Your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform is a goldmine of information about your customers’ needs, interests, and buyer journey, but if your support agents can’t quickly access that information when they interact with your customers, what is that information worth?
Even in the age of cloud software, many companies are still asking customer service agents to manually update customer records after every support interaction. This increases your agents’ workloads and costs them the precious time they could spend assisting customers.
Integrating your CRM with your customer experience (CX) platform is a critical step to ensuring that you’re providing a personalized experience to every customer who contacts you. Eliminating data silos also leads to a better customer and agent experience, reduces agent turnover, improves your data insights, and can save your business a lot of money in the long run.
What Is a CRM?
CRM stands for “customer relationship management,” which – you guessed it – is a platform that businesses use to manage customer interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. Your CRM can help you track customer interactions, take notes about potential problems and upsell opportunities, streamline marketing and accounting efforts, and centralize valuable customer data.
CRMs are incredibly valuable tools for housing information about your customers and their preferences, but they work best when paired with a robust customer experience platform that can utilize your CRM’s database to track where a customer is in the buyer journey and suggest the next-best actions to your customer support agents.
What Is Cloud Customer Experience (CX) Software?
Customer experience (CX) software is designed to facilitate communication between your customers and your business. Cloud CX software helps agents monitor and improve your customer experience at every interaction and is particularly powerful when paired with an intuitive cloud CRM platform like Kustomer.
What Are the Benefits of Integrating My CX and CRM Platforms?
Properly integrating your CX and CRM platforms leads to a host of benefits for your business and customers alike. Here are just a few:
- More robust customer data to contextualize each customer interaction
- Better visibility into who your customers are for agents, executives and everyone in between
- More personalized customer support, offers and experiences
- Deeper customer engagement and loyalty
- Smart recommendations for agents on best next-steps
- Automation of after-call work, including call transcription, summarization and record updating
- Ability to better predict customer intent and make dynamic routing decisions
Your CRM and CX platform can work together to deliver better customer insights from past interactions, phone metadata, shopping history, and more. Your CX platform uses this information to make dynamic routing decisions, predict customer intent, and suggest useful knowledge base articles for your agents.
It can also save your agents time they would otherwise have to spend manually updating customer records, sending post-call follow-ups and searching for knowledge base articles. Considering each minute in a call center costs your company around $0.95, that time saved could mean a huge reduction in overhead costs for your business.
CRM and CX platforms Are Better Together
While some customer experience management platforms only selectively integrate data from your CRM and lead to mismatched records and huge headaches, robust cloud contact software (like UJET!) supercharges your CRM for a single source of truth for every employee across your business.
All customer data and PII is stored natively in the CRM or your private data repository, eliminating data silos and reducing the effort and complexity associated with global data compliance management. And with a unified customer record, you can deliver a more seamless, personalized, and effortless experience for both the agent and your customer.
Learn more about how you can build brand loyalty and enhance your customer experience with the combined power of UJET + Kustomer.
Meg Monk is a writer and digital marketer based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She earned a B.A. in journalism from Brigham Young University, has over 10 years of professional writing and marketing experience, and currently leads content marketing at ujet.cx. Connect with her at megmonk.com or on LinkedIn.
