Today, customer service, like any other business area, is heavily dependent on software. Various tools help service and support teams to assist customers better and increase productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
However, such a variety of tools presents certain challenges to their users. They need to learn how to deal with multiple products and, more importantly, find ways to synchronize information between them. This is why we are talking about integration.
Integration helps to synchronize data between different tools used both within the customer service area and in other areas, such as marketing, customer relations, and even production. Through integration, a business can manage customer data from a single point and allow all departments to get access to synchronized data at all times.
Such details as customer name, email address, order history, and contact information may be needed by multiple teams for various purposes. To create a solid, professional impression, all employees who are ever in contact with customers should have up-to-date information about their status. This is why all relevant data should be updated centrally and shared within the company, which can be achieved through software integrations.
Nowadays, businesses recognize the value of integrations and are seeking ways to implement them to improve productivity and increase their customer service KPIs. According to 80% of business operation leaders, data integration is critical to their operations.
There are several ways customer service integrations can be implemented.
A CRM is not just a tool, it’s a complete platform where businesses can manage all their relations, contacts, and interactions with their customers. A smartly set up CRM can be used by many teams that work with customers in any way – sales, marketing, customer service and support, business development, and analytics.
A CRM integrates a customer database, a support ticketing system, tools for planning and managing marketing campaigns, and analytical tools. Being a single platform, a CRM ensures that all information is updated from the central point and is available to all users. A CRM that can also integrate carrier lookup is even more ideal since it will automatically improve the quality of your customer database.
Employees in any department can look up customer data that they require for their work. Marketers can get the information they need to target campaigns and plan social media calendars, salespeople – the purchase history, service agents – the current subscription plans. Some CRMs can even track social media and pull relevant information from there so that the business can respond quickly and professionally. Different software development companies incorporate such features to enhance their platforms and provide comprehensive solutions to their clients.
Integration between a customer service system and an email system can save a lot of time and resources, as well as improve customers’ satisfaction with the brand. Such integration can automate many useful functions:
Connecting email with customer service also adds to personalization which is one of the main automation and integration trends nowadays. It helps to speed up processes while maintaining the personalized approach that customers love so much.
Integrating payment channels into a customer service system is a huge step toward improving customer experiences. Payment channels by reputed providers ensure not only the convenience and ease of transactions but also security and confidence.
With a payment channel integration, customers using the service system will not need to change the tool if they need to make a payment. The gateway right within the communication channel allows them to make transactions quickly and with minimum effort. However, when dealing with such transactions, make sure to leverage the managed detection and response benefits for enhanced security and proactive threat handling. Also, consider looking up how much does SOC 2 certification cost to ensure that your security measures align with industry standards and safeguard sensitive information effectively.
Today, one communication channel is not enough. Customers want to have a variety of options to reach the business to request assistance or provide feedback. This is why a customer service system needs to support integration with multiple messaging channels – both standalone, such as Viber, and social media-related, such as Facebook Messenger. Some companies also use the client portal option to keep seamless communication with customers and improve retention.
Multi-channel messaging gives your customers the freedom of contacting you in their preferred way. For support agents, such integration means that they can send and receive messages over many channels from within the same system. They do not need to switch between separate tools to communicate with customers using different messaging channels. If they don’t want to use messaging tools, they can use a softphone which is another great alternative. Thus, in addition to customer satisfaction, multi-channel communication integration ensures higher employee satisfaction, too.
For businesses, customer service integrations bring multiple benefits.
With integrations, information exchange between different departments and employees happens in no time and with minimum effort. It is no longer necessary to actually request information and then send it – anyone can get what they need whenever they need it.
As a result, the costs of maintaining the productivity of customer service departments are lower. Besides, processes take less time, thus reducing the overall time needed to fulfill a customer’s request and complete any other interaction.
An integrated customer service system allows anyone with a proper level of access to get customer information they need in their work. Such self-service processes are much more efficient than asking for information and receiving it.
When you look up data in the common database, you know what you are looking for and will be sure if certain blocks of information are relevant to your task or not. Besides, when browsing the data, you may notice something that did not occur to you before but may be useful.
When a company has an integrated customer service system, it ensures that everyone who is in contact with customers always has the same information. This way, if a customer needs to interact with several agents, they will represent the company in the same manner.
Besides, when each agent has all the customer data they need to solve the issue, they do not need to ask the customer again and again about the same thing. Customers hate telling the same stories over and over – 54% of them admitted that.
When information is synchronized and consistent across the company, its communications with customers become more professional. Customers feel higher trust towards the brand and are more confident in their choice to do business with it.
Integrations help to build and maintain a healthy data culture in the company which makes a good impression on customers. They learn that the business invests time and resources into managing data in a proper way to make customer service as effective as possible.
As a result, customers become confident that they have made the right choice when they decided to do business with this company, which boosts their satisfaction and loyalty significantly. They not only continue to purchase from you but can also bring more customers through referrals and user-generated content, such as feedback, reviews, and testimonial videos.
When the team has all their data in one place, their productivity can grow exponentially. They can easily find all the information they need right there and then, even when the source of information is a different department. For example, to learn the history of purchases, the support agent no longer needs to request information from the sales department. Instead, they can pull it directly from their system.
At the same time, marketing managers can build campaigns more effectively and address many content creation pain points, when they have complete customer data allowing them to target their promotions better.
While implementing customer service integration may seem challenging, it is surely worth the invested time and resources. Through integrations, you are laying the foundation of a streamlined and effective data management system that will benefit the entire company.
