As customer experience becomes more and more important in 2021, so does the technology that supports your CX efforts. In this blog, we cover the top integrations you should try to optimize your technology stack.

contact center software integrations

Turning the corner into 2021, we will likely continue to face the same problems that we are all trying to navigate today:

  • Training and maintaining contact center agents.
  • Managing remote and virtual work technologies.
  • Reaching distributed and fatigued customers—and keeping them happy!

Luckily, technology can help. There are many tools out there that can help you better interact with your fellow contact center team members and customers. But, without the right integrations, these tools might just be getting in your way.

Why You Need to Integrate Your Contact Center Technology

It’s time that all your contact center technologies worked together seamlessly to deliver the ultimate customer experience. A fully integrated contact center technology stack results in:

  • An omnichannel support experience for your customers.
  • Better metrics and happier agents.
  • Less costs and more ROI.

So, what kind of contact center software integrations are possible?

Short answer: Many.

But here are the top 4 integrations that have provided powerful results for contact centers:

Top 4 Contact Center Software Integrations

The most common integrations connect your telephony system with your CRM or ticketing solution. Here are four examples:

#1. Zendesk CRM

Zendesk is a customer relationship management (CRM) company that builds software to support customer relationships and sales. From ticketing and live chat to social and voice, Zendesk provides a lot of flexibility with the features you choose to implement so you can provide excellent customer service and efficiency for your agents.

But you can take Zendesk’s functionality to the next level by establishing a highly configurable and customizable connection between your Zendesk instance and your telephony or VoIP system.

When you do, you unlock amazing features that help you create a more satisfying customer experience while getting the most out of the time your agents spend on each call.

For example, user information pops up instantly on agents’ Zendesk screens when a call comes in. Detailed call reporting, including such crucial information as call time, queue time, talk time and hold time, is available hourly or daily. And voicemails and call recordings can be automatically integrated into Zendesk, so agents can listen to recordings or voice mail messages to return calls fast and efficiently.

#2. Salesforce

Salesforce is another popular CRM platform. Specifically, many contact centers use Salesforce Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.

With any of these solutions, you can create a link between your Salesforce platform and all leading call center telephony systems. The result? Agents can be provided with information directly from Salesforce as soon as a call comes through, and instantly create a Case, Post, Task or Contact. They can even call a phone number listed in Salesforce with a single click.

#3. Freshworks

Freshworks offers software that covers all bases for a business, bridging the gap between support, sales and marketing. From customer support software and CRM to IT service management and AI, Freshworks provides easy to use software that help teams reach customers.

So, just like the previous examples, if you’re using any Freshworks product as your CRM, you can take your customer experience to the next level by integrating with your telephony system.

Just like the Zendesk integration, user information can pop up on agents’ Freshworks screens as soon as a call comes in. More detailed call reporting is available and calculated metrics of totals and averages can be used for Freshworks reports. Plus, voicemails from customers automatically generate tickets that are displayed to agents, with the recorded message inserted into the ticket—avoiding the time it would take to dial into the voicemail system.

#4. MuleSoft

Finally, there’s MuleSoft.

MuleSoft’s Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) allows other applications, including CRMs, to connect with it, so they can all communicate with each other. An ESB architecture like this provides a simple, well defined and “pluggable” system. It scales really well, while offering a way to leverage existing systems and expose them to new applications using its communication and transformation capabilities.

And those capabilities are powerful. Connecting your MuleSoft ESB to a contact center software enables you to retrieve telephony events and perform operations including making, answering and releasing calls on more than a dozen telephony systems.

How to Integrate Your Contact Center Software

The benefits of these integrations are clear. But how do you actually make it happen? To integrate your technology stack, you have two primary options:

  1. Develop your own custom integration project
  2. Work with a Custom Telephony Integration (CTI) solution provider

From a cost and timeline perspective, option #2 wins every time. But not just any CTI solution. Look for a provider that requires zero custom code, prices per seat as a subscription (rather than an up-front capital expenditure) and combines a robust core engine with prebuilt connectors for leading CRMs, telephony systems and other critical pieces of the customer service puzzle.

Conclusion

Bottom line: The CTI solution you’re looking for is CDC Software.

CDC can deploy contact center software integrations far faster (and with much higher reliability) than a custom system integration. Plus, if your systems change in the future, CDC can simply be reconfigured by swapping out a connector, rather than forcing you to replace your stack entirely.

CDC’s CTI solution connects over 70 leading contact center systems—with more being added every week, or at customer request. As a result of this powerful integration, contact centers enjoy:

  • Optimized performance
  • Centralized logging and solution metrics
  • Minimized integration time and expenses

And much more.

Whatever your contact center technology stack looks like, CDC Software makes it work together better. Find out more by contacting our team.