VoIP Integration Challenge
In a business environment where customer relationship management (CRM) systems abound and where voice over IP (VoIP) voice communications system commonly used what’s likely missing is integrating between those two different systems. Here’s why a company would to invest time and resources in developing integration in this area and some typical challenges to be mindful of.
Several significant benefits will be better customer engagement through integration of CRM with VoIP given the improvements for call log collection and call recordings. Efficiency will get a big boost as well, especially where improving automation and eliminating steps for entering data. However, with significant improvements such as integration are concerned, come challenges.
One of the biggest challenges for businesses with applications is integrating customer phone, email, and Web contacts for a consistent customer experience. To address this challenge companies have invested heavily in contact centers, computer telephony integration (CTI), and CRM systems to ensure the quality of every customer interaction.
Although voice calls are still the most popular means of contacting a company, customers are choosing to do business via email or Web collaboration in growing numbers. Recently, companies have struggled to add email and Web sessions into the contact media mix. But contact centers have specific challenges when providing levels of service across all three media channels. These include complex multichannel integration, management of multiple media applications at the agent desktop, and accurate consolidated reporting on service levels by media type.
Integrating these systems is not cheap nor do they require minimal time investment. In fact, many believe them to be complicated. But VoIP promises to simplify integrating phone, email, and Web for e-business communications. VoIP also gives wonderful benefits to the customer service contact center. The appeal of VoIP has been the notion of managing a single, corporate data network for all the customer communication needs of a company. Here are three important benefits when integrating VoIP:
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VoIP saves money, perhaps a lot of money. Labor and telephony costs and reduced and CTI deployments are practically eliminated.
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Straight forward CRM integration. With an IP customer service center on single-network architecture, CTI is built in, reducing deployment time from weeks or months to hours. This includes the integrations of CRM applications like Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Siebel, etc.
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Single platform for web contacts, phone, and email. One platform reduces acquisition and integration costs, and will improve the customer experience.
