Critical data often remains siloed in different departments or applications, denying valuable context and insights to your broader organization. This can result in sales teams missing cross-selling opportunities, irrelevant marketing messaging, or product teams lacking informative customer feedback that can guide innovation. While the consequences of these mishaps are clear, the adverse effects on customer experience are the most pressing.
However, integration allows your businesses to gain a comprehensive view of your customers by connecting data across your systems, from service and sales to marketing and product development.
Read on to learn why customer integration is essential for customer success and discover the best practices that ensure seamless collaboration, consistent service delivery, and lower churn rates.
Managing an Ongoing Customer Relationship With Integration
Unifying your company’s data in an integrated ecosystem across various customer success tools and platforms ensures that all departments can access consistent, up-to-date customer information, including personal details and interaction history, enhancing service efficiency and customer satisfaction.
When you integrate customer data, you can build lists of customers and then segment and categorize them based on attributes like industry, company size, use cases, etc. You can then use these insights to make campaigns, training programs, and customer success initiatives more targeted and relevant.
Integrated customer data gives your salespeople more complete visibility into the solutions that different customer segments are already using. Rather than selling without insight, reps can craft targeted sales messaging and plays based on industry and use-case data.
You can also target product releases or growth initiatives more effectively toward the accounts that need them most. This means that expansion opportunities are optimized, and campaigns are well-spent on relevant customers.
You can achieve limited integration with a CRM platform or marketing automation tools. However, by connecting siloed systems through an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) solution like Boomi, you can unify data from disparate applications, systems, and departments to maximize integration throughout your digital architecture and access the comprehensive insights you need to serve and retain customers.
What Is Customer Success?
Customer success entails building deeper and more meaningful relationships with customers to ensure they achieve their goals when using your product or service. It means going beyond basic service to understand their needs and providing education, proactive assistance, or ongoing support throughout the customer journey.
Rather than simply resolving sporadic problems, a successful customer success strategy requires identifying the vital milestones and metrics that customers see as bringing them closer to their ultimate objectives. These include reducing operational expenses, meeting sales targets, improving personnel efficiency, or other business results. Customer success teams should actively monitor these outcomes and provide guidance when customers display early indicators of difficulty or dissatisfaction so they can assist them back on the path toward their targets. Building such strategic alliances strengthens loyalty and trust and ensures customers achieve maximum value from your solutions.
What Are the Eight Top Benefits of Customer Service Integration?
Integrating once-siloed customer data into a single source of truth unlocks powerful insights that can enhance every business-critical process.
Here are the top eight advantages your firm gains from integration:
1. Save Time and Money
Instant information updates and exchanges speed up request fulfillment, enable easy data retrieval, and promote self-service for sales and customer success teams. This saves significant time and cuts the costs of manually handling requests.
2. Boost Productivity
Your agents can retrieve complete customer histories rapidly, improving support team productivity with accessible, comprehensive data access across departments and eliminating constant tool switching.
3. Gain Actionable Insights
Automated processes and tracking tools surface valuable insights and streamline workflows. This aids in more effective strategy implementation. One example is identifying customer expansion opportunities.
4. Enable Proactive Engagement
The early identification of customer issues through integrated CRM and customer success software enables timely intervention. Teams can reach out proactively when they spot problems – rather than waiting for the customer to get in touch.
5. Personalize Experiences
Automated customer segmentation allows for a 360-degree customer view. Highly targeted communications improve engagement and increase satisfaction as customers receive more relevant offers, invites, training, and updates. Integrated customer data also provides visibility into usage patterns and support requests. This informs new product development and strategic roadmaps tailored to customer needs.
6. Increase Loyalty and Satisfaction
Making consistent and comprehensive customer information available across departments reduces repetitive conversations and mistakes. You can reduce their frustration and increase trust and loyalty by eliminating the need for customers to re-explain their issues multiple times.
7. Foster Growth
Integrated systems deliver superior experiences that customers reward with higher renewal rates and reduced churn. Transforming customers into brand advocates drives referrals and grows market share.
8. Enhance Your Competitive Edge
Integration also provides usage insights and request data are useful for helping you develop new product roadmaps and strategies that solve customer pain points.
What Tools Help Integrate Customer Service?
Various tools and platforms can help you integrate your customer service systems and data sources for a unified view of customers. Options to consider include:
CRM Systems
A CRM centralizes customer data, interactions, and support tickets into one accessible platform for all teams and can act as the core source of truth for other systems.
Email Automation
Automated email tools can handle tasks like sending notifications, creating tickets, and adding subscribers automatically, saving your staff significant time that can be better spent on high-value activities.
Messaging Channels
Integrating messaging platforms with your CRM improves customer communication flexibility and enhances agent efficiency through unified interfaces.
Payment Channels
Embedding secure payment options within your customer portals, sites, and services facilitates seamless and secure transactions without forcing customers to switch between systems.
Platform Analytics
Usage analytics integrations give visibility into product adoption and feature usage. They also can predict churn risk – enabling proactive customer success programs.
iPaaS Solutions
Unlike hard-to-manage individual point-to-point or app-to-app integrations, a centralized integration platform as a service (iPaaS), like the Boomi Enterprise Platform, offers the advantages of end-to-end integration. With every app interconnected through the iPaaS, you can orchestrate applications, systems, and data sources more efficiently and create a unified view of your customer data to ensure personalized customer experiences and enable more informed decision-making.
Daylight Transport suffered from inefficiencies that resulted in revenue and employee productivity losses. By implementing Boomi’s iPaaS solution, they gained seamless coordination between previously siloed applications, achieved a 40% to 50% drop in customer inquiries, accelerated delivery and invoicing, and boosted revenue by an additional $800 – $1,000 per day.
How Do You Implement Customer Integration?
To successfully integrate customer data across your organization, following a strategic approach is essential. Here’s how:
1. Identify and Consolidate Data
Start by auditing your existing data ecosystem to identify all customer touchpoints, records, and sources to integrate. This includes customer-facing platforms like your website, portal, service desk, and CRM system, as well as back-office systems for billing, fulfillment, marketing analytics, and more. Compile all relevant customer data into a centralized repository.
2. Leverage iPaaS Golden Records
Boomi DataHub creates golden records in a centralized location that houses single data points that accurately define critical records for your customers, products, and more without the need to set up unique identifiers. Updates synchronize across integrated apps in real time.
3. Appoint Data Stewards
To ensure data quality extends beyond the initial migration, assign internal data stewards to oversee governance policies, promptly address errors, and enforce data integrity. These data stewards can utilize Boomi DataHub to automate record filtering, enrichment, and reconciliation, ensuring the unified customer data remains accurate as changes occur. Boomi Labs tools like Spaces provide data stewards with flexibility and control over their teams’ data management processes.
4. Monitor Performance
Following customer data integration, establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate its effectiveness. Tailor dashboards for each team to monitor data flows, avoiding information overload. Boomi DataHub ensures data trustworthiness and accuracy by creating golden records. Regular monitoring facilitates the identification of improvement areas, data quality optimization, and alignment with business objectives.
5. Prepare for Future Integrations
Your technological landscape is constantly evolving. Plan for the integration of new applications. An iPaaS like the Boomi Enterprise Platform provides a unified platform for current and future integrations, ensuring seamless connectivity. Boomi API Management encompasses governance for the entire API lifecycle, allowing you to manage legacy, end-of-life, and new connections concurrently. This centralized approach keeps your technology organized and adaptable, allowing you to integrate new systems as needed without disruption.
Consider establishing an Integration Center of Excellence (ICoE) to build integration best practices company-wide. Download our ICoE eBook to see why Deloitte advises implementing ICoEs to eliminate up to 80% of the work required for building new integrations.
Achieve Customer Success With Boomi Customer Integration
Integrating customer service systems is critical for collaboration between marketing, sales, and support teams to resolve issues quickly. Shared customer data, assets, and resources let them deliver unified experiences.
Boomi enables quick, cost-effective, no-code integration of all customer applications, data, and devices. Key integration benefits include:
- Pre-built connectors for major CRM, CX (customer experience), and productivity platforms to accelerate unified workflows.
- A drag-and-drop visual interface that simplifies building integrations between custom systems.
- A centralized data and app ecosystem that gives teams a 360-degree customer view.
- Automated synchronization and error handling to maintain data accuracy post-integration.
- With Boomi, teams gain the comprehensive visibility they need to maximize customer success across all channels and departments.
Learn more about how Boomi can help you access and leverage customer data faster with cloud integration and automation with our Customer Data Acceleration eBook.