10 Software Integrations To Consider for Your CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a powerful solution. It allows you to have a centralized place to store all your customer information, gives you better transparency into your customers, and so much more.
Yet there are ways to make it even more valuable. How? Integrating your CRM with other robust solutions that allow you to break down the silos in your business and gain better insight into your customers and their needs. By utilizing software integrations, you can truly customize your CRM platform and meet your exact needs. You can incorporate a variety of integrations—from email to ERP systems.
Here are 10 popular integrations to consider for your CRM:
1. Email
By integrating your email with your CRM, you can streamline communication and improve customer relationship management. This integration allows users to store all email conversations with clients or customers in one centralized location, making it easier to access, track and manage essential interactions. Doing this not only saves time and effort but also helps to ensure that critical information is not lost or forgotten. In addition, having all email correspondence stored within the CRM can provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can be used to improve customer engagement and overall customer satisfaction.
2. Calendar and Meetings
When it comes to integrations, efficiency is key. No matter the business or industry, everyone uses email and a calendar. You can even integrate meeting software (such as Zoom) into your CRM to schedule and open meetings right inside the CRM.
3. Marketing Automation
Before a contact is a customer, they are a lead. Once they become your customer, you want to keep them as such. In other words, you need to market to them, show your value, and be able to track that. By having your marketing automation and CRM work together, you can streamline your lead-generation process and customer retention activities.
4. Accounting
By connecting your CRM and accounting software platforms, you can streamline operations and minimize the chance of double work. And you can sync so much information—from customer data to inventory items to sales receipt history and orders. Synchronization between the two platforms can occur quickly. For instance, the SugarCRM QuickBooks integration syncs every 10 minutes.
5. TMS
CRM software gives you a significant amount of insight into your customers and prospects. A transportation management system (TMS) takes a deep dive into your supply chain management, which allows you to learn more about your shipping and warehouse.
What happens when you combine these two dynamic systems? You get a 360-view of your customers and their loads, which allows you to gain efficiency and create visibility for anyone who needs it. A TMS/CRM integration helps eliminate silos since all information is accessible in one place. This feature also improves the visibility of important shipping information.
Armed with this data, a company can produce more accurate delivery times, rates, orders, and quotes.
6. Artificial Intelligence
Integrating artificial intelligence with your CRM can provide numerous benefits for your business. Both AI and CRM systems are designed to help you understand and analyze data to make informed decisions and improve customer relationships. By combining these two powerful solutions, you can gain even more valuable insights into your customers and improve your reporting capabilities. The integration of AI with your CRM can also provide your team with greater transparency, allowing them to make data-driven decisions and offer more personalized customer experiences. Ultimately, the integration of AI and CRM can help you stay ahead of the competition and better serve your customers, leading to increased success and growth for your business.
7. Communication
Both for internal and external relationships, communication is imperative. Having one-on-one conversations that are not recorded anywhere can leave a lot of your teammates in the dark. But connecting communication channels (such as Slack) into your CRM can allow you to communicate with team members more effectively and organize conversations by topics, projects, and more.
8. Project Management
As companies begin to experience real growth, bottlenecking between external and internal processes starts to become a problem. It’s no longer a matter of having someone with access to both systems run a quick report. It’s now a matter of not being able to access critical information easily—and without having to rely on a gatekeeper.
Connecting your project management and CRM systems (such as monday.com with Zendesk Sunshine) enables users to synchronize data and display it in both systems.
9. ERP
CRM is the front-office system of a business since it holds all of its information on customers. Meanwhile, ERP (enterprise resource planning) is the back-office system with information on accounting and order management.
By properly syncing a company’s ERP and CRM, you can improve efficiency, eliminate information silos, create and maintain internal controls, and help with inventory visibility.
This connection also lends itself to more accurate business forecasting, and it creates a better overall CRM strategy. By combining your back-office and front-office systems, employees can have a better user experience and a more stable center of gravity.
10. Virtual Assistants
The value of an AI-powered conversational assistant often resides in the context of sales and customer service.
For instance, integrating Conversica with Sugar brings the capabilities of a virtual assistant to enrich CRM data for Leads and Contacts. Utilizing a multi-channel approach to communicate with your Sugar users, you can synchronize all these communications to Sugar and access them anywhere via the Conversica Messages sub-panel.
Conclusion
When it comes to software integration, there are so many options—from quick and easy solutions to highly customizable options. The whole goal of software integrations is to give you better insight into your contacts and create a better customer experience. Integrations also allow you to customize your platform to suit your particular use case.
Are you looking to integrate your software? We’d love to help. Contact us today.
