Are you benefiting from CRM integration?
Are you benefiting from CRM integration? For sales teams, contact centers, SMEs and larger enterprises, a CRM system is often found at the heart of business
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For sales teams, contact centers, SMEs and larger enterprises, a CRM system is often found at the heart of the business.
Customer Relationship Management. CRM. The term is a little misleading. CRM systems excel at managing data. CRMs meet the needs of sales people and their managers for data entry, reporting and analytics. However, CRM systems are not designed to handle interactions. This is why most companies use a variety of software services to ensure meaningful engagement with their customers.
For many companies, the CRM can become divorced from real customer engagement. If you don’t have CRM integration with channel-specific engagement tools, it may be the reason why your leads are not racing through your funnel.
The best businesses with successful sales and customer service operations have their CRM working in concert with software that specializes in contact with customers. Success is when the data entry and record keeping aspect of a CRM is aligned and integrated with multi-channel interaction and supporting services.
What are top CRM integrations that support real engagement and drive successful sales and customer service?
Web chat: Software-as-a-service web chat add-ons, like Zopim and Giosg put agents directly in contact with customers while they are on your site. And in real-time. Web chat is great for lead generation and to increase conversion rates
Text messaging: The ability to execute SMS campaigns from a CRM and support the sales process with text messages can be highly effective to nurture leads and avoid lost deals. Services like MVaayoo and TextAnyWhere provide enterprise SMS solutions. LeadDesk provides SMS solutions inside LeadDesk Software.
Help desk: Zendesk has become synonymous with help desk software. There are others, like HappyFox and Atlassian’s Jira. Help desk software typically offers management of email threads, forum threads, issue resolution and crowdsourcing. With CRM integration, help desk services can help you monitor your whole customer lifecycle and feed back into product development.
Social discovery: For agents in conversation, a useful snippet of customer insight could be just the thing to close a deal. Social tools for CRM integration, like FullContact and PIPL, give agents direct access to the social profiles of leads and customers.
Marketing automation: Hubspot, Unbounce and similar make it easy to create landing pages with forms for lead capture. Marketing automation services deliver leads directly into your CRM. They also provide tools for helping you with search optimization and content management.
Lead scoring: Lead scoring helps you qualify and prioritize leads in your CRM. Services like Lattice Engines and EverString look at social profiles and fit, intent and engagement data. They use machine learning to understand buying signals so you can focus on the best leads.
Telephony: Dedicated software that offers business-class telephony is essential for success in sales and customer service. Cloud-based services, like LeadDesk, offer low cost VoIP calls, reliable service, intelligent list management and advanced auto dialer features.
A powerful auto dialer that includes a predictive dialer, as well as automatic, preview and B2B dialing modes, can dramatically improve call rates and call success. You don’t get call center-grade telephony with a click-to-call add-on app for CRMs.
The best call center software integrates easily with popular CRM systems. The best vendors include answerphone detection, DNC list sync, data validation, and a choice of dialer modes for different agents and campaigns, including a predictive dialer.
CRM integration is easy with a good API
The most popular CRM systems, like Salesforce, Dynamics, Zoho, Sugar, Base and Pipedrive, can be easy to integrate with. That is, if your specialist software is CRM integration-friendly. Services, like Zapier, specialize in acting as the bridge between different services and applications. They enable the triggers and automations that keep your tools in sync.
LeadDesk’s open API makes it easy to add a powerful cloud telephony front-end to popular CRM systems. With software like LeadDesk you can take advantage of the latest predictive dialer technologies, while still having your underlying CRM data handling and reporting tools.
