With customers spoilt for choice with communications channels, integration with back-end systems becomes crucial if brands are to deliver enhanced customer experiences.
The push for enhanced customer experiences is about a lot more than just having a competitive differentiator: according to PwC’s Future of Customer Experience report, companies who get this right can benefit from a price premium on their products or services and increased loyalty, while their customers are likely to try additional products and services from brands that provide a superior customer experience.
A major challenge, however, is that with consumers now being spoilt for choice when it comes to communications channels, businesses need to ensure that they can have seamless, transparent and personalised engagements with consumers regardless of where they occur.
The key to addressing this challenge is starting with a good customer relationship management (CRM) system, and then integrating it with communications tools in order to provide either multichannel (with a focus on customer engagement, channel-centricity and quantity of channels) or omnichannel (with a focus on customer experience, customer-centricity and quality of customer support) capabilities.
While organisations have been trying to integrate their CRMs with communications since the early 2000s, these were done through a cumbersome process involving legacy equipment such as Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI) drivers. This has begun to change as more organisations adopt cloud-based CRM systems and cloud-based communication platforms, which offer far easier integration capabilities.
In addition, these systems have grown to be more than just customer relationship software and now include many different components that are integral in day-to-day business operations. This can include modules that bring in functionality such as billing and subscription management, quoting, project management, support, human resources, and marketing. Adding communications capabilities to this mix is a natural evolution.
As it is built on Open Standards and APIs, Telviva integrates with several CRM systems that are popular in South Africa in order to bring context to conversations: Telviva One, our Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) product, integrates with Freshdesk, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Zoho; and Telviva Omni, our Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) product, has native integrations with Freshsales, Salesforce, Servicenow, SugarCRM and Zoho. Telviva also works with customers to integrate their legacy or proprietary CRM systems through API calls via triggers and scripts.
Why consider CRM integration
As mentioned above, one of the biggest benefits of integration is being able to enhance the customer experience. This happens because organisations are able to link calls or interactions across digital channels with a particular contact within the company’s CRM system, thereby automatically keeping a record of all engagements in one place, and allowing employees or customer service agents to have more personalised conversations.
Having the Telviva integration inside the CRM further allows users to easily action tasks they have been allocated by the CRM workflow, for example, to make a call, by simply clicking the call button. They no longer need to switch between systems and search around to find the contact, their contact details, and history of past interactions to provide context for the call – it is all available in one place.
Beyond just bringing in the capability to communicate across multiple channels, integration brings in additional features such as regulatory compliant cloud-based call recording or Telviva’s transcription and Generative AI services, which remove the requirement for manual notetaking and can even summarise action items and have them added as tasks within the CRM system. Organisations can also link metadata from the telephony platform such as call reference IDs or call recording IDs to a contact for easy future reference.
Furthermore, businesses integrating Telviva’s business communications tools with their CRM systems benefit from being part of a cloud free-call community that allows for zero-rated calls to 90,000 subscribers on Telviva’s network.
How to integrate Telviva into your CRM
There are currently three ways in which organisations can integrate Telviva’s business communications solutions into their CRM systems:
- For organisations where the CRM needs to be the default tool that teams use to carry out their work, and where complex omnichannel capabilities are not needed, they can integrate Telviva One within their existing workspace. This improves efficiency as employees can make calls without requiring another application or device.
- For organisations with contact centres dealing with larger volumes of interactions and different communications channels, Telviva Omni is used as the ‘single pane of glass’ used by the service agent. In this case, the integration ensures that relevant data from the CRM system is presented to the agent in order to drive personalisation. This works both ways, and any information inputted by the agent is added to the record of the customer in the CRM system.
- Some organisations have invested significantly in developing and customising their own CRM and are unlikely to switch to off-the-shelf products, but still want to bring in communication capabilities without having to add the cost and complexity of having an additional system. Telviva’s Software Development Kit (SDK) allows developers of bespoke systems to embed components of Telviva’s ecosystem into their own systems. This includes calling and call control, contact centre features like pause codes, after call work statuses, and the ability to dashboard key metrics to the service agent. The SDK further provides access to all Telviva functionality, such as call recording, reporting and transcription.
The reality, however, is that not all organisations are the same, and the requirements for what service agents need to perform at their best will vary too. As an example, as much as you want agents to be able to personalise engagements, you don’t want to overload them with too much information, but provide only what is needed. Similarly, workflows will differ as well: one company might want a note or ticket to be added to the CRM post-call, while another might want an automatic WhatsApp message to be sent to the customer with next steps.
Being a South African company with locally-based development teams, Telviva can work with organisations in order to customise its communications solutions to meet their business requirements and help enhance customer experiences through its managed contact centre service.
Whether you require a basic solution or a full-function omnichannel operation, our highly experienced professional service team will help you evaluate the best fit for your needs and your digital journey. Contact us today.
By Kelvin Brown, Customer Operations Executive at Telviva
