6 Must-have Integrations for Your CRM Software

CRM is powerful software.

It can boost sales by 29%, productivity by 34%, and forecast accuracy by 42%.

Individually, it works as a system carrying the data of the customers. But by integrating CRM with other tools and software, you can make them automatic and make your work much easier.

Over 17% of sales representatives cite lack of integration with other software as the biggest challenge using their existing CRM.

CRM integration is the connection between third-party software and tools with your CRM to merge the functions of the tools into one platform.

Your CRM tool should serve as the hub to all your sales activities, and integrations should serve as the support system making your central software more powerful.

How can CRM Integrations with Other Systems and Platforms Benefits Your Business?

There are several top CRM systems that offer easy integrations to foster a seamless customer experience. CRM integrations with other tools ensure the availability of the right data at the right time and enable automation and orchestration of workflows.

Before we discuss integrations that your CRM software should have, let’s quickly look at the benefits of CRM integration for your business:

• Assists all your sales activities easily.
• Consolidates your calendar activities and your communications.
• Each integration connects data-rich platforms to your CRM so that you can centrally track all your customer information.
• Removes information silos that exist between platforms and company departments. It makes it easier for each member of your team to access the information in your CRM.
• Makes it easier to define a buyer persona. Allow you to be more effective in creating content that reaches your target audience. It helps you to deliver a product that appeals to current customers and draws in new customers with a focused brand message.
• Provides you with customer details and new changes to your leads. It gives you information about previous interactions and where each customer falls in the sales pipeline.
• Creates an accurate picture of customer habits and tells the right time to engage with customers with your product or service.
• Reduces the cost and time spent on training and gathering the data for support and services.
• Allows you to have all information in one place, thus, reducing duplication.

How Can You Integrate CRM Into Your Business?

Here are six systems you should think about including on your CRM integrations list:

1- Phone and Call Center System

Integrating CRM software with your call center system combines internal and external calling tools to provide a view of all customer touchpoints. Your call and contact details get logged in your CRM for future reference and visibility.

Here are the attributes of an integrated phone or call center system with CRM software:

• Automate tracking: With CRM integration, you can automatically enter details, such as date of call, time of call, who did the call, missed calls, and voicemail. It reduces labor costs and lost data costs.
• Call from anywhere: Enable your employees to dial from any website by simply clicking on the number. The integrated system will automatically pull up a notepad, log the call, and file the data after the call.

2- E-commerce Platform

CRM e-commerce integration helps you get 451% more qualified leads than companies who do not integrate CRM and e-commerce platforms.

Moreover, enterprise e-commerce companies experience 69% more revenue per employee and a 20% reduction in business intelligence expenditures through CRM e-commerce integration.

Thus, CRM integration is needed for synchronizing data between a CRM system and an e-commerce platform for leveraging sales.

You can sync certain entities to harmonize the integration of applications:

• Customer information: Sync customer information and shipping addresses with the CRM to ensure users have access to information when dealing with customer requests.  

• Order history: Sync complete order history, such as items ordered and pricing information from eCommerce solution into CRM to help deal with order modification, cancellation, or additional requests.

• Invoice and credit memo: Sync invoice and credit memo information in a bi-direction manner. This is to ensure that any cancellation in CRM is reflected in the e-commerce application.

3- Email Marketing Software

Email marketing is an effective marketing tool. For every dollar spent, you earn $42. Hence, email marketing has a high marketing ROI among all the other channels.

If you are sending cold pitches, answering prospect questions, or sharing data with your internal team, email is your go-to tool.

Therefore, integrating your email software, such as Mailmunch, with a CRM platform is important to provide knowledge, resources, content, and message out to the right audiences.

Here is how you can use integrated CRM email marketing software:

• Data collection: Centrally manage your communication by keeping all information about your customer and their activity in one place.

• Personalize your content: As CRM integration helps you gather customer information from different channels, you can send super personalized and relevant emails to your customers.

• Automated emails: With CRM integration, you can automate emails based on triggered events and customer behavior.

• Calculate ROI: You can also connect your email marketing campaign responses and lead generation strategies to your CRM solution. It allows you to calculate the ROI and examine future opportunities.

4- Help Desk System

It is important to maintain a positive relationship with your customers. Customers value quick solutions to their issues by customer service. Help desk systems have a high success rate to help provide quick solutions to the customers. But it may also lead to long wait times if agents have to frequently switch between platforms to resolve web tickets.

Thus, integration between your CRM and customer support software is crucial to managing the customer conversation flow perfectly. It streamlines the process by grouping all tickets and communications on one platform.

Here are the steps to synchronize both the systems:

• Copy all the contacts from the help desk in your CRM to have information under one platform.
• Sync customer data and tickets with your CRM contacts for a single view of data.
• Connect with ticket and sales data so that the sales team can view, create, and update tickets known to the team.
• Provide business insights and details through synced data to improve workflow efficiency and customer queries.

5- Social Media

Social media is an important sales tool for nearly every business.

Integration between your CRM and social media is required for managing your social media accounts, communicating with customers and potential customers. You can connect popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to your CRM.

Integrating two helps you gain valuable insight into your social audience and track customer engagement along their journey. It helps you find out customers that are continually engaging with your posts and which are not.

Most engaged people can be your good prospects for upselling and cross-selling, while you can offer an incentive to people that are least engaged.

CRM and social media integration allow you to automatically identify the audiences who are not your customers but continually engage with your content. It also helps you to streamline and automate posting.

6- Accounting and Billing Systems

Accounting and billing systems that operate independently of your CRM require a repetitive, manual entry for all transactions.

Thus, the integration between your CRM and accounting and billing system is required to enhance finance management, track cash flow, and make payments simpler. Any transaction originating through an integrated platform automatically updates the associated accounts in real-time.

CRM and accounting and billing system integration enable you to:

• Edit contacts in your CRM and accounting platform. It automatically updates the information in the other system.
• Update an invoice in your accounting platform and it is automatically reflected in your CRM.
• Automate your billing by setting up triggers in your CRM to create invoices in your accounting platform at predetermined times.
• Provide your sales and accounts teams with access to the same records, including invoice history and accounts payable.

Final Thoughts

The integration between your CRM software, whether its a Sales CRM or any otherCRM, and other tools helps you save time on switching between apps, keeping all of your data in one place, transferring data from different channels, reducing the workload of your employees, and providing a better experience for your clients.

There are mainly three ways to deploy an integration. It includes using your CRM platform’s out-of-the-box solutions, via a connector service, or by writing the code yourself. However, if you want your brand to become more effective and less time-consuming, then consider applying the above CRM integrations.