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What are the advantages of integrating a CRM to my existing contact center?
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5 Answers
There are several advantages to integrating CRM with contact centers. Call Center software is typically based on telephony technology and therefore focuses on the automation of the outbound calling capabilities, or if it is an inbound contact center, automation of the response process (making sure the customer gets the right answers to their questions or inquiries in a timely manner). However, most call center software applications do not provide functionality for tracking the sales process or the customer service process. In a call center environment capturing and managing the leads generated from the calls, whether inbound or outbound, is critically important. The leads need to be distrubuted to the sales force for follow up and the sales management team must have visibility into the pipeline, i.e., what deals are in process, where they are in the process, how much revenue is expected to be won from the pipeline and in what time frame. The same is true from a customer service perspective. The customer service staff must follow up on product or service issues and the customer service manager must be able to measure the satisfaction of the customer. Call center applications typically do not address either the sales management or customer service aspects of the business model. This is the domain of the CRM solution. It is also interesting to note that most browsers now provide plug-ins for auto-dialing phone numbers stored in web based CRM programs. Although this is certainly no substitute for a full-fledged call center, it is convenient to be able click on a phone number and have it dialed by the VoIP system to increase the efficiency of the sales and support teams.
Mark and Kregg gave great answers relative to internal business processes so let me answer the question from a different direction. Another advantage of integrating your CRM into your service center is to easier to create and manage content for your knowledge base.
For example, through Salesforce.com's Service Cloud option, companies can monitor social media channels, tap into content created by other users or interested parties, and automate content creation. The resulting documents can then be exposed to customers for self-serve purposes or as reference for call center reps. Another option is to push the content back into the social media channel.
Marrying your CRM application with your contact center can save you big dollars... you can replace your expensive hardware and support costs associated with your traditional phone systems, by moving to a SaaS based solution. Agents use a soft phone embedded in the application and you cut out the IT issues.
Another value is that if you embed your contact center within your CRM application you can leverage the innate CRM reporting/analytic capabilities for deeper insight into your sales/service/marketing...
CTI allows you to pop customer information to the agent such as who is calling/last orders placed/last service tickets logged/ upsell-x sell information/ inventory information etc.
IVR/Skills based routing allows you to take the call to the right agent using the right version (potentially localized) to the customers native tongue, e.g. Spanish for example...
Overall you can reduce IT complexity, lower costs to operate the contact center, and get better insight into your organization with more personalized communication to your customer.
The key requirement in running a successful contact center is information, and one of the key sources of information is customer data managed within a CRM system. This is basically need by ALL agents to maximize the possibility of resolving a customer’s issue, providing them with the information they are seeking, keeping them satisfied and achieving the best business outcome from ever interactions. Making it easy to get this information is therefore vital. This can be done either using CTI software, integrating CRM to other systems using a unified desktop, or indeed many companies are now looking to achieve the same end game using search applications. Any one of these methods is going to show a reduction in average call handling times and increasing first call resolution rates, both of which should easily justify the expenditure.
Integrating Customer Service Call Center software with Sales and Maekting automation will go long way for your business operations. CSRs who keep in touch with the customer day in and day out are able to create a true profile of a customer on each interaction. If you have your CSRs trained properly they can provide you valuable feedback on which customer uses your product in what ways. You can read into the trends when customers call about "what they thought it will do". This feedback gives you basis for your next marketing campaign. You can develop a focused "product / offering" and you already know which existing customers you can target. Since its a trend you caught from end users chances are that others that do not use your product currently, possibly are expecting similar features. So you got a focused product.
After you started this new marketing campaign, guess what, your sales team already got leads from the same data. Since you already know the customer who were looking for that product or offering, your new product will suit their requirements. This will create seed sales for your new product and then you can target other non customers that fit the same profile.
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