Customers have higher expectations today than ever before.
Your clients demand more meaningful interactions with companies, through multiple channels like video, voice, and text. At the same time, they’re looking for experiences that are both convenient and personalised, custom-made for their needs. With so many demands to deal with, many companies are looking for extra help in driving the best possible CX outcomes.
The contact centre on its own is a valuable tool for building customer relationships. The right software ensures you can reach your audience wherever they are, with contextual conversations, self-service systems, and more. However, adding a CRM solution into the contact centre could take your service strategy even further.
The Customer Relationship Management System is a kind of comprehensive customer database, capable of supporting all kinds of contact and sales workflows.
So, how do you combine CRM and contact centre tools?
Know Your Options
Integrating your contact centre and CRM solutions makes it easier for companies to build highly personalised journeys for customers. The first step in discovering the benefits for yourself is combining the two pieces of technology.
Many contact centres already come with native integration options for leading tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Microsoft Dynamics. These integrations allow for an intuitive, aligned experience when agents need to access customer information in the contact centre. Find out what kind of native integrations your CCaaS provider has to offer.
If the native integration you hoped for isn’t available, you might be able to create the connection another way. APIs and open platforms make it much easier to connect multiple tools and technologies today. Speak to your CCaaS provider or a developer to see what they can do.
Set Strategic Goals
Now you know which CRM solutions and contact centres work well together, you can start thinking about how you’re going to leverage the combined technology. Setting goals for what you hope to achieve with your CRM and contact centre integration will help you to determine whether your implementation has been successful.
Bring your decision-makers together for a discussion of which metrics and facts will make the biggest difference to your business. You might want to track something number of calls answered in a certain time and see if this increase when you have a CRM in place. Access to customer information in an instant could make it easier to solve problems quickly.
Alternatively, you might be looking for better customer satisfaction or a higher NPS, which means implementing surveys into the customer journey.
Deliver Usage Guidance
For employees in the contact centre to fully adopt and use your CRM tools, they need to know how they work. With that in mind, create some guidance within your knowledge base to support your team. Ensure that everyone knows how to access information quickly, either through bots, or commands within the contact centre software. Offer sufficient training for employees who need help getting used to the new services and opportunities.
Remember, different members of staff may need to access the CRM integration in different ways. Your supervisors and managers might need to know how to assign a specific sales account to a contact centre agent, while the agents themselves need to be able to access information about a customer in seconds when dealing with a query.
Aside from written guides and advice, you could also consider creating small videos, particularly for remote employees who might have trouble finding a function without help.
Consider Compliance and Security
Any technology that manages or interacts with customer data requires a carefully considered strategy for compliance. When you purchased your contact centre solution, you may have sat with your stakeholders and discussed how you’re going to address common security issues. For instance, did you choose a CCaaS offering with things like fraud detection and encryption built-in?
Now that you’re implementing your CRM solution, you’ll need to think about the relationship between your contact centre and CRM data. How can you ensure that only the right people have access to certain facts and pieces of information? How are you going to store any of the information you collect from the contact centre? Do you have to abide by specific sovereignty rules or GDPR guidelines?
The more data you collect from your contact centre for the CRM system, the more effective it can become at helping you make better business decisions. Just make sure that you’re protecting the data you collect correctly.
Align the Integration Across all Channels
Remember, your employees will need to be able to access the integration across all channels. Having access to the CRM in the back end of an omni-channel contact centre paves the way for more streamlined conversations with clients.
If your agents can access all the information, they need in one aligned environment, they can follow the conversation with a customer, and reduce the need for repetition. A completely aligned omnichannel environment with access to CRM functionality makes it easier to see the full customer journey from start to finish, bringing context to every discussion.
Aligned channels with CRM connectivity will also make it easier to discover trends in your clients’ needs, expectations, and preferences. Many CRM solutions and contact centres come with analytics tools and reporting systems to give you a better behind-the-scenes view of what happens with each client discussion.
Remember to Learn and Grow
Speaking of the analytics and reporting tools in your CRM and contact centre solution, they’ll also help you to make better choices about your future investments and opportunities. With a combined backend dashboard, you can pull out key targets, metrics, and information from huge amounts of customer data. Be thorough when it comes to selecting the key metrics that matter to you and defining what success might look like.
The more you analyse and evaluate your contact centre and CRM, the more you’ll learn about your customers, their needs, and what you can do.
