How to Unlock CRM Data for Exceptional Contact Center Service

Facilitate more efficient call handling, more equipped agents, and a more satisfying customer experience by integrating your CRM and telephony systems.

As the global marketplace continues to gain competitors and customers grow accustomed to the lightning-fast transactions of e-commerce, the bar for
speed and service has risen in contact centers worldwide. Despite the introduction of social, chat, and email customer support channels, telephone interactions are still heavily relied upon by customers for urgent and complex matters, with long wait times and call transfers no longer excused as unfortunate, but inevitable, encounters.

Telephony support remains at the heart of customer service and, as such, needs to be brought up to speed to continue to meet customer expectations. Essential to this is integrating your telephony system with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. By adopting a computer-telephony integration (CTI) solution, you can decrease call handle time, ramp up productivity and establish a competitive and sustainable approach for delighting customers on each and every call.

Interested in learning more about integrating your CRM and telephony system? Check out our guide, “3 Rules for Quick, Easy and Budget-Friendly Telephony – CRM Integration.”

More Efficient Call Handling

When it comes to customer support, every second on the line not only costs money, but also tests the caller’s patience. This has driven many contact centers, which are often running on limited resources, to look for ways to optimize their workflows to better manage increasing call volumes. That’s where CTI comes in. The days of agents throttling back and forth between systems to provide support are over. When your telephony system and CRM are fully integrated, the entire customer interaction can be managed from a single unified screen. Not only that, CTI gives your organization the ability to pull data from customer databases, billing systems, and other software to optimize call handling, ensuring callers is quickly provided with answers to their questions or a resolution to their service issue. Armed with CRM-provided data such as customer sales history and the reason for the call, your organization can provide a more personalized and relevant experience for the caller while establishing a less costly and more efficient contact center workflow process.

A Personalized Customer Experience

Even before the call is answered, a CTI screen-pop displays the caller’s name, location, service history and more. No more juggling between databases and asking the customer to repeat his or her information. CTI allows the agents to take quick stock of the caller’s unique profile, enabling them to personalize their interaction. The system also automatically creates a trouble ticket, generating a timestamp and auto-reporting call data, so the agent can focus on communicating effectively with the customer and taking value-added notes to enhance future interactions.

In today’s economy, it’s not enough to deliver a quality product or service. In fact, in Deloitte’s 2015 Global Contact Center Survey, 85 percent of respondents said customer experience as delivered through the contact center was a competitive differentiator. Customers stay loyal to brands that speak to them, and empowering your agents to provide prompt, proactive and empathetic support is a way to say “We hear you” to customers before even saying “Hello.”

About CDC Software

CDC Software’s SaaS and cloud-based solutions empower companies to quickly and cost-efficiently integrate their telephony, CRM, and other mission-critical contact center systems, giving contact center agents the information they need to delight customers – on each and every call. Our solutions create real-time integrations with a lower total cost of ownership and much quicker time to market than a custom integration project. Clients of all sizes use CDC solutions every day to provide a better customer experience. CDC’s unique system integration methodology makes it possible to implement CTI in weeks, rather than the months required by custom coded integration projects. We combine a robust core engine with prebuilt connectors for leading CRMs including Freshdesk and Zendesk and Telephony systems from Cisco, Avaya, Digium-Asterisk and SwitchVox, Mitel and more. As a result, CDC integrations are highly stable, scalable and flexible; if you ever change a system, CDC can simply and quickly be reconfigured to work with it.