How a simple integration can improve customer experience

For every organisation, customer data is important. However, the way it is shared across a business can often be flawed. Data that doesn’t get transferred from one platform to another and remains stuck in a legacy CRM or other platform isn’t adding any value to a company.

This can be a frustrating position for account management and operations teams, and leads, ultimately, to poor customer service. At a time when customer service is such an important differentiator, having old, incompatible or unreliable data systems like this in place really can impact a business’s bottom line.

A few months ago we completed a project where a client was dealing with exactly this issue. Data on clients was getting trapped in the sales team’s CRM software and was not being passed on to other teams within the organisation once sales had been closed.

After carrying out a brief discovery phase where we examined and understood the problem, we were able to add a Salesforce integration into our client’s already existing digital systems. This freed up the trapped data, allowing the other established web application in use around the company to import specific fields of customer data from the sales team’s CRM system.

This new integration enabled our client to improve the customer service they were able to offer their clients, as now all departments within the company had access to the sales team’s data. Additionally, with the data now freed up, the company was able to create simple web widgets showing customers their account details and the sales information the company held on them.

The screengrab below shows one of these widgets, the data in which is being fed into the client’s events portal from their CRM platform.

This principle of freeing data up within a company goes beyond event portals though. Anywhere there’s a need to provide customers up-to-date, in-sync information about their account, integrations between your systems to manage the various data streams flowing around your company become key. That might be things like:

• Members hubs
• Customer management portals
• Account management portals

Once you combine your Salesforce data with other functionality within your application such as a chat function, then it can become a powerful integration.