Context

Marketing

Marketing teams run activities that help their organization understand what customers to pursue, how to do those, how to grow brand awareness, and how to generate more sales. These include activities like market research, brand management, managing promotional activities, running marketing campaigns, and more. 

Many of these activities suffer from inefficiencies due to manual work that can be automated as well as incompatibilities with their software tools. SimplyAsk solutions – including Symphona and our consulting services – can help many marketing teams modernize their systems and optimize their processes so they can save time and money and focus their efforts on more complex work. 

SimplyAsk can help address the following common challenges within marketing:

Surveying and Market Research Challenges

Customer feedback and market research are integral in making informed strategic decisions. However, conducting a surveying or market research campaign can mean dealing with the following issues:

• Software Incompatibilities: An end-to-end customer surveying process often requires the use of multiple software tools. For example, some organizations may use SurveyMonkey to design surveys, HubSpot to host surveys on a custom landing page, and Adobe Insights to generate reports. Coordinating these platforms manually requires significant effort and is better off done through process orchestration software. 
• Survey Distribution:  Many survey distribution methods are available such as email, email-to-mail, direct calling, landing pages, chatbots, and more. Utilizing these tools and methodologies requires organizations to juggle many tools, making it significantly more complex to send the appropriate survey.
• Survey Report and Analysis Generation:  To use the collected results of their surveys, organizations must prepare reports and analyses to review a campaign's data and gather insights. Report and analysis generation is a crucial process of customer surveying and requires significant manual input. Pulling insights from data sets requires context, knowledge, and complex interpretations, often manually through software such as Excel, Nvivo, or Enterprise. 

Contractor Management Challenges

Many marketing teams make use of contractors. Depending on your organization, you may consistently use the same contractors and need to redraft agreements and documents at the start of every new project, resulting in the following common issues: 

• Invoice Processing Issues:  Invoices are often processed manually (either partially or fully) and involve reviews and approvals across company departments. The average small-to-medium-sized organization takes 25 days to handle a single invoice manually from receipt to payment, leading to late payments, more processing fees, missed pre-payment discounts, higher rates of error, and a slew of other problems. 
• Contract Generation Problems: Generating a simple, one-page agreement may take a few days to prepare, whereas a large one may take weeks or even months. For organizations using contract workers at volume, drafting, writing, and reviewing individual contracts from scratch is often a resource-intensive and repetitive task, even with templates. 

Solutions

How SimplyAsk Helps Marketing

Strategic Planning and Architecture

If your organization feels its current infrastructure and architecture is failing to support your marketing systems and processes, SimplyAsk can help plan and execute your new infrastructure and architecture goals. Our team will help clarify your goals, plan resource allocation, and account for potential risks.  

SimplyAsk develops infrastructures with scalability and flexibility in mind, ensuring our solutions can adapt to your evolving organizational needs and accommodate growth. We select technologies that enable seamless expansion without sacrificing performance or reliability. 

Application and Data Migration

If your organization is still using old and inefficient legacy systems for your marketing processes, SimplyAsk can help modernize and centralize your digital systems and data architecture. Our migration projects typically follow a phased approach, where we perform a comprehensive assessment of existing systems to create a detailed migration roadmap for your organization, including activities, milestones, and resource allocation.

By using our Symphona Migrate tool and our AI-powered conversion tools, SimplyAsk can dramatically expedite the data migration and transformation processes while managing fallouts and ensuring data integrity and compatibility. 

Process Optimization and Automation

Symphona can help automate and optimize marketing processes through a variety of use cases. Symphona products are no-code, allowing anyone of any technical level to design workflows. Its usage-based pricing means that your organization only pays for the automations it uses. 

Knowledge Centralization

To consolidate your marketing documents and information together, your marketing team can train Converse generative AI agents on a knowledge base of your marketing info and use for a variety of capabilities, one being as a search engine for their documents and information. 

By training a Converse generative agent on an organization’s digital knowledge base, the agent will learn about all the information it receives, including its location, applicability, and how it relates to other information in the system. By leveraging its LLM technology, the agent can accept and reply to queries submitted by staff about locating or verifying specific internal business information. The agent will speak using organic and formal language. Search engine chatbots are designed with low response variability, which prevents hallucinations from occurring. 

When search engine chatbots provide information based on a query, they will additionally share a link to the sources they found. This provides staff with a variety of opportunities, such as being able to locate documents, double-check information, or research further. Chatbot responses will always include sources for any information they retrieve. 

Customer Surveying

Use Flow’s no-code automation tools to automate your survey distribution, such as with manual tasks like transferring data to third-party platforms to distribute the surveys. 

• For example, with an email survey campaign, one may use Mailchimp or Omnisend to manage your email deliveries and mailing lists. Firms can even automate email-to-mail services like Click2Mail or Mailchimp to send out physical letters.

Integrate all your customer surveying tools together with Flow. 

• Flow is built to integrate with any tools with a third-party API, enabling you to easily connect your tools together and develop strong pipelines. 

Automate survey report generation with Flow.

• By designing and implementing parameterized surveys, your organization can perform real-time data analysis automatically with automation technologies — from simple result determination to more complex calculations like regression analysis. 
• This reduces the manual effort required to produce survey results and enables operational enhancements like automatically emailed result reports.

Expand your collection methods with Converse’s Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) and its generative AI capabilities.

• For example, firms can program an automated AI chatbot or voice phone agent to facilitate the survey, allowing a more interactive user experience. 
• Lower costs, improve efficiencies, and enhance your customer experience.

Contractor Management

Symphona Flow and Resolve are perfect candidates to automate contractor management processes. Symphona tools are no-code, allowing for people of any technical skill to use them. Furthermore, with Symphona operating on a usage-based system, your organization only pays based on how many automations you use.

Symphona can help in three ways:

1. Contractor Database Management

One possible automation solution for contractor management is to implement a database of profiles for past and present contractors, storing data in either Flow or a third-party CRM provider. 

This database would stay current automatically by scanning proposals, contracts, documents, and more with Resolve’s OCR capabilities and generating new contractor profiles. These profiles would help organize and route documents, contractor communications, and agreements while providing a centralized data source with any information needed to help evaluate performance and fit for future projects. To aid organizations with large numbers of contractors, Flow and Resolve can generate database indexes to help teams search for entries by keywords.

These automation technologies can also generate metrics and reports automatically to allow for better decision-making, ranging from profit margins to historical contractor performance.

2. Contract Generation, Review & Signing

Flow and Resolve can automate the entire contract generation, review, and signing process. 

Your organization can use Flow to create workflows that generate contracts using defined templates and data from contractor profiles, including names, addresses, duration, and terms. After contract generation, they are sent to internal staff for review and later to contractors for any amendments. If the contractor requests amendments, they can be parsed and summarized for staff to review, edit, and accept. 

Once both parties agree on a final contract, digital signatures can be collected, with signed documents securely stored for record keeping. Applying this or a similar workflow automation solution for contract generation, review, and signing can result in 60%+ less processing time and costs.

3. Contractor Invoicing

Automating invoicing processes can reduce invoice to payment turnaround times by up to 85%. By automating the tedious and repetitive steps, like invoice receipt, bookkeeping/accounting, and payment, staff only needs to review critical operations. Flow and Resolve enable organizations to implement advanced invoice processing automation.

Regardless of the file type, format, or graphical design, Flow and Resolve can parse received contractor invoices to identify the address, company name, phone number, email, items, tax codes, amount, invoice no., payment terms, and more. Contracts that meet defined criteria can be flagged for detailed manual review and tracked within Resolve]. If any information is missing, workflows can automatically contact contractors to acquire missing information.

Depending on company policies, invoices may need to be approved by multiple departments. You can design workflows with Flow to arrange this approval process by providing dashboards to enable staff to identify what approvals remain before payment and reports to help locate operational bottlenecks. 

Following the invoice approval process, automated workflows can transfer agreement data to bookkeeping/accounting software, including Xero, Intuit Quickbooks, Netsuite ERP/SRP, Finsync, and SAP ERP, link them in contractor databases / CRMs, and issue the payment.

Overall, for every aspect of your organization’s marketing systems and processes, SimplyAsk solutions can help modernize and optimize them so that your marketing department can perform at their best while saving money. Contact our sales team today and get a free consultation on how your organization can use SimplyAsk solutions.