Etisalat UAE | Steps to integrating a CRM

Most businesses have a communications system they use – but to scale up and manage it better, you need to find the right one for you and make the most of it. Integrating into your systems is an integral step to making a good communications platform work for you.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) should really be the heart of all customer-centric operations. It helps bridge the gap between a customer and the company. It analyzes the history of the customers, improving a company’s overall interaction with its customers. A good CRM is also important for making sure that only the right message is getting delivered to the right customers.

A suitable CRM system will provide you with all the necessary data to exceed your clients’ expectations and build up your image. To make the most of your CRM, involve your team in the selection process. Get their feedback on the workflow, must-have features of the software, and the processes they’d like to automate.

The right CRM, like Cloudtalk, will complement your regular workflow. For instance, if you follow your clients mostly via email, consider taking up a CRM that can integrate with the email system you use. Most CRM software is customizable, so make sure you test it to see what adjustments you need to make to ensure that it fits your business needs.

CRM integration is quite crucial to the successful daily functioning of the company. There are three ways these integrations can work:

Native integrations that are built into the CRM software

Native integrations, the easiest to use and implement, are built into the CRM software to ensure that you can work with the most commonly used business tools like email and calendar without leaving the CRM. Turning on these native integrations can often be done with one click within the software. However, they are usually only available for the most popular business tools such as Gmail, Outlook, Mailchimp, Slack, and Intercom.

3rd-party integrations developed by independent companies

Small business teams use so many business tools that it is virtually impossible for a CRM software platform to provide a native integration for all. However, third-party services like Zapier specialize in collecting simple connections between different software tools, giving businesses the opportunity to access and integrate with more applications.

Custom integrations that are created using APIs (application program interfaces)

An API is a software-to-software interface that allows programs to connect and communicate with each other. All cloud-based or SaaS (Software as a Service) business tools have a published library of APIs that allow other software applications to access your CRM without requiring a password.

These APIs can also allow your CRM to communicate with any legacy internal systems that you may have in your company. However, they do need a level of technology and expertise to ensure that that these integrations work with the CRM of your choice.

Beyond the technical integration, it is important to ensure that for the CRM to work, it needs to have a few other integrations to make it work.

Team integration:

Depending on the size of the organisation and the complexity of the CRM system, train your team to use it correctly and make the most of the opportunities to ensure that the customer experience and the sales opportunities are documented and managed correctly. Encourage your teams (especially your sales teams) to use the system, inputting data and using the CRM on a day-to-day basis. The most effective CRM is the one that is current and updated with information on all interaction with existing and potential customers.

Communication and marketing:

In this day and age of cloud computing, you can integrate CRM functionalities of some of the cloud-based options into several areas of your business from monitoring and managing email interaction to creating marketing automation to managing your meetings and social media interaction.

Applications like Hupspot and Zoho allow you to not only manage them with your online software but integrate with your calendar and your social media to generate touchpoints for not just managing the customer interaction but also create opportunities for lead generation.