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How To Win More Deals With CRM Integration
CRM Integration
December 4, 2024
End customers want fully-integrated, end-to-end solutions. Ideally, they also want one well-respected, fully-supportive company to provide them with this specific solution.
If you’re not able to provide a total unified comms / contact center platform with all the moving parts, your skin in the game just vanished.
Sure, there are still some companies who see the benefit of using disparate solutions and like having multiple providers in play. After all, when one system goes down, it pays to have at least one system accessible to users or contact center agents.
But if you ask the majority of businesses what they’re looking for from a communications provider, it’s a partner to deliver everything, rather than multiple providers of different technology.
This may sound different to how you operate today. You may not have the portfolio to cater to being the single provider for all the demands of the modern day customer.
You must treat this set of unwavering needs as an opportunity rather than a threat. The vital key missing in a good chunk of service providers’ rosters is CRM integration — the keys to the city, as you’re about to find out.
Benefits of CRM integration
When you integrate a telephony platform, contact center, or collaboration platform with a CRM, end customers benefit from:
- More personalized customer experiences: Use the data at hand to recall previous transactions and information.
- Uplift in productivity: Fewer switches between apps means agents have more time to focus on meaningful tasks.
- Decrease in manual errors: Less duplication of information means a lower risk of human error.
- Faster dialing: Click to dial reduces misdials and removes the need to hunt for phone numbers.
- Improved customer insights: More comprehensive and larger number of reports means you get data and predictive analytics across systems.
- Enhanced data security and compliance: Fewer transfers of data between platforms means there’s low risk of duplication, misinformation, and data leakage.
As a service provider, there are many benefits too:
- Increased customer stickiness: A CRM is an integral part of any customer-facing business and not something that will become surplus one day.
- Extra revenue stream: Simple to deploy and manage while generating new annual recurring revenue.
- Differentiation in a competitive service provider market: Advantage over bit-part solutions with few options for tying a solution together.
- Lower churn rates: Offering an end-to-end solution often means customers rely on you for a partnership and are less likely to seek alternatives for their entire communications estate.
CRM integration is now a common request in prospect conversations
When was the last time you spoke to an enterprise customer without a CRM?
For every customer-facing business, it’s become the source of customer information. It’s where documents get uploaded, it’s where every customer service interaction gets logged, and it’s where agents spend most of their day.
Yet, it’s not connected to the most used tool: the phone. (Replace phone with collaboration or call center platform based on how far your customers are along their digital transformation journey.)
At Akixi, we speak to service providers and end customers every day. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that more than 90% of conversations we have include CRM integration.
Once upon a time, CRM integration was viewed as a shiny add-on. It was a nice-to-have. Today, however, we know that CRM integration is a must-have. It’s become an expected line item on a purchase order; no longer an optional extra.
Due to the benefits for both end customers and service providers, CRM integration is talk of the town. If you can’t provide it, you’re pushed out of a very popular conversation.
The requirement for CRM integration in RFPs
If your business relies heavily on responding to RFPs, the introduction of a comprehensive UC to CRM integration could be make or break.
While, on literal paper, it’s merely one check box, it’s now heavily weighted and is definitely graded as a MUST on the MoSCoW rating.
You must be able to demonstrate proficiency in delivering a total communications solution.
Today, that includes every touchpoint in the customer and agent journey.
- We’re no longer restricted to providing the telephony backbone.
- We must now empower users to provide a best-in-class customer experience.
If you’re serious about winning RFPs, rather than simply going through the motions, a background deploying CRM integration becomes a strong gunner in your arsenal.
Using CRM integration as a differentiator
There’s a huge opportunity for service providers to differentiate themselves, cater to demanding customers, and win more deals by meeting market demands.
If you can provide (and communicate to the market) a total solution, you become the one stop shop for business communications. While competitors may show off fancy features and catchy slogans, your point of differentiation will be not needing those.
In large enterprises, once blue sky requirements are now very much table sakes. Here, we’re talking about automated routing and self-service IVRs.
CRM integration perhaps used to fall into that category. “We’d like to do that one day, but it feels like too much effort to configure.” Today, it’s very much plug and play.
Especially in the case of small businesses, having a reliable support partner is more valuable than several specialist providers with multiple contacts to manage and various SLAs to juggle.
Of course, you can still throw as many advanced features and AI as you like at customers.
But without satisfying their desire for a single provider for all components, everything else is just noise.
The future of CRM integration
Ultimately, it’s not going away anytime soon.
The combining of phone systems, collaboration platforms, and CRMs makes everything tighter in customer processes. In the age of customer demand and increasing pressure to keep existing clients, end customers will bite your hand off for anything that makes their lives simpler while boosting efficiencies and streamlining customer experiences.
For service providers to future proof themselves, adding CRM integration is your obvious first step. You’ll cater to immediate customer requirements while adding a sticky service to your portfolio.
As technology continues to advance, and with the proliferation of AI and automation, the more we can do with communications technology, the better equipped we’ll become for taking customer data and learning and applying insights both in real time and using historical trends for future business decisions.
Add CRM integration to your portfolio today
Features like Caller Preview, Contact Popping and Call Activity Logging are provided through our easy-to-use desktop application.
Caller Preview
Search the integrated CRM for callers info when you make or receive a call, and “preview” the details in a “toast” pop up.
Contact Popping
Allow users to “pop” caller’s records within the integrated CRM from a live call or directory.
Call Activity Logging
Manually or automatically create an activity record of a call received within the integrated CRM and allows addition of notes.
Deployment is as simple as a few clicks per user. You can choose to hide the interface or make it front and center, depending on the softphone interface you’re using.
Akixi supports integration with 300+ CRMs across the following UC platforms:
- Avaya
- Cisco BroadWorks
- Cisco Webex
- Intermedia Ascend
- Intermedia Elevate
- Ericsson LG
- Microsoft Teams
- Mitel
- NetSapiens
- NEC Univerge Blue
- uaCSTA
- Unify
The power of such a simple tool is not to be underestimated. Making CRM integration readily available will create retention opportunities for existing customers and uncover new prospects looking for a complete provider.
Ready to add CRM integration to your portfolio?
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