If you’re at the beginning of your automation journey, it can be tough to choose which solution makes the most sense for you. One thing you’ve probably heard all about is the importance of integrating your bot into your CRM. But what exactly does that mean and why is it so important?
Essentially, it means that your customer service software and your virtual agent platform speak to each other. This makes sure that your data is consistent across both platforms and creates a better experience overall for both you and your customers.
Whether you’re using Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshworks or another contact center software, here’s a few reasons why choosing a bot provider that integrates into your CRM will ultimately save your business time and money.
Ensures a seamless customer (and agent) experience
When your bot is integrated into your existing CRM and website set-up, your chat widget will both look and feel like your brand. And, if your customer’s issue ever has to be escalated to a live chat agent, they’ll experience a seamless transition from bot to human agent within that same widget.
Not only will this look consistent, but your agents won’t have to learn a new interface. In addition, your agents will receive context from the bot, including historical conversation data, information collected to assist with their inquiry, and tags or prioritization assigned by the bot. Basically, before the customer gets to your agent, your bot has collected all the necessary information to help the agent help them faster. And it means that the customer never has to repeat their inquiry or confirm their information.
According to a global Statista survey:
“21% of respondents claimed that not having to repeat themselves when transferred to a new customer service agent improved their perception of customer service.”
- Statista
Creates personalized customer interactions
It’s clear that many customers now expect not to have to repeat themselves within the context of a single interaction with a company, but why stop there? If your systems are connected, your virtual agent has access to all past interactions with your customers. It can also determine the user's locale, the device they are using, their VIP status, and more, allowing your bot to personalize every customer experience.
According to an Epsilon Research Report:
“80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a business that offers personalized customer experiences.”
- Epsilon
This can make customer interactions faster and easier. For example, one of our customers in the online gaming industry makes use of their bot’s advanced actions to identify if a customer is logged in or not. If a customer isn't logged in, the bot asks them a series of security questions before escalating them to an agent. If the customer is logged in, they are able to bypass the security questions. This leads to a significant reduction in average handling time (AHT).
Read up on the power of personalization
Reduces silos in your organization
Your virtual agent can also help reduce silos in your organization by greeting your customers in one place and funneling them to the appropriate teams. It can qualify a lead and send that to the sales team or it can recognize an issue that needs to be solved by a human and escalate that to the CX team, saving time for your customers and your agents.
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Additionally, if your virtual agent platform has a robust backend that’s integrated with your customer service software, it will provide a single view that tracks and analyzes how your bot is impacting agent performance and support metrics across your organization. This can help you gather the context about your support inquiries with a breakdown of AI recognized topics (without any manual or keyword searching).
You can also see which types of inquiries are escalated the most and determine if they can be improved via better conversation design or an integration into your backend systems. Inevitably, some inquiries will always have high escalation rates. This simply means that these are best answered by human agents so they can use their empathic touch to provide value to your customers.
“Today we automate complex end to end conversations and processes, categorize tickets and help our agents navigate through their daily chats. With ultimate.ai we also measure CSAT closely and they are constantly helping us not just automate but also improve the customer experience.”
- G2 Review from Aditya J.
Read all our reviews on G2, the leading tech review platform where verified users share experiences and feedback on software solutions.
Ensures security
Choosing a bot that integrates with your customer service software means that the bot will sit behind the security layer of your CRM widget. You already trust your CRM provider with your data, so by choosing a virtual agent platform that they’ve worked with before, you know you’re using another trusted company, and the data transfer will be seamless and secure.
Reduces costs
One huge advantage of a virtual agent platform that integrates into your CRM is that you don’t need to hire the technical resources to connect the two systems, because the integration has already been built (and tried and tested by many companies).
What’s more, you’re utilizing the capabilities of the product that you’re already paying for and your agents already know how to use (for example, Zendesk’s built-in chat widget). This saves money for you and saves time for your agents who don’t need to learn a new platform. Basically, there are significantly fewer extra set-up hurdles since you’re working within the same system and you never have to compare two different sets of data.
All in all, if you’d like to create consistently great experiences for your customers, save money for your business and time for your agents, the decision to go with a virtual agent platform that integrates into your CRM should be a no-brainer.