The Beginner's Guide to CRM and Contact Centre Technology Integration
First things first – why should you integrate your CRM with your contact centre?
Intelligent Call Routing
If your contact centre is integrated with your CRM, you can access all the information needed to efficiently route your calls.
Through the retrieval and use of data such as location information, customer status (if they’re a high or low satisfaction customer) and whether or not they counted as a “VIP” customer, you could create rules within your contact centre to route calls to the most suitable advisor. Creating a simpler, more tailored experience for your customers and ensuring they can access the best possible contact means Faster Call Resolution (FCR), higher satisfaction rates and a better overall service experience.
For example, with intelligent call routing, you could create rules to reduce waiting times for customers tagged as “VIP” within your CRM.
Better Working Environment for your Agents
Typically, your advisors spend around 15% of their time searching for information across different systems.
Instead of optimizing productivity, multiple screens and applications are making it exceedingly complicated for agents to access relevant information. By integrating your customer interaction management (CIM) and your CRM, you can enable screen pops of customer information before the call is answered, helping to ensure your advisor is prepared in advance.
By streamlining the number of screens your agents have to look at, you can help to remove complexity, which is proven to affect your bottom line.
Increase Productivity
Integrating your CRM and your contact centre can help to free your advisor from some of the more basic manual tasks related to calls.
By automatically logging calls and adding interaction history to customer information records – with the option to add automatic triggers of actions and follow up tasks – your organisation can reduce time wasting. Removing the need to create additional caller records means enhanced productivity and a smoother customer experience.
Click-to-dial and transfer technology is made easily available when you integrate your CRM and your contact centre – so your agents can stop dialling manually and eradicate dialling errors.
Accurate, Consolidated Reporting
Successful CRM integration means it is possible to consolidate reporting.
Often, reliance on different systems necessitates manual data entry, complex tables and consolidation without a common ID. When your CRM is properly integrated, there is no need to consolidate information from opposing systems/platforms.
With your CRM’s standard reporting features, your contact centre data is instantly available to everyone within the organisation, and able to be combined/compared with business metrics.
Omnichannel Context
Unlock a 360-degree view of your customers by integrating your CRM and contact centre platform.
Access insights into previous interactions (across varying channels) and help your agents to identify who customers are and what they want quickly and easily – irrespective of how they reach out.
With the capacity to deliver automatic screen popping of customer account details, the ability to add information from the CRM to recording systems, and the option to attach comments, information, tags, emails and chat transcripts to your customer records, integration allows for full omnichannel context across all your interactions.
Personalisation to Make Your Customers Feel Important
ACD information such as your wait and handle times, your holds and transfers, contact channel and call recordings mean that your CRM can deliver a more complete view of customer interactions.
Help your agents to deliver a personalized experience with screen pops of customer information like past order details, birthday or anniversary date, preferred name etc. when they connect with advisors.
Deliver Automatic Quality Assurance
Turn call recordings into text to be analysed by AI tools with historical transcription and real-time speech to text.
Automatic Quality Assurance can then be carried out by monitoring the use of key phrases by agents. Analysis of this text can yield insights into the positivity/negativity of the engagement.
It’s easy to identify where adjustments to the prepared dialogue is required, or to identify the areas where further training is needed for advisors. Additionally, ultra-responsive CRM systems cab enable new ways for organisations to engage with their customers – be it via web-chat, video, transfer of files or co-browsing.
AI
Forward thinking organisations are already looking at ways to integrate AI into their contact centre.
Automated processes and virtual assistant technology are natural integrators when it comes to the CRM system as it works in conjunction with any desktop application.
Extract and summarize all relevant CRM details for your agent whilst they are on a call with a customer, whilst performing real-time analytics to enable them to deliver efficient and intelligent customer service. Adding real-time speech analytics to attended automation software can help to deliver an additional layer of insight.
So How Do You Integrate Your Contact Centre and Your CRM?
All too frequently, integration projects become difficult, costly and expensive to deploy and maintain. However, they don’t have to be. Our tips for approaching an integration project are included below:
1. Look out for pre-built integrations
With many pre-built integrations to Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk and more, some providers are able to deliver integrated contact centre solutions in no time at all. Making use of pre-built integrations with popular CRM systems means you can eliminate custom development and support costs.
Often, providers will be using API’s to connect and so if your CRM supports open API connectivity, there will be a way to integrate and improve your customer interactions.
2. Choose a good technology partner
Typically, cloud-based platforms can be integrated with the contact centre’s CRM system with just a secure internet connection. Look out for partners who can offer you flexible API’s with bespoke integration options to enable integrations with other platforms for features like speech recognition and WFM.
Access to knowledge bases, support documentation and other learning resources will make your transformation journey a lot easier – check that your technology partner can offer a sufficient level of insight into the process and features.
