In a world where business success is increasingly experience-driven, having in place an efficient way of managing customer relationships has become critical. This need has fuelled the adoption of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions by companies of all sizes and across all industries over the past decade.
Today, most CRM solutions have advanced capabilities that enable companies to track their interactions with clients, collect valuable insights about the customer journey, and harness the data to personalise the experience of every customer. CRM technology isn’t just useful for customer service operations either, with 65 percent of sales professionals now saying they use CRM solutions on a regular basis.
However, as valuable as CRM solutions can be, these tools deliver their best results when connected with other critical systems and applications in the customer journey. In this journey, Contact Centres have traditionally played a key role in managing customer interactions. Yet, they have been left to operate in isolation when it comes to common CRM integrations.
Contact Centres collect endless, valuable data from customer conversations each day. Adding the right contact centre integrations to the CRM solution ensures companies can create a single unified view of their customers, leverage automation and real-time capabilities, and unlock new opportunities to engage customers and increase revenue.
The Best Contact Centre Integrations for Your CRM
Because the CRM and the contact centre are so closely connected, more and more leaders in the CCaaS space are already beginning to incorporate CRM technologies into their ecosystem.
For instance, Sabio Group recently acquired the CRM provider “makepositive” to help companies reimagine the customer experience (CX) by bridging the gap between the contact centre and the rest of the business.
Here are three excellent examples of Contact Centre integrations that can transform the way your entire business engages with its customers.
1. Agent Desktop Integrations
In today’s digital landscape, contact centre employees often spend significant time jumping between a variety of software applications and tools. They may need to navigate everything from the contact centre dashboard to product knowledgebases, CRM tools, ERP systems, and countless other apps. The more apps an employee needs to manage, the more complex the workflow becomes, which might lead to increased customer wait times and errors.
Integrating the dashboard for the contact centre into the CRM environment, or vice versa, allows companies to bring two of the most important elements of the customer service roadmap into the same space. If customer data and respective history surface automatically in the contact centre dashboard the moment the customer calls in, agents don’t have to leave clients on hold while they go searching for information. And with the right workflows and triggers in place from the CRM, agents can get on their screen knowledge articles, next best actions and recommendations tailored to the customer and the conversation at hand. Ultimately this means that agents can get it right the first time and provide a truly personalised service to customers.
At the same time, contact centres can harness automation to reduce the amount of after call work most agents need to do. Rather than having to copy-paste transcriptions of calls from a contact centre into a CRM dashboard, new information and notes will automatically be uploaded to the CRM customer profile.
2. Conversational Analytics
Conversational analytics has taken the CX world by storm. Currently, the market is accelerating towards an estimated value of $41.39 billion by 2030. Via conversational analysis, companies can collect information from every discussion they have with their clients across virtually every channel. The benefits of Conversational Analytics have been well known to contact centres that have been leveraging the information on customer intent and sentiment to improve customer-agent conversations. However, feeding this information through to other departments has been a time-consuming, manual and error-prone process.
With a CRM integration, such information will automatically flow into the CRM and inform other departments, who can then take appropriate and timely action. For example, Sales might uncover up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, Marketing may trigger a customer nurturing programme, or Product might be alerted to make certain improvements to a specific product or suite.
This data can help drive more personalised sales and marketing programmes, effective product development plans, and successful customer retention strategies.
3. Analytics and Reporting Tools
Enriching a CRM with data from the contact centre is an excellent way to make it more valuable to the business. However, to generate more value from this use case, companies must simplify the process of converting streams of data into insightful, actionable reports.
Advanced analytics and reporting tools, often part of or embedded into the CRM solution, leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to help business leaders gain more meaningful insights into their operations. For instance, an intelligent solution could help companies determine when certain high-value customers are most likely to call the contact centre or which channels they’re likely to use for contact.
Analytics tools can also scan through large amounts of data to discover patterns and trends that may guide future business decisions. For instance, is customer sentiment highest amongst customers that purchase a specific combination of products or that use a specific channel? Are there underlying commonalities (anything from years with the company to demographics) that drive similar behavioural patterns among the customer base? With such information, companies can become more proactive in the way they serve their customers and build these recommendations into their sales, marketing and product strategies to drastically improve the customer journey and bottom line.
Combine the CRM and Contact Centre
As customer expectations continue to evolve, it’s more important than ever for companies to ensure they’re not only collecting the right data about their audience but leveraging it correctly. The right integrations between the contact centre and CRM can improve employee productivity, customer experience, and business outcomes in no time.
Looking for expert help in bringing a CRM into your contact centre? If so, visit makepositive, part of Sabio Group.
