Through the years, customer relationship management has gone beyond its technical functions within a company. Commonly known by its acronym CRM in business jargons, the term eclipses the role of being responsible for devising strategic processes to ease the delivery of customer service; and has, moreover, been seen as a critical element in establishing organic and lasting relationships between businesses and their customers. And as organizations have become more and more aware of this affinitive role of CRM’s, systems dedicated to providing such service have been withstanding fixtures in every office setup.
In the context of CRM systems, the term integration, in its very essence, means the unification of both your marketing and sales processes to your CRM platform or software. This ensures that a seamless co-existence between the latter and the former thrives within the organization. In its barest form, a CRM is a quintessential tool for maintaining customer data through blue-collar entry; but when synced with your organization’s systems of operations, this software is a key element to the full automation of almost all sales and marketing processes. Won’t life be easier when both your sales and marketing teams are fully optimized?
Disparate parties that exist within an organization are the perfect hosts for a mutually beneficial relationship with a CRM. We all know that sales and marketing teams are the primary recipients of the benefits a CRM system can offer. But besides these members of the frontline, office teams also reap the rewards these systems bring.
As members of the leading edge, sales agents are default actors in driving customer satisfaction. And by undergoing CTI integration, or computer telephony integration, agents can live up to organizational standards. Having CRM systems fully integrated to CTI phone systems allow agents to make and receive calls via their desktops, or laptops and handsets if they work remote. Agent performance is also improved as CRM’s supply previews of the caller’s contact information, which allows agents to address the client’s issue with ease. With CRM’s integrated into phone systems, calls are automatically routed to the agent who can provide the best solutions to a client’s specific query. Through video and voice call conferencing, call barging, and warm transfer; agents are able to collaborate with fellow agents or members from cross-functional teams to supply better answers to questions thrown at them by clients. And lastly, managers are also given the privilege to monitor their agents’ performances, and further, decision-makers are provided with an overview of each department’s performance.
Alongside the marketing and sales teams, the accounting team would probably be one of those units in an organization which deals with an overwhelming number of customer data. The fact that accounting teams go through a seemingly insurmountable amount of data on a daily basis is an obvious fact, but what isn’t an obvious fact is the importance of integrating CRM systems with bookkeeping functions. Most companies just have pre-conceived notions about the possibility of a co-existence between the two like accounting teams can survive without a CRM; integration of CRM systems to accounting functions can be costly; programmers need to be employed for the integration process, or Application Programming Interfaces (API) can suffice accounting system integration challenges. These are all ideas that need every company should get rid of. Companies need to start moving forward with the times, and start realizing accounting system integration benefits like the elimination of double data entry; an overview of all buyer and seller transactions; the full optimization of the accounting team via real-time information; and eliminates extra expenditure on accounting software licenses and expenditure costs.
The CRM’s available in the current market. With the wide selection of system providers with some going as far as providing VoIP integration, there’s no excuse for any organization to be caught functioning without one. Not that it would be a crime for businesses to run without a CRM system; but with the current pace the industry is going, every entity within it needs to keep up with the fleeting shifts that occur within it. An unorganized database? An outdated address book? The tedious task of scheduling events? Communicating with every single client? The documentation of daily activities? These are just some of the mundane tasks of a workforce that functions sans a CRM have to do manually. So why go through this equipment on a daily basis, when you can have it easy and let your CRM system do the dirty work for you.