Benefits of integrating your contact center with your CRM

Improving the customer experience when contacting a company should be the top concern for a customer service manager. For this, agents and supervisors need professional tools that allow an immediate and precise response to each interaction. And that’s the reason why is important integrating your contact center with your CRM.

Today no customer service center can offer quality service without advanced call and campaign management software. What is not so frequent is that this system is well synchronized with the CRM. And that is where both the speed of response and the precision in the management of those calls, loses many points. Scattered or duplicate information, manual processes, applications that hang… frustrated users.

The explanation is simple: proprietary systems, closed software, long and expensive developments… it is not easy to integrate the different systems and technologies present in the market.

Integrating your contact center with your CRM is easier from the cloud

Cloud-based call management systems can be easily integrated with all the systems that already exist in the organization, such as databases, contact channels, different business applications, etc., as well as adapting to the day-to-day changes arising.

The automatic integration between the cloud contact center and a CRM is simple and provides a fundamental added value: share the information of your contact center and your CRM automatically. Among the benefits for companies are:

• Automation of secondary processes.
• Minimize manual errors.
• Delete duplicate tasks.
• Provide agents with more time to perform value added tasks.
• Improve KPIs related to customer service.
• Centralize information and add ‘Business Intelligence’ systems such as call tracking, metrics or customer contact through the various channels.

On the other hand, the integration of a cloud contact center with a CRM in the cloud brings to the agents advantages like:

• Simplicity when working in a single window.
• Eliminate repetitive operations thanks to process automation.
• View the information in real time.

What types of CRM can be integrated with a contact center in the cloud?

Any CRM web can be integrated with a cloud contact center, although the type of integration will depend on the following points:

• Basic integrations, such as sending call information, making calls from the CRM itself or visualizing the cloud contact center and CRM in the same window, can be done in any CRM web in a simple way.

• Commercial CRMs (SalesForce, Zoho, Sugar, etc.) usually have an API to make integrations, but they are less flexible solutions and rely on the technical capacity of the client to set up more complex scenarios.

• Own CRMs can usually be more easily adapted, since the client has a company that is in charge of maintenance and/or development.

In which consists an integration of a cloud contact center with a CRM in the cloud?

The integration of a cloud contact center with a CRM is flexible and there are different possibilities. The most common ones, those that contribute more value to the cloud contact center and that can be implemented separately or in combination are:

• Send information of the call answered by the agent to the CRM in real time. This information (caller’s number, time, agent, geographical location, etc.) allows multiple actions, depending on the needs of each client. For example: Automatically open the calling client tab, create a new tab by automatically filling it with the call information or log the incoming calls.

• Issue calls from the CRM itself through Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) integration, call issuance APIs or browser extensions.

• Integrate the cloud contact center agent module within the CRM website and vice versa.

• Use the IVR to request the data automatically and send them to the CRM (agent). In this way, it is not necessary to ask them to the caller because they can be retrieved using ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) and DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) technologies to capture the keystrokes of the keyboard.

• Query in the CRM database the information of a specific client to route a call based on, for example, the client profile: VIP client, non-client, open ticket type, etc.

• Send notifications to the CRM with the actions of the agents to make a record of their activity.

• Integrate the state of the agent in a multichannel CRM to control the inflow of calls and thus improve customer service.

• Link call recordings with the corresponding ticket or customer card.

• With the different APIs available from the cloud contact center you can get valuable information such as call details and statistics.

• Have APIs to generate calls.

In conclusion, if your company wants to expand the knowledge of its customers and satisfy their needs quickly and effectively, as well as improve the quality of customer service, generating new sales opportunities, integrate your cloud contact center with a cloud in the cloud is the best solution.