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How the food industry is automating business management

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Jul 13, 2022 10:33:04 AM
How the food industry is automating business management

In the new commercial dynamics, sales processes have had to adapt to the demands of digital users. The change has dramatically influenced consumer habits and the no-contact trend left by the pandemic.

Now, this has had a positive impact on the food industry through the incorporation of automated service ecosystems.

Increasingly, we see how the food supply is present in many digital channels: B2C or B2B eCommerce, marketplaces such as Uber Eats or Rappi, WhatsApp orders, 800 lines, and even email are playing an important role.

These ecosystems that the food industry has been developing have the main feature that axiomatically increases the volume of contact with customers and their management. An aspect under the off-line working mode is not sustainable unless you hire an army of salespeople and service personnel.

This is where the central theme of this article, "automation," comes in.

To enhance the expected flow of customer interaction with digital channels, the food industry has implemented automation with digital processes and technology, where the center of everything is the customer.

Let's look at examples of this, from new customer generation processes, sales attention, and after-sales service.

The generation of new customers in the digital era presupposes a strategy based on communication methodologies such as Inbound Marketing or Account-based Marketing, which, together with Marketing Automation tools such as HubSpot or Marketo, add extra hands to carry out the task.

These tools with functionalities such as sequences, workflows, and lead scoring, are the virtual workers that are helping companies in this industry to generate automatically:

Predefined mail sequences that are triggered according to time rules.

Workflows that trigger activities such as:

  • Creating tasks for staff.
  • Sending notifications or alerts.
  • Alerts to supervisory teams.
  • Qualify the interaction that prospects are making with digital assets: emails, ads, landing pages, downloadables, or any call to action (CTA) that are implemented in the communication strategy.

In the sales process, automation is one of the most significant changes the food industry has implemented in B2-B and B2C strategies.


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In B2B, private eCommerce has been developed, allowing distributors and customers to: 

  • Self-manage their orders. 
  • Generating benefits such as 24/7 accessibility 
  • Comprehensive geographic coverage 
  • Independence of sales personnel 
  • Price lists are updated online 
  • The type of customer or segment differentiates credit conditions, delivery, and prices. 

B2C, on the other hand, has also been positively impacted.

Consumers can now easily find single or multi-company eCommerce, where from the comfort of their homes, they can place home orders or make purchases under the Pick-Up scheme.

Likewise, this has provided 24/7 accessibility and understanding of consumer habits, and something significant is that it has allowed some companies in this industry to strengthen their retail scheme or, in some cases, facilitated their incursion into this sales scheme in a very controlled manner.

Apart from all these customer benefits, there is something that management teams get from this model: online information.

Managers can now have immediate access to sales trends, top products, or products that are lagging, make comparisons by specific times or dates that may influence the sales behavior of certain products review indicators by segments or locations.

This has represented gold for more timely and better-informed decision-making.

For this reason, many companies have leveraged creating their eCommerce B2B / B2C, with platforms such as Adobe Commerce, which facilitate the process for customers and consumers and internally within the organization.

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Lastly, the food industry has also relied on automation to support the entire post-sales management process in the customer service process.

With resources such as ticket management, each control must be attended to, enabling a 360-degree view of all processes related to the process at a single point. 

This ticket management no longer has to be manual, and automation points have been implemented. Where customers themselves can self-manage, from channels such as chatbots, forms, landing pages, and even WhatsApp, tickets can be created automatically.


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Automations have also been created to communicate with those involved, achieving an efficient and timely service process.

For example, within the different stages that a service management process goes through, SLAs were defined that can be automatically monitored so that when the SLAs of each stage are about to expire, the supervising group is notified so that it can take timely measures.

Both manual and automatic communications with customers are integrated into an omnichannel view of the customer, which means there is no dependence on service personnel. 

All these benefits that are being achieved in the service process are supported by CRM tools such as HubSpot, which positively impact the customer experience by providing answers and solutions in minutes, without time or location restrictions, and through multiple channels.

As we have seen, the food industry has been able to take advantage of this accelerated process of digitalization that has exploded in the last two years, using automation in the different processes as the cornerstone that supports the new business ecosystems.

If you are interested in learning more about how to automate your company's business processes, do not hesitate to schedule a meeting with our team at Imagineer.

 

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