human Wrkforce.

For client reporting, Wrk’s solution automates virtually every step of the process. For instance, this could involve starting with a detailed analysis of your clients’ subscriber base (including recently enabled and disabled customers), before automatically filtering your client’s customer list based on IP location, and concluding with a similarly detailed breakdown of the devices are most receptive to your client’s messaging.

Budget cuts and hesitant markets mean your customer relationships are more important than ever. **Photo Credit: Tetiana Shyshkina**

From there, our solution helps you to compile this intricate body of data and translate it into helpful statistics that are relevant to your client’s business. In other words, Wrk’s automation solution sifts through all the data and extracts only the most relevant metrics, allowing you to present them to your client in a concise and consistent way.

Whether you want them weekly, monthly, or quarterly, Wrk’s solution can schedule regular automated client reports so that your client can stay up-to-date with customer product reviews, brand performance and awareness, as well as changing trends. Consistent client reports can also illuminate the big picture by tracking how their company’s performance and customer success evolve over time.

Overall, turning to automated client reporting is a wise choice if you’re looking to augment your customer success and satisfaction. Despite the economic challenges that COVID-19 has caused, this one easy change can make a world of difference to your day-to-day and overall customer communication strategy.

If you want to learn more about how Wrk’s Hybrid Automation can benefit Customer Success teams today, visit our Solutions page!

Featured Image Photo Credit: William Iven

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