Why is this? Businesses are currently using an average of 130 SaaS apps. This number has constantly been increasing since 2015.
Image via Statista
Many apps collect lots of customer data due to frequent customer interaction with these apps.
As a result, you end up with scattered data across various applications and systems. With this, maintaining a cohesive and accurate view of business and customer data is almost impossible.
This is where CRM integration steps in to help you solve the issue of data silos and fragmentation. Integrating your CRM with such tools allows you to consolidate customer data from various touchpoints and systems into your CRM.
As impressive as integrating your CRM with your apps sounds, you need an effective strategy to implement it properly.
This article helps you understand the process of CRM integration. It highlights the most essential CRM integrations your business needs and offers guidance on their implementation.
CRM integration is the seamless connectivity between your customer relationship management software and your business’s external systems and apps.
It creates a seamless data flow between your CRM software solution and technology stack.
For instance, any changes you make to the data in your lead management software solution are reflected in the CRM data, and vice versa. This ensures all functions in the business are using similar and current data.
CRM integration can enhance the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your business processes. Here are six key benefits of CRM integrations.
Integrating CRM with other systems allows for automatic and real-time data synchronization.
This increases efficiency within your business in several ways:
Over 56% of consumers become repeat buyers after a personalized customer experience with your brand.
Image via Twilio Segment
On the other hand, 27% of Gen Z shoppers will stop shopping with your business and share negative experiences with others if they have an impersonal customer experience.
Such is the power of a personalized customer experience.
CRM integration centralizes and updates the complete data related to your customer interactions. It ingrates and stores this data from all customer touchpoints.
It gives frontline employees a unified view of customers, enabling them to create personalized customer experiences, such as:
CRM integration with marketing automation systems creates a more streamlined lead management process.
Sales teams can receive qualified leads in real-time, reducing lead response time. They can quickly prioritize and act on sales opportunities, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
In addition, a centralized source of customers’ transaction history data makes it easy for your sales team to suggest hyper-relevant upsells and cross-sells. It also helps to maximize customer lifetime value.
One of the main benefits of CRM software is that it enables accurate sales forecasting and data-driven marketing campaigns.
Integrated CRM systems provide enhanced business intelligence capabilities.
It consolidates comprehensive customer data from various departments to provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. These insights enable the following:
Here are some practical examples:
Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual representation that illustrates how customers interact with your brand. It covers all touchpoints throughout their relationship with your business.
Here’s an example of a customer journey map for a retail customer.
Image via Delighted
Customer journey mapping helps you understand every stage of the customer’s experience. You can find ways to improve experiences by mapping your customers’ journeys. This drives higher conversions and increased loyalty.
How does CRM integration step in to improve customer journey mapping?
Before we begin, let’s discuss the types of data necessary for customer journey mapping. There is solicited and unsolicited customer data.
Solicited data is obtained from customer surveys and feedback. This can help you understand how they interact with your brand. However, unsolicited data can uncover deep insights that customers aren’t telling you directly.
CRM integration consolidates unsolicited customer data from multiple sources, such as social media listening tools and chatbot transcripts.
This comprehensive data helps you understand the customers’ journey at a granular level.
Customer service agents require access to a range of data to make customer interactions exceptional. This includes:
Rather than hopping from system to system to access this data, a CRM system integrated with the company’s software acts as a central source of all this data.
An integrated CRM system enables faster response times to customer inquiries, enhancing overall customer satisfaction.
The CRM integrations you implement for your business depend on your industry, specific needs, and existing business tools.
However, we’ll give you seven CRM integration examples that can benefit all kinds of businesses.
CRM integration with marketing automation systems is critical. It ensures that the sales and marketing departments work together to bring in more leads and close more sales.
The integration provides the marketing team with sales information, such as customer buying behavior and preferences. They can use this data to refine their lead generation and nurturing tactics.
Marketing data helps sales reps launch focused sales initiatives. They can create targeted campaigns based on how customers interact with previous campaigns.
An ERP carries data on critical business functions, such as accounting, project management, supply chain operations, procurement, and more.
Integrating your CRM system with your ERP can have benefits, such as:
Integrate the ecommerce software your business uses to manage sales, such as payment and order management software.
It keeps your customer profiles updated with details of their buying patterns, preferred payment methods, and support activities.
A significant benefit of this integration is the automatic creation of profiles for self-converting customers. It captures valuable data about these customers for future marketing and relationship-building efforts.
Integrate your website forms with your CRM.
It creates a seamless flow of customer data from your lead generation forms to your CRM. The prospect data in your CRM system remains fresh, accurate, and properly segmented for easier and faster follow-ups.
The integration can also support relevant data flow from your CRM system to your website. It allows you to pre-populate customer forms using data stored in the CRM.
Integrate your CRM system with your survey tools to make customer sentiments and preferences available to client-facing employees. It provides them with insightful data that they can use to address customers’ concerns proactively.
In addition, it makes it easy to automate follow-up actions based on survey responses. You can initiate a retention strategy for a dissatisfied customer and assign tasks to the customer support team.
Connect your CRM system to your document management system. It can make locating and sharing important files like sales contracts and other proposals easy.
The real-time data sharing from the document management system also ensures that your team works with the latest versions of the business’s documents. This prevents confusion and potential errors.
CRM integration with social media management tools lets your business leverage customer data from social media interactions.
Sales representatives can analyze customers’ online behavior and use these insights to tailor their approach and offerings.
CRM integration with social media management tools can also help your business in the following ways:
Now that you know what an integrated CRM system is the most crucial system to integrate, what’s next? Learn how to make these integrations.
Out of these five methods, your choice will depend on the complexity of the data exchange, system compatibility, and the level of IT resources available.
Let’s see how these five methods work.
A super-easy CRM integration strategy you can implement is to source most of your services and tools from the same provider.
For instance, you can get Salesforce’s small business CRM, Data Cloud, Sales Engagement, and Customer Service Automation. The systems will automatically connect because they are from the same provider.
This strategy reduces the number of custom CRM integrations you need to create.
However, only apply this strategy where the set of tools provided is up to par. You should not prioritize its capability to integrate with the CRM automatically over its quality.
CRM systems today have built-in connections that integrate your CRM with some popular apps businesses use. This is a convenient solution because you can quickly identify the app you need and integrate it with the click of a button.
See the wide range of built-in integrations that Freshworks offers for ecommerce apps. It’s one of the best CRM software in the market.
Image via Freshworks
Investing in a CRM system with built-in integrations for your business’s apps is one of the best options for small businesses.
But if the systems you want to integrate are unavailable in the CRM software, use the next best method—building an API connection.
If you can’t use built-in integrations, get an IT expert to create API connections for the systems you want to integrate.
An API is a software intermediary with endpoints in your CRM and the system you want to integrate. It allows the two systems to talk to each other. It also defines the following:
How does an API integration work? The API request and response process is explained in the context of the client and server.
The software application sending the request to access the data of another application is known as the client. Meanwhile, the application receiving the request is known as the server.
What happens is that the client uses the API to send a request to the server. The request is known as an API call, and it includes the action or data the client seeks.
The server receives the request, processes it, and sends a response back to the client.
Using an API connection in CRM integrations has two significant advantages:
Most CRM systems offer API integrations to connect seamlessly to third-party apps like Pipedrive.
Image via Pipedrive
However, you must ensure that the CRM provides extensive documentation for its API function.
The fourth CRM integration solution leverages the integration services of an IPaaS.
An IPaaS is a cloud service breed that enables integration among different software without extensive on-site infrastructure or custom coding.
The IPaaS offers pre-built connectors and adapters to facilitate CRM integration with various applications.
Here are some reliable IPaaS you can invest in:
Writing custom code is also viable for creating CRM integrations. A developer can write lines of code that force your CRM to communicate with your systems.
It is handy when you have highly specialized and complex integration needs, such as unique workflows and data models.
Custom code means you have control over the performance optimization of the integration. You can maximize the overall speed and efficiency of data transfers.
On the other hand, it can be both time-consuming and expensive. You’ll need a team of in-house software developers to keep up with the constant updates and changes necessary to keep the integration working smoothly.
Additionally, the development process takes longer compared to using pre-built integration tools.
You can enhance the success of your CRM integration and create a more seamless and efficient workflow within your organization by applying these six tips.
You need to invest in the right CRM tool to succeed with your integrations. These are the features such a CRM system should have:
These features impact the effectiveness and success of your integration strategy.
This is one of the critical CRM best practices for making your integrations work properly.
Create a detailed plan that outlines how data and processes will flow between multiple systems as part of the integration.
This plan should define:
Having a clear plan for implementing the CRM integration process reduces the risk of errors and supports seamless user adoption.
It also minimizes disruptions to regular business operations during the implementation phase.
Assess the quality of your existing data before the CRM integration. Accurate data is essential to a smooth integration process and maintaining the effectiveness of your CRM software tool.
To assess the quality of your data, identify the following:
Addressing data issues minimizes the chances of encountering unexpected challenges during the integration process.
Back up all your data before beginning the integration process. If the data is lost or corrupted during the transfer, you can restore it to its pre-integration state.
There are several methods you can use to back up your application data:
We recommend following the 3-2-1 backup rule for CRM integration purposes and the safety of all your data.
This is what it stipulates:
Don’t just back up your data at the beginning of the integration; make it frequent.
Set an automated and regular backup schedule based on the rate of data changes in your systems and the criticality of the information they hold. It can be daily, hourly, weekly, or as you see fit.
Failing to train staff is one of small businesses’ most common CRM mistakes. Training becomes even more important when you integrate other systems.
Provide adequate training for users interacting with the integrated CRM software. Adequate training will have several benefits for your CRM integration strategy:
It’s important to analyze if your CRM integration brings in the specific benefits you had in mind.
To achieve this, be clear on your objectives first. What do you want the CRM integration to do for your business? Should it improve customer service delivery? Increase sales efficiency? You have to state what you want to achieve.
Next, set metrics that you’ll use to measure these objectives. A few practical examples are:
Regularly monitor these metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your integration strategy. Then, make adjustments, like adding more data elements, integrating more systems, or encouraging higher user adoption.
Q1. How to integrate a CRM into a website?
An API connection is the best way to integrate your CRM platform into your website. Get an IT expert to make the API connection for you. You can also use a pre-built connector from an IPaaS.
It allows for the real-time exchange of data between your website and CRM.
Q2. What is an example of a CRM?
Some examples of CRM tools that support seamless integrations are Salesforce, HubSpot, and Freshworks.
Q3. What is a CRM and how does it work?
CRM stands for customer relationship manager. It is a software tool designed to help businesses manage customer relationships across all customer lifecycle stages.
CRM systems offer a variety of functionalities. However, most CRM systems provide the basic functions, such as:
Q4. What is CRM API integration?
A CRM API integration connects CRM and third-party applications using an application programming interface. It allows seamless data exchange and collaboration between the CRM system and the other software, enhancing its functionality.
Q5. What is ERP and CRM integration?
An ERP and CRM integration is the process of connecting your CRM platform to your ERP system. It synchronizes data in the two systems and provides a comprehensive view of customer interactions and overall business operations.
Q6. Can CRM systems integrate with social media platforms?
Yes, social media integration with CRM solutions is possible. All you have to do is integrate your social media management system with your CRM software. It’ll allow your CRM to access data on how customers interact with your brand on social media.
Q7. What is a CRM integration strategy?
A CRM integration strategy enables data exchange between your CRM and your technology stack.
We’ve helped you understand CRM integration and all the basics you need to get started with your CRM integration strategy.
Choosing your CRM platform is the most essential part of getting it right. Pay attention to its integration capabilities, user-friendliness, scalability, and customer support.
Take the time to prepare for the integration.
Create a detailed plan of the integration process and workflows, conduct a data audit, train your staff, and back up your data.
Once you’ve integrated the systems, measure if they bring in the desired outcomes.
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