You’ve likely heard of a CRM – or Customer Relationship Management – system. You’ve also likely heard of a call center or contact center. What you may not know is how CRM and contact center software fit together, why it’s important to connect them, and how your organization could benefit from the integration.
Fortunately, you’ve come to the right place to find out. Read on to learn the answers to these questions and more.
What is Contact Center CRM?
CRM is a set of software solutions that help organizations store and manage information related to their existing and prospective customers. Some examples of CRM systems include Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
A contact center handles an organization’s communications with customers across multiple channels, such as phone, email, instant message, and social media. Traditional voice-only equivalents are referred to as call centers.
Contact center CRM is the CRM system used by agents in a contact center to improve customer experience. While both CRM and contact center software are helpful and powerful on their own, they can be even more helpful when integrated with each other.
Benefits of a Contact Center CRM Integration
- Improve Agent Experience –A CRM integration enables agents to receive important contextual information about a customer as soon as an interaction comes in through a feature called screen pop. This saves agents’ time from having to manually search for this information. Similarly, a CRM integration can automatically insert activity records, reducing the need for tedious data entry to keep CRM records up-to-date. These capabilities ultimately make agents’ jobs easier and improve their experiences.
- Increase Revenue Generation – Contact Center CRM integrations enable customer details, including purchase history, to be screen popped to an agent as soon as an interaction comes in. This helps agents to immediately see opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, empowering them to suggest relevant new products and services to existing customers.
- Reduce Call Duration – With screen pops, agents spend less time asking customers for information and manually searching for context. This means they can address a customer’s reason for reaching out sooner and therefore resolve their issues faster.
- Improve Knowledge Distribution – CRM systems provide organizations with a centralized knowledge base. Their integration with the contact center ensures that the right information gets to the right person exactly when and where they need it. The instant delivery of customer information via screen pops ensures that agents never miss important details.
- Reduce Customer Wait Times – When call durations are reduced with screen pops, agents can serve more customers in the same amount of time. This in turn reduces the amount of time customers spend waiting in queue to reach an agent.
- Reduce Wrap-Up Time – Since a contact center CRM integration can automatically insert activity records detailing the interaction that took place, agents don’t have to spend as much time manually entering data after a call. This means they can get back to a ready state to serve the next customer faster.
- Minimize Potential for Human Error – CRM integrations often have click-to-call capabilities, allowing agents to make calls directly from the CRM. This means there is no potential for misdials, and they’ll call the intended recipient every time. Similarly, automatically created activity records mean that activities are created with correct details; there is no room for an agent to forget to create the activity record or record incorrect details.
- Unify Customer and Interaction Data – Contact center CRM integrations help to bring all customer data into one place by automatically inserting activity records. This means that complete records of customers’ interaction history can be easily accessed in the same place as all other customer details, including links to recordings and transcripts if available.
- Provide More Personalized Service – With screen pops, agents can instantly see information about a customer that can lead to more personalized service. This helps customers to feel valued and increases satisfaction. Agents can provide personalized greetings based on contact info and suggestions for complementary products and services based on purchase history. Past interaction notes can tell agents more about the customer’s preferences and topics they may be interested in.
- Create Custom Dashboards – With an integrated contact center CRM, you can create custom dashboards in your CRM that show important contact center data, like Average Talk Time, Total Handled and Average Queue Delay. These dashboards allow users to quickly and easily see performance statistics at a glance.
- Optimize Interaction Routing – With an integrated contact center CRM, you can apply routing rules based on CRM fields. This reduces transfers and increases the likelihood of first contact resolution by ensuring that every customer quickly reaches the agent best suited to handle the interaction.
- Enhance Customer Experience – With benefits like faster handling, reduced wait times, and more personalized service, integrated contact center CRMs ultimately improve the customer experience, leading to more satisfied and loyal customers.
Key Contact Center CRM Integration Features
- Screen Pop – When a new interaction comes into the contact center, a contact center CRM integration can instantly open (or “screen pop”) the customer’s CRM page to the agent, displaying all the relevant information about the customer. This includes details like purchase history, open cases, and past interaction information.
- Click-to-Call – A contact center CRM integration allows agents to click-to-call from a customer’s CRM page, saving time spent dialing and eliminating misdials.
- Automatic Creation of Activity Records – When an interaction occurs, a contact center CRM integration can automatically create an activity in the CRM to log the interaction. This ensures that contact history is correct and complete in the CRM.
- Automatic Links to Recordings and Transcripts – When applicable, a contact center CRM integration can automatically include links to recordings and transcripts in the automatically created activity record of an interaction.
- Routing Options Based on CRM Fields – With a contact center CRM integration, interactions can be routed based on fields in the CRM system in addition to typical routing options offered by a contact center.
With all the exciting features and benefits a contact center CRM integration has to offer, it is one of the best tools available to drive efficiency and improve customer experiences in the contact center.
