Imagine being the buyer of a luxury pair of shoes that came in the wrong size. You’ve spent over $100 on these shoes, and you’re disappointed, so you contact customer service to start a return.
Two days after submitting your return, you receive an email from the shoe company about how they respond to all customer service inquiries in 24-hours.
This is a bad customer experience. And it’s one that could easily be solved with better customer resource management (CRM) integration between customer service and marketing tools.
Your CRM should be the central place for all customer communications, but in reality, it’s just part of your company’s collection of tools and software — most of which don’t integrate with your CRM. In fact, companies use a whopping 900 applications on average — only 28% of which are integrated in any way.
Integrating as many tools as you can with your CRM improves customer experience and breaks down the silo of information that often exists within each of these tools.
In this article, we’ll discuss why CRM integration is so important and how to execute it.
What is a CRM and why is it valuable?
A CRM is a type of software that bridges the gap between an organization and its customers.
It’s a platform built from several tools that enable you to organize and track all details of your company’s customers in one central place, so that it’s as easy as possible to have good customer relationships, and provide your customers with a good experience.
With a CRM, you can manage the entire customer experience from marketing to sales and support, all on one platform.
What is CRM integration?
CRM integration is a seamless connection between your CRM and any other software applications that your company relies on for day-to-day operations. This includes cloud applications, legacy infrastructure, and on-premises software.
CRM integrations allow data to flow to, from, or between your CRM and those other applications. This creates a CRM system that allows your CRM to always host a complete, accurate picture of your business and customers.
Why is CRM integration important?
If your CRM isn’t integrated with other relevant tools within your organization, then your employees are making decisions about customer communications and sales without all of the information they need.
Without a CRM integration, data is siloed, and that will negatively impact lead generation and your bottom line.There are some use cases where this is obvious.
For example, if your email marketing tool isn’t integrated with your CRM, then how will your sales team know that the person they’ve been chasing for the past 2 months just downloaded your latest whitepaper, and now is a good time for them to reach out?
Other scenarios are less obvious.
Say one of your customers is really enjoying a new bag you’ve just shipped her, and posts about it on social media. Before she shares a photo of the bag, she pastes your logo into the photo.
That day, 2 members of your organization reach out to her — the marketing team, to ask her to be a part of your ambassador program, and the legal team with a cease and desist note for improper use of your logo. These conflicting messages together make a bad customer experience.
Within your organization, each department has multiple pieces of software and systems, all of which house data and information on your customers, like the examples above.
57% of business leaders say that their CRM is fragmented for this very reason — all departments have their own version of a CRM.
CRM integration is important because if the left-hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, it will inevitably lead to gaps in your customer experience.
Solve your CRM integration gaps by integrating data from tools across your organization
First off, you want to make sure you choose a CRM that’s able to be integrated with the other tools your organization uses.
Some popular options include tools like Salesforce, Copper, and Pipedrive. But many business teams use monday.com’s work operating system (Work OS) to build a custom CRM that suits their needs.
Here’s what our CRM template, which serves as the foundation before customization, looks like:
Our CRM template includes functions to help you collect CRM data and data from other software, as well as automate status updates and communications.
This is why companies like Parvenu are embracing monday.com for all their business needs, including customer relationship management.
Parvenu helps retailers and grocery stores raise more money for charity and create in-store engagement through AI-driven personalization. With monday.com, they were able to automate a big portion of their customer outreach initiatives, resulting in a fuller pipeline for their sales teams.
For more detail on how to set up a CRM using monday.com, check out this video:
While monday.com is a complete work management platform, we know it’s not the only tool you have in your arsenal. Which is why — like all CRM software — monday.com works best as a CRM solution when integrated with other tools throughout your organization.
So let’s dive into how to set those up.
How to set up integrations within your CRM
To integrate your monday.com CRM with another tool, you’ll want to first travel to the main board that houses most of your CRM information.
Then, at the top of the board, select the plugin symbol to “plug in” your tool.
From there, you’ll be presented a window that allows you to search for the tool you’re looking to connect with monday.com.
Keep in mind that if you don’t see something on the list, you can likely make it work through integration with Zapier.
From there, you’ll be prompted with questions regarding how you’ll want each integration to function.
This includes which data you’ll want to be shared with monday.com, which data you’ll want monday.com to share with the software you’re integrating, and whether or not you want it all to happen automatically or manually.
Here’s one example of how an integration between Zoom and monday.com might work to improve customer satisfaction:
When you integrate Zoom with monday.com, you can automatically add valuable data to your CRM when meetings are set or completed with clients, and automatically notify other members of the team who might want to know.
When information like this is accessible to everyone, redundant communications are minimized, making for a happier customer.
It’s also common to integrate your organization’s main communication tools with your CRM, like this example of an integration between Slack and monday.com:
Once you’ve integrated Slack with your CRM board, you can automatically send information from Slack to monday.com by specific channels.
You can also notify Slack channels when items are created, updated, or completed in monday.com, for seamless communication between the 2 tools.
Automated communications to customers, leads, and prospects are also important to track within your CRM, and are often accomplished with email marketing software or marketing automation software.
Here’s an example of what that integration might look like between Mailchimp and monday.com:
These are just a few examples of some of the automation that can happen when Mailchimp is integrated with monday.com.
You can automatically trigger drip campaigns when lead status changes, or create contacts and change lead statuses when people respond in a certain way to your email campaigns.
In addition to the marketing team sending those automated emails, the customer service team has a lot of communications with customers that you’ll want reflected in your CRM.
Here’s an example of what an integration between your monday.com CRM and Zendesk would look like:
Once your Zendesk instance is connected with your monday.com CRM, you can share data between the 2 platforms regarding which customers currently have live requests and the status of each ticket.
You can also change the status of leads and contacts in your CRM, based on their status in your customer service team’s ticketing system.
As a final example, let’s walk through how the activities from your engineering team can sync with your CRM using this example between GitLab and monday.com:
With GitLab integrated into your CRM, you can automatically notify the right people on your sales and account management team when products or features releases will directly impact their clients or pipeline.
These examples just scratch the surface — there are so many tools out there that may need to be integrated with your CRM. Here at monday.com, we want to assist our customers in fully integrating their CRM so that data is never siloed.
Without CRM integration, you’re customer experience isn’t as good as it could be
If your CRM isn’t fully integrated with other tools that house customer data across your organization, you’re risking gaps in your customer experience that lead to lost revenue and miscommunication, and can leave an overall bad taste in your customer’s mouth.
Close those potential gaps by using monday.com as a central CRM to make sure data from everywhere is in one place.
monday.com integrates directly with the other tools that your organization is using, including project management tools, software development tools, marketing tools, communications tools, common CRMs, and more.
Not a monday.com customer yet? Get started today with our CRM template.
