No matter what your job is, you are measured on performance. But if you are a contact center manager, you aren’t measured solely on your own personal performance. How well your team performs—and how their performance is measured by customers—directly impacts your performance rating and potentially your compensation.
So, how can you ensure that your agents are able to achieve their own performance goals, and in turn support yours? One powerful way is to integrate your customer relationship management (CRM) system and your contact center software.
Your contact center software acts as your single source for customer interaction data across all your channels. And your CRM is your single source for customer relationship data, including identity details, preferences, purchase history, service contracts, and more.
Integrating the two empowers you to use your CRM data to augment the capabilities of your contact center software to create a holistic customer journey view, enabling consistent, exceptional customer experiences and driving better performance for your team, your contact center and yourself.
Here are five Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) most contact center managers are measured on and that you can significantly improve by integrating your CRM and your contact center software.
- Customer Satisfaction: When you integrate your contact center software and CRM, you can deliver the fast, convenient and personalized service that your customers expect. Because you can use your CRM to identify your customer before the interaction begins, they don’t have to repeatedly provide their personal information or explain their past interactions. They are simply routed to the best resource for the fastest resolution—reducing their effort and increasing their satisfaction.
Integrating also enables you to triage interactions or provide tiered levels of service. For example, if your CRM tracks your premium customers—say those with a pre-paid service contract or high-volume purchasers—you can leverage your CRM data to ensure those interactions are prioritized in the queue or routed to a dedicated team for higher touch service.
- Agent Productivity: You can achieve significant agent productivity gains when you integrate contact center software and CRM. When the agent has the information and tools available at their fingertips, they spend less time navigating between and searching separate applications and more time serving customers. Integrated softphone and click-to-dial capabilities from within the CRM reduce agent friction and effort. Automatic data synchronization between your contact center software and CRM eliminates agent after-call work associated with manual system updates.
- Average Handle Time: Integrating your contact center and CRM enable you to shorten call length. Querying your CRM data enables you to identify the customer before the interaction begins to determine the best way to route the interaction based on the specific customer to ensure the quickest resolution. For example, whether it’s routed to the most qualified agent, special queue or self-service option.
Identifying the customer via CRM on the front-end provides agents a full view of the customer history the moment the interaction is routed to them, and then they can quickly determine the next best action to take. Agents also save time by not having to ask the customer for their name, account number, and other information when they receive the interaction. And if your integration provides a unified agent desktop, you can shave additional time off the call duration by eliminating the time agents spend navigating between screens and waiting for applications to respond to queries.
- Wait Time: By shortening the Average Handle Time on your interactions, your agents can take the next interaction sooner, shortening the time customers wait to speak to an agent. Plus, if you use your CRM data to identify customers who should be routed to self-service options, their wait time is eliminated entirely. Want proof? When Swisslog Healthcare implemented NICE CXone Agent for Salesforce, they reduced their wait times by 30%!
- First Call Resolution Rate: By using your CRM data to connect customers to the most qualified agent the first time, you increase ability to resolve the interaction in a single interaction and reduce the number follow-up calls, transfers and consultations.
NICE offers a wide range of pre-built CRM Integrations that consolidate your customer context and contact center functionality into a single interface so agents can handle more interactions in less time, deliver more personalized service to customers, and achieve better business results.
Join us on October 23 to learn more about the benefits of NICE CRM Integrations and how Swisslog Healthcare used CXone Agent for Salesforce to drive significant KPI improvements across its organization.
