A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is all about understanding your customers and being able to provide them with an exceptional, more tailored level of customer service to meet their individual needs.

With customer experience (CX) becoming increasingly important to ensure lower customer churn, providing your agents with the right tools to solve issues quickly and efficiently has never been more critical to business success.

With one centralised location for all your customer interactions, your agents don't have to waste time trying to find out who the customer last spoke to and whether their query was resolved, making tracking and reporting a lot simpler.

However, not all CRM systems were created equal - which is why we've listed some of the features your business should look for when integrating your CRM with your contact centre solution.

Read on to find out the five CRM integration features that will make your agents' lives easier and your business more successful.

The top five CRM integration features for your buiness

1. Caller Preview

If you've ever gotten a call from an unknown number, you'll understand that initial feeling of not being sure what the person is calling about. Now imagine how frustrating it must be for your agents to get an infinite amount of calls from 'unknown' numbers and having to spend the first couple of minutes of a call just to get down the customer's details.

With Caller Preview, the customer's name is presented to the agent before they take the call or start a new interaction, making it easier to identify important customers and to solve their issue much more quickly. This feature matches the number calling your contact centre with the customer information stored in the CRM, making the most of this integration.

This will not only save time, improving your agents' productivity, but it will also allow your agents to deliver a more personalised experience - enhancing your CX and keeping your customers happy.

2. Screen Pop

Similar to Caller Preview, Screen Pop takes it one step further by providing even more customer information as soon as an interaction begins.

Agents can waste so much time repeatedly asking customers to provide their details at the beginning of an interaction - wasting the customer's time and increasing both theirs and the agent's frustration.

With screen popping, the customer's records 'pop' on screen as the agents take the call, making it easier for them to recognise customers, to understand previous interactions and to solve queries more quickly. Agents can concentrate on the interaction without having to take a few minutes to look up customer information, while customers won't need to repeat their details over and over again with every interaction.

3. Click to dial

When your CRM and your contact centre are not integrated, agents have to navigate multiple windows and software to get their job done. Say one of your agents is looking up some customer information on the CRM and then wants to call the customer to follow up on a query - when the two systems are not integrated, the agent will have to go back to the contact centre solution and then locate the customer again to call them, or worse, punch in the number manually.

With CRM integration including click to dial, an agent can easily locate a contact within the CRM and simply click on their phonebook entry to call them - reducing the time it takes to dial a customer and reducing the frustration of having to deal with two separate systems.

This also reduces the risk of misdialling, as the agents won't have to manually input the number from one system to the other. It's time to say goodbye to 'sorry, wrong number'!

4. Intelligent routing

How often do your agents transfer a customer query to a different department because they're not the most appropriate person to deal with a query? If the answer is 'quite often', then you'll want to learn more about intelligent routing.

Intelligent routing is a feature that uses customer data and previous interactions to route calls to the most appropriate agent available. This means that your agents can play to their strength, while your customers' queries are resolved more quickly.

This feature can only really work with CRM integration, as customer data is what helps the system match queries to the best agent available. Some of the benefits of intelligent routing include first call resolution, a more personalised CX and better employee productivity.

5. Automatic call logging

When a CRM and contact centre are integrated, information flows both ways. Contact centre interactions feed information into the CRM, while contact centre agents consume the information stored in the CRM.

However, things can get quite tricky if this exchange of information is not automatic. Imagine how much time your agents would have to waste if they had to manually input every customer interaction and details into the CRM - they'd hardly have time to deal with customer queries!

This is why you should consider a CRM integration with automatic call logging. With this feature, your contact centre automatically maps all customer interactions directly into your CRM, guaranteeing you capture the entire customer journey and store information easily and seamlessly.

What other features should you look for?

While the five features above will definitely help your contact centre agents be more productive and keep your customers satisfied, you shouldn't overlook how the CRM is integrated with the contact centre software.

To further increase productivity, agents should be able to do the following without leaving their CRM software:

  • Call Control - transfer calls, put them on hold and consult
  • Agent Break Management - easily be able to change their status so they don't receive calls
  • Presence - look up other users availability so they can progress issues quickly

You should also bear in mind that not all CRM integrations will come with all these features out of the box, some will require additional setup.

Conclusion

Integrating your CRM system with your contact centre will certainly prove beneficial to your business success, your agents' productivity and your customers' satisfaction. The market is saturated with different solutions to choose from, but whatever your choice, you shouldn't miss out on some of the features mentioned above.

If you're not sure where to start, get in touch or check out our cloud-based contact centre solution - it fully integrates with some of the best CRM systems on the market and delivers all of the above features and much more.

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Disclaimer

Gamma Communications plc published this content on 16 September 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 16 September 2021 16:01:10 UTC.