Beyond CRM Contact Center Integration: Why Data Unification Is the Key to Customer Service Success

The API integration linking your contact center and your customer relationship management (CRM) tool shouldn’t be holding you back. But for many businesses, it is.

API integrations are lines of code that connect two or more applications, like your CRM and your contact center. The problem is that many API integrations facilitate the bare minimum when it comes to data sharing and functional app connectivity. Instead of unifying data, most API integrations produce piecemeal or fragmented records of your individual and collective customer data, which then need to be painstakingly stitched back together. Important details or entire customer records can be lost or deleted, which hurts your customer experience and, in turn, your bottom line.

To avoid customer data corruption, you need a CCaaS platform that goes beyond CRM contact center integration. You need a CCaaS platform that unifies your customer data within the CRM software—a contact center truly built for modern consumers and modern businesses.

While other cloud contact center platforms were (and still are) busy fighting over whose CRM integration worked the best and who owns the data, the team here at UJET took a different approach. We built a contact center solution that reads and writes all interaction data directly to (and from) your CRM to ensure that your data was accurate, your customer’s privacy was protected, and your customer service team had all the tools they needed to deliver better customer experiences.

What Exactly Is CRM Contact Center Unification?

CRM contact center unification is a step beyond your run-of-the-mill API integration. When your CRM and contact center are unified, they share one source of customer data (which lives in your CRM). Traditional contact centers integrate with the CRM but also store a second set of customer data within their systems.

Imagine that your CRM and your contact center are two remote coworkers collaborating on a document. Each coworker starts by writing their own version in a Word doc, and then they send their respective drafts to each other. The writers make edits and suggest changes to the other’s draft, and they again swap documents. If you’re thinking this process sounds outdated and inefficient, you’re right. But this is what normal API integrations are like: two separate entities overwriting and disjointedly editing each other’s information in two different places.

Thankfully, Quip, Google Docs, and other similar platforms make it easy for two people to read, write, and edit the same document together—without losing data or needing to re-explain something because it got lost in an earlier version. And UJET enables your CRM and contact center to collaborate in much the same way.

Instead of having customer information stored and written in two different places and then shared haphazardly (which creates compromised data on both sides), we designed UJET to read and write directly to your CRM—in real time. This is CRM contact center unification.

4 Advantages of CRM Contact Center Unification

Using a CCaaS platform that unifies with your CRM system isn’t just the logical choice; it boasts four major advantages for your business.

1. Data Accuracy

As we mentioned above, standard API integrations work by linking two completely different data sets. So if you’re using a first-generation cloud contact center with Salesforce, for instance, your customer information is stored on each individual platform. And that information doesn’t always transfer seamlessly back and forth.

UJET solves this problem by not storing your customer information, call transcripts, recordings, or photos in our contact center platform. Instead, UJET reads and writes directly to your CRM, so there’s no risk of duplicate, incomplete, or overwritten data popping up on either platform.

2. Privacy by Design

Another benefit of CRM contact center unification is that it’s inherently compliant and designed to be more secure.

Because UJET doesn’t store customer credit card data, transcripts, or any personally identifiable information (PII), you don’t have to worry about privacy risks. In fact, we practice data minimization company-wide to ensure that your customer information is stored only in your systems.

All cloud CCaaS platforms must also adhere to very strict information security regulations and privacy laws, including HIPAA, SOC, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS, which gives CCaaS platforms an edge over on-site legacy systems that aren’t required to follow the same protocols. But UJET is uniquely advantaged even over other CCaaS platforms because CRM contact center unification makes UJET inherently compliant with data residency laws, too. Since none of your customers’ PII is stored within UJET, you don’t have to worry about data sovereignty.

3. A Better View of Your Customers for Better Support

Unification of your contact center and CRM protects your customer experience.

UJET facilitates real-time data exchange between your CRM and your contact center, so your agents get access to all of the customer data stored in your CRM before they even begin communicating with a customer. Your customer doesn’t have to wait awkwardly on the phone while your agent flips back and forth between screens trying to find the information they’re looking for.

UJET’s intuitive agent user interface (UI) embedded within the CRM puts both interaction controls and actionable insights in one place. This means that not only can your agents provide help faster, but they also have more information to work with, so your customers don’t need to explain the entire history of their relationship with your brand.

UJET enables agents to go beyond omnichannel and actually blend channels together to talk and seamlessly share digital information across email, chat, or voice. Agents can talk to a customer via in-app voice call and have them send a photo of the issue they’re calling about without that customer needing to leave the app or reauthenticate.

Throughout customer interactions, agents are able to add notes for future reference but are free to focus on the customer while the event journey is automatically mapped, and digital media is appended to the CRM record in the background. Agents don’t have to waste valuable time with tedious ACW (after-call work), such as manually transferring information from your contact center platform to your CRM. Instead, they can move quickly from one customer service request to the next, helping more customers in less time, reducing your AHT (average handle time), and boosting your CSAT (customer satisfaction) score.

4. Customer Service Elasticity

The fourth major advantage of unifying your contact center with your CRM is that it enables you to scale customer service operations quickly and efficiently.

For a business to be successful, it needs to deliver a great customer experience even during periods of growth or seasonal shifts in demand. UJET gives both small businesses and enterprise companies the agility to scale up and back down according to their unique needs without compromising call quality, routing, reporting, or customer experience. Our built-in process automations and AI customer service features streamline low-touch interactions. This means that even as your company grows, your agents can devote ample time to high-touch issues, and all of your customers get the support they need.

By partnering with UJET, one on-demand delivery service was able to scale its customer support team 10x to more than 24,000 users in just 40 days when faced with unprecedented demand due to COVID-19. And as brick-and-mortar stores have opened back up, this same company has seamlessly scaled back to meet newly established requirements.

UJET Is the Only Contact Center Purpose-Built for Your CRM

UJET was designed specifically to unify with your CRM. We’re the only CCaaS platform with the data synchronization and hyperelasticity required to provide all of the benefits mentioned in this article. If you’d like to find out how CRM contact center unification could help your business, we’d love to chat. Just fill out this short form, and we’ll be in touch soon.