7 Great Reasons Why You Should Integrate Your Website And CRM

CRMs are an amazing modern business management tool that starts at contact data organisation and expands from there into a world of convenience and account management. Your CRM has the potential to streamline absolutely everything about your interactions between your company and customers, clients, and business contacts. Of course, your CRM is only truly as useful as the data you feed into it and how accessible it is across departments in your company. The more you centralise and connect your CRM, the more helpful it becomes and the best way to do this is by integrating your CRM with your business website. Here are seven great reasons why:

1) Instant Automatic Data Updates

Your CRM may be designed to hold all the data but your website is where the action happens. Customers make purchases through your eCommerce portal, contact customer support through your contacts page, leave comments on products, and subscribe to newsletters that interest them. Wouldn’t it be great if all this information was not only in your CRM, but automatically available the moment it occurred? Of course it would, and a fully integrated CRM can do just that, sharing all the most recent data with every possible department who are then free to make use of it.

2) Less Time on Tedious Administration

When you are constantly entering data from one program to another, this is called ‘swivel chair’, reminiscent of the old typewriter to filing cabinet relationship in businesses before computers. If your administration staff is still copying duplicate data from your website to your CRM, then your company is losing time and paying people to do something technology can do automatically. An integrated CRM will cut these unnecessary hours so you can assign your administration staff to tasks that really make a difference.

3) Unified Customer Profiles

Having a single file of data on your customers is an invaluable bonus to efficiency and accurate account management. Your sales team will know when shipping has sent an item, and your customer service team will know exactly how long ago a customer’s last purchase was before they called in. This interoperability is just as useful for managing leads caught by outbound or inbound marketing

4) Improved Profiling

How do you know who are your key customers, who is ready to buy again and which leads are ready for conversion? The answer, of course, is profiling, a process that becomes much easier when you have a truly comprehensive collection of data on each customer, client, contact, or lead. This data can easily be gathered through the website and piped directly into the CRM for best use by employees when your CRM and website are integrated.

5) Boost Your Sales

Good marketing, conversion, and profile management are all about data. Knowing who your customers are, how often they return to the website, and what items they prefer to look at can be directed into an integrated CRM which, in turn, will come together as a comprehensive view. This allows you to target not just your imagined buyer personas but real, data-rich customer profiles.

6) Faster Response Time

CRMs are smart, even intuitive, when set up correctly and can be configured to provide incredibly useful actions in response to website activity. No more having to check messages in order to know if a customer has contacted support. Instead, an integrated CRM is more than capable of sending a chiming alert to get the attention of the exact right staff member based on customer location and keywords in their message.

7) Smooth Customer Service

One of the most discouraging experiences a customer can have is when their messages or requests for support slip through the cracks. This can occur easily in non-integrated help desk environments but an integrated CRM would have the ability to keep a note on every customer with an unanswered query and can repeat a service request alert to the help desk employees before a customer has the chance to get impatient. Then, when dealing with a support ticket, your help desk team will have a window into every product, delivery, service, and support request each customer has ever experienced with your company, allowing them to provide excellent and continuous service.

CRMs are incredibly powerful tools for any business, big or small, and so is your website. Whether you have just opened a business or are preparing to celebrate your 50th founding day, you have every reason to integrate your CRM into your website in order to speed up your practices, reduce administration overhead, and drastically increase customer experiences.