In a growing enterprise, there are few elementary questions that define the curve of your growth. One of them is about CRM. Does your company use CRM? What possible benefits does it accrue? What should be the future strategy for organizations using CRM. Let’s find out!
What is a CRM?
CRM is expected to reach $80 bn in revenues by 2025, making it the biggest software market in the world
Abbreviated for Customer Relationship Management, a CRM enables you to manage your relationships with customers. It provides your company with a central space to store customer and prospect data, track interactions, and enable flow of information. It allows your businesses to grow by enabling them to manage customers in an efficient manner. Without a CRM, it can be a daunting task to deal with the vast amount of customer details. And, there’s a huge possibility of these details getting lost or forgotten, and mainly drives organization on guesswork rather than hard, established facts.
CRM functionalities can be upgraded with the help of integrations. Let’s explore.
Importance of integrating your CRM:
A recent survey by Cisco shows that integration is among the top priorities for contact centers, particularly with CRM systems.
2 out of 3 companies, as of 2021, have started integrating their contact center systems with CRM along with other business applications.
The integration would save you from blunders of forgetting to update contact information or not being able to keep track of relations across platforms. Also, with all information accessible to agents on a single interface, it saves them the hassle of switching across multiple screens to access customer data.
There are several other reasons behind this increasing need of integration-
- Seamless dataflow
- Enhanced analytics
- Personalized CX
Benefits of integration:
Integration of your contact center software with CRM can help you drive up sales and consequently, enable greater realization of revenue.
Here we have listed five main benefits of CRM integration with Cisco, Avaya, Genesys contact center.
1. Boosts Agent Productivity:
Agents are often loaded with unproductive work such as updating caller information, accessing the interaction data etc. And then searching for customer details from multiple screens is like a cherry on cake of daunting tasks. Your agents should be, by virtue of their job, involved in targeting leads and driving conversions. With CRM integration you can utilize your human capital in the best possible way. The integrated CRM system ensures seamless flow of data across systems, thus eliminating the need for manual efforts to update caller details. The agent can now spend more time interacting with the customer than dealing with post-call activities.
2. Omni-channel Contact Management:
With digitization, the touchpoints of communication have significantly improved. It’s not an easy job for the agent to be prompt across all these channels without some aid. And that aid is an integrated CRM. Your contact center software can easily receive information about customer journeys across these multiple points of contact. This includes the journey from visiting a website to established communication.
3. Creates Upselling and Cross-selling Opportunities:
This is a significant feature for those agents who have to deal with inbound and outbound communications. The data that is connected by CRM can be analyzed holistically. It can then help in understanding latent demand, future requirements and also cross-selling/upselling opportunities. By utilizing this data, agents can benefit by making their outbound conversations more effective and personalized. It leverages customer trust and builds brand loyalty in the long term.
4. Reduction in Call Resolution Times:
Agents prioritize first call resolutions by ensuring quick and effective resolution of customer queries. It’s very frustrating for customers to wait in long-queues before being connected with an agent or getting connected to the ‘wrong’ agent who demands an entire narration of queries once again. Quick call resolutions are a result that emanates from giving agents the context of call and details about customers. This would pave way for meaningful interactions and early query resolution.
5. Improved Customer Experiences:
As more and more customers turn to self-service channels, such as live chat and chat bots, it underscores the importance of growing emphasis on personalized interactions. A customer is the end-driver of growth for organizations and their satisfaction is important to ensure visibility in the market.
CRM integration offers valuable insights into the customer journey by highlighting their requirements and preferences. These can be utilized to tailor agent’s responses accordingly and increase conversions. Each and every interaction gets recorded into the customer’s history and can be accessed with ease on a unified screen. By ensuring smooth customer journeys, the integration of CRM and contact centers inevitably show that it’s customer-oriented.
The future of CRM: An automated one
As the market is flooded with CRMs, it’s prudent to find the one that suits your specific needs. The unfolding trends of digitization hint towards an automated future and CRM is no exception. With predictive data and AI, CRMs can break into a world of enhanced productivity with decision-support algorithms.
The future is digital and it’s CRM is inevitably a critical element in it.
