12 reasons a CRM Phone Integration improves the customer experience

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Customers normally have higher expectations when contacting a brand today than they did a decade ago.

How can you keep raising the standard of your customer experience in line with these heightened expectations? By knowing who your customers are, what they want, and how to give it to them.

Customers will always pay attention to pricing, but modern customers are also looking for companies that are responsive. With the expectations for a good customer experience at an all-time high, SMBs have to do more than the bare minimum to deliver a good customer experience. You have to go above and beyond what customers expect.

A CRM phone integration allows your business to provide a better customer experience by being able to have customer information appear when someone calls. This lets you tailor your customer interactions to each caller, providing a better, more personalized experience overall.

No matter the size of your business, a CRM phone integration is an essential component of your sales and support operations. But don’t just take our word for it – here are some of the reasons why it’s crucial for building a better customer experience.

Quick links

• Why Businesses Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms

• The Benefits of a CRM

• The Importance of Integrating Into Your CRM

• 8 Mistakes You’re Currently Making When Integrating Your CRM Data

• 12 Reasons Why a CRM Phone Integration Improves Your Customer Experience

Why Businesses Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms

A customer relationship management platform, commonly referred to as a CRM, encompasses all the technologies and workflows that your business needs to manage interactions with both prospects and customers. A CRM creates a digital interface that collects and organizes customer data, making all customer data accessible to teams in various departments.

Here are 5 reasons why a CRM is such a valuable tool for businesses:

1. It’s scalable. A CRM is affordable enough for startups. As your company grows, you can add an infinite number of contacts. It’s the perfect setup for sales and marketing activities at scale.

2. It gathers lots of customer data. To provide the best customer experience, you need to have a 360° view of your customers. CRM data gives you valuable insight into purchasing trends that help you anticipate customer needs and proactively fulfill them.

3. It conveniently organizes customer data. A CRM mines data and arranges it into useful, accessible formats, making it easy for sales and support agents to find and use it.

4. It optimizes customer interactions. CRM software streamlines complex workflows related to customer interactions, offering you the greatest potential to improve the customer experience. It’s also a great tool for cross-selling and upselling.

5. It promotes brand loyalty and retention. A CRM helps to reduce churn, and long-time customers will have a positive impact on your revenue.

The Benefits of a CRM

A CRM enables you to manage hundreds – or even thousands – of customer accounts with speed and ease.

What’s more, a CRM is a collaborative tool. It allows anyone with the proper login credentials to access customer data. When an inbound call comes into your call center, any of the authorized sales reps or support agents can pull up the call history and other customer information in a pop-up window and respond immediately to the caller’s concerns using personalized data.

A CRM phone integration has many features which can benefit both sales and support teams when it comes to achieving their targets and improving overall customer experience. Let’s take a look at how each department can use CRM software to boost sales and customer satisfaction:

For Sales

1. It works with lead scoring software to target, score, and generate quality leads.

2. Automated workflows keep leads moving through the sales funnel.

3. It works in tandem with your cloud phone system, meaning sales reps can use a click-to-call feature to dial phone numbers using a single click.

4. It enables timely follow-up on sales calls, allowing sales reps to target the most opportune time to close sales.

For Support

1. CRM data gives support agents a lot of useful information at their fingertips, allowing them to personalize interactions during incoming and outgoing calls.

2. A CRM phone integration with VoIP phone systems to automate call logging and centralize voice features, like call recording and voicemail.

3. It reduces the amount of time wasted on manual data entry.

4. Support agents can tap into a single source of data that also connects with a cloud phone system and other digital tools to facilitate efficient multitasking.

5. A CRM makes it possible for support team members to view customer data in real-time.

The Importance of Integrating Into Your CRM

A CRM phone integration, also known as CRM CTI (CTI = computer telephony integration), uses VoIP technology and open API technology to join forces between your telephone system and other business communications tools.

Without a CRM phone integration, your sales and support agents have no choice but to work with disparate systems. Generally, working with siloed tools means that your sales and support agents have to do more things manually.

Nothing is streamlined. Nothing is easy. Mistakes happen and customers get upset. Employees get frustrated knowing that customers are holding too long before they get assistance.

All that looks different when you use a CRM phone integration.

With a CRM phone integration, you get voice calling functionality, combined with access to a comprehensive set of customer data.

Here’s why using CRM integrations, instead of disparate systems for your CRM and cloud calling software, is crucial for improving the performance of sales and support teams in your small business contact center:

For Sales

1. Enables a sales process that prioritizes qualified leads and tracks all leads using sales software (for example, Salesforce CTI)

2. Makes dialing outbound calls faster and more efficient than working from manual call logs

3. Eliminates the time it takes to log into and out of separate tools

4. Allows you to leverage call recordings and transcripts from phone calls to improve your sales processes

5. Makes it easier to forecast sales

6. Automates follow-ups, so you don’t miss out on sales opportunities

7. Gives you the data needed to help you understand the decisions that guide the customer journey

8. Allows you to track the various stages in the sales process and see why sales were won or lost

For Support

1. Allows you to automatically collect data on a granular level to help you understand your customers’ pain points, needs, and preferences.

2. Offers analytics that provide valuable insights to enable informed, customer-centric business decisions.

3. Gives you sufficient data to track trends, assess customer behavior, and spot opportunities for growth

4. Positions you to tailor your messaging to individual target audience segments

5. Gives you insight into the types of products and services that are most closely aligned with your customers’ preferences

6. Allows you to incorporate help desk software and other support applications (for example, HubSpot CTI) so you can be agile and responsive to your customer base’s needs

8 Mistakes You’re Currently Making When Integrating Your CRM Data

Data from your CRM platform is a goldmine of information that you can use for a variety of purposes. With that in mind, you could be making mistakes during the integration process that inhibit your CRM’s full potential. Over half of sales leaders blame their CRM for the loss of revenue, according to a recent report by SugarCRM.

Check this list of 8 mistakes you could be making when it comes to integrating your CRM data:

1. Your sales teams can’t access customer data across multiple departments (sales, marketing, and customer service).

2. You’re not gathering data that helps identify problems with churn (51% of U.S. sales teams don’t know why they’re losing customers).

3. Your CRM doesn’t sync with other business communication tools, preventing you from competing with other SMBs on the quality of your customer experience.

4. The CRM system doesn’t work for your specific needs (53% of businesses don’t think theirs does).

5. Your CRM costs more than the value it brings (59% of companies report this).

6. You’re not getting the proper support from your CRM system provider (53% of businesses list this as an issue).

7. The tools you’re using place an administrative burden on your sales teams (55% of companies find their CRM too burdensome).

8. AI increasingly plays a role in data collection, but your CRM isn’t automatically adapting these features.

12 Reasons Why a CRM Phone Integration Improves Your Customer Experience

1. You can manage larger amounts of customer data and grow revenues without many of the problems associated with scaling and widening your distribution channels.

2. Sales and support teams can use your existing cloud phone numbers to contact customers inside your CRM system using a single click.

3. A CRM phone integration gives you the details and data you need to get acquainted with your customers and begin building relationships that set you apart from the competition. This leads to better customer service overall, and better customer service reduces churn.

4. It keeps your customer data organized, making it accessible to sales and support teams and other departments.

5. You can easily set up remote teams or distributed teams, allowing you to tap into the best talent to serve your customers.

6. A CRM integration helps you identify marketing trends that will help you set up timely promotions to optimize product sales.

7. Marketing departments can tap into CRM data that helps them better segment and target audiences.

8. It helps bring in the most qualified leads and lets you track them throughout the customer journey.

9. You get the benefit of automation, which increases productivity and efficiency, and also facilitates business growth by making processes scalable and repeatable.

10. You can store call recordings and other historical data for continual reference.

11. Dashboard analytics generate automated reports that provide insight into your call center activity to inform decision-making.

12. It syncs all your business tools, bringing a single source of data into a central, accessible place for everyone who needs it within your organization.

Aircall makes telephony integration easy to install, and even easier to implement. With the benefit of a cloud phone system, the possibilities for digital transformation are only just beginning.

Your CRM or help desk software works seamlessly with Aircall’s virtual phone system. These programs form the basis for adding even more digital tools to help you improve the customer experience.

Aircall’s App Marketplace offers over 50 integrations which give you even more additional functions and capabilities.

Featured Integration Categories:

• AI & transcription tools

• Data analytics & reporting dashboards

• eCommerce plugins

• HR & recruiting platforms

• Productivity tools

• Sales automations

• Quality assurance checks

• Omnichannel communication tools

• Automated surveys

With Aircall as your base, your sales and support teams have every tool they need at their disposal to improve the customer experience.

Published on April 12, 2021.