Smarter Sales and Customer Service with MS Dynamics CTI Integration Across ACD Platforms

Businesses today are faced with a lot of challenges, ranging from adapting to evolving customer expectations to ensuring their agents don’t feel overwhelmed in the face of high call volumes but still land up good leads for them. Most businesses find themselves caught up in either one or more of these trinity of challenges and might find themselves grappling with the question – how can we manage these challenges while maintaining exceptional customer service standards?

The answer to these questions lies in integrating your CRM with your business telephony. Today we are picking MS Dynamics as the CRM and will explore how Integrating MS Dynamics with CTI can create a landmark change for your business.

What is MS Dynamics?

Microsoft Dynamics is a comprehensive CRM solution that helps businesses manage customer relationships effectively. It provides a centralized hub for customer information, enabling businesses to streamline processes, improve communication, and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

What’s the Need to Integrate MS Dynamics CRM with CTI?

With the onset of the digital era, the customer service landscape is undergoing a constant transformation. While most contact centers deploy a CRM such as MS Dynamics to centralize customer information, they fail to live up to customer expectations for several reasons.

• • Businesses use a lot of applications and systems apart from a CRM, creating a challenge for agents to access the right information just when the customer needs it
  • Sometimes the CRM does not hold the real-time and up-to-date information that agents require during calls. This can be because of a simple mistake on the part of agents who forget to log in with call information after they hang up.

For such reasons, a business wanting to stay on top of customer’s expectations in terms of efficient and personalized service delivery cannot just rely on a CRM. They need to seamlessly connect the various applications, systems, and processes. This is where the CTI connector plays a pivotal role. The seamless integration of MS Dynamics CRM and telephony amplifies the capabilities of both, fostering a cohesive environment where customer information seamlessly aligns with communication platforms.

Let’s now understand the importance of this integration across the two most important departments of a contact center: Sales and Customer Service.

1. Improving Sales Efficiency

The Challenge: Lost Opportunities and Disjointed Processes

Rachel is an ambitious salesperson, driven by her eagerness to connect with potential clients and close deals. On average, her day requires her to juggle between ringing phones, incoming emails, and messages from various channels. Each channel, though a potential avenue for deals, is also a pitfall for chaos. Let’s understand the many challenges she faces.

a) Disconnected Communication Channels

Customers reach out to Rachel through diverse interaction channels like emails, phone calls, messages, etc. To streamline their experience, Rachel has to juggle between these channels back and forth, causing crucial information at times to slip during transit and creating communication silos.

b) Inefficient Data Handling

As Rachel tries to make sense of the deluge of customer data, inefficiencies creep in. Without a unified platform, she is unable to handle customer information efficiently, leading to missed insights and delayed responses.

c) Poor Visibility into Customer Interactions

Rachel also lacks a centralized view of customer interactions. The consequence is a struggle to tailor her approach, resulting in missed opportunities to provide personalized solutions, causing the overall customer experience to suffer.

MS Dynamics CTI Integration for Transforming Sales

The integration of MS Dynamics with leading ACDs like Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Amazon Connect, etc, helps Rachel navigate the sales landscape with ease. Here’s how:

a) Unified Omnichannel Engagement

The capabilities of MS Dynamics CTI extend beyond voice interactions. Integration with ACDs ensures a unified approach to customer engagement across various channels. Whether it’s email, chat, or calls, Rachel can carry out a cohesive and consistent interaction with her clients, without having to hustle with disintegrated channels and aligning smoothly with the expectations of modern customers.

b) Automated Post-call Workflows

The integration solution ensures that the end of a call is not the end of a customer interaction. Automated workflows triggered by ACD events within MS Dynamics, handle post-call tasks seamlessly. Whether it is updating records, scheduling follow-up activities, or initiating surveys, these automated workflows enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and ensure a holistic customer journey.

c) Predictive Analytics for Anticipatory Sales

Beyond just managing ongoing interactions, MS Dynamics CTI introduces predictive analytics in the sales playbook. By analyzing historical data and customer behavior, the system predicts potential needs and identifies cross-selling and upselling opportunities. This proactive approach positions people like Rachel as salespersons and trusted advisors.

2. Revolutionizing Customer Service

The Challenge: Inconsistent Service and Agent Overwhelm

Now, shifting our focus to the customer service domain, let’s meet Emily who is a customer service representative. Her challenges differ from those of Rachel. She encounters the problem of delivering consistent services across multiple channels and the constant flux of customer inquiries overwhelms her. The challenge lies in not just dealing with the high call volumes but also maintaining a high standard of service that prevents customer frustration.

a) Drawing a Blank to Customer Queries

There are times when Emily while handling a call is caught off guard by questions she simply can’t answer at the moment. But she can’t leave it as an “I don’t know” and move on. To bridge this knowledge gap, she has to put the customers on hold and search for the answers through a complicated web of disintegrated applications, making it difficult to serve the customer on time with accurate responses.

b) The Arduous Process of Call Transfers

The next step for Emily after the above scenario would be to transfer the call to someone in the team who might be equipped with the answers to the customer’s questions. But that isn’t as simple as it sounds. Complicated technical questions require the expertise of the same level but how can an agent handling calls day in and day out, know which agent in what department might know the answer to a specific problem? It’s more of a hit and trail. Customers often end up frustrated because they waste a lot of their time repeating the same set of information to multiple agents during such call transfers.

c) Failing to Align with Customer Expectations

The core of all support interactions is identifying the customer’s needs and delivering tailored solutions. Yet, many agents like Emily, face challenges in aligning their services as per the ever-evolving expectations of customers. The dynamic nature of customer expectations, influenced by market trends and shifting expectations, creates a disconnect between service delivery and what the customers expect. Agents often find themselves wrestling with data silos that hinder a comprehensive understanding of the customer and hence personalized interactions.

MS Dynamics CTI: The Customer Service-Centric Solution

The integration of your MS Dynamics CRM with your contact center’s telephony solutions like Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Amazon Connect, etc can be the transformative solution needed to address these challenges in customer service. Here’s how the integration achieves this:

a) Intelligent Call Routing

Traditional Call-routing systems lack intelligence, causing customers to be directed randomly to available agents. Integration of MS Dynamics with leading ACD platforms can overcome this challenge. By fetching customer data and historical interactions, the system intelligently directs customers to agents well-versed in handling specific queries. This minimizes the time spent by customers in explaining their concerns and ensuring the delivery of personalized and efficient solutions.

b) Unified View of the Customer Journey

Traditional systems often segregate customer information across platforms, hampering agents from accessing a real-time and unified perspective.

MS Dynamics CTI integration solution addressed this by centralizing customer information. It seamlessly connects the CRM with the telephony solution, breaking down silos and equipping each agent with holistic customer data. The integration, thus streamlines interactions and empowers agents to deliver contextually-rich responses.

c) Dynamic Call Controls

On one hand, customer service reps like Emily have to handle high call volumes and deliver impeccable service but on the other hand, they don’t have the technological assistance to work with greater efficiency. The integrated MS Dynamics CTI interface empowers agents with one-click controls eliminating the need for manual hassles in dialing or answering calls, transferring, etc. Further, by facilitating automatic logging of call data during every call, the CTI solution allows information to be tracked consistently.

Wrapping Up

Any business that values its customers would try to deliver the best possible service to customers. To achieve this, businesses need to equip themselves on the technological front, setting up seamless connectivity between their processes and applications that can provide agents with the right data at the right time. A NovelVox CTI Connector does exactly that for your contact center.

In essence, the NovelVox CTI Connector for MS Dynamics transcends the conventional boundaries of customer relationship management. The seamless and strategic integration not only keeps businesses technologically adept but also positions them as architects of seamless, personalized, and unparalleled customer experiences.