Over the years, customer relationship management tools (CRMs) have evolved beyond merely storing customer data to robust tech-integrated systems with multiple functionalities in one.
Many of these additional functionalities, such as sending emails and scheduling appointments, are possible thanks to third-party integrations. These integrations enable you to extend the CRM's functionality beyond its native features.
The benefits of doing this include saving time, seamless data capture across various applications, reduced workload, and fewer errors and inaccuracies.
In this article, we extensively discuss the types of CRM integrations and how leading global companies are leveraging them to close more deals.
Third-party integrations in CRM refer to the process of connecting CRM software with other applications or services. These integrations aim to enhance and extend CRM functionality and sometimes effectiveness.
Third-party integrations allow businesses to use additional tools and data sources to manage customer relationships better and streamline essential processes like tracking sales and creating targeted email campaigns.
Integrations help you create a super CRM app tailored to your needs. You can have a unique customer management need, find an app that solves that need, and connect that app to your CRM.
The reality is that you can connect to as many apps as you need, depending on the integration capabilities of your CRM. The benefits of CRM integrations include:
Every integration brings additional functionality, allowing you to perform additional tasks and access more features from within your CRM without switching between different applications.
For example, you can integrate your CRM with an app like Calendly to make scheduling meetings seamless.
You can connect your CRM systems to a tool like Zapier for customized automated workflows. This means that you can set up the workflow once based on certain triggers and events, such as a customer filling out a form.
Such automation reduces manual efforts and workload and increases productivity.
CRM integration enhances team collaboration, especially with customer support/success, marketing, and sales teams.
For example, a customer may have pending and unresolved issues with the customer support/success department. Due to the right integrations, a salesperson can see all previous customer interactions, offering more context and awareness as they work on a new deal with the customer.
Where necessary, they can work with the support team to resolve the issues more speedily by giving the customer’s issue a bigger priority.
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Putting all customer data into a single repository gives you greater visibility and insights into your customers. External sources enrich CRM data with valuable information, enabling you to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs.
By depending less on manual data entry, you eliminate or reduce errors and discrepancies in your CRM records, enabling you to make more accurate data analysis and take appropriate actions where necessary.
The potential integrations for CRM are endless. The only limit is the integration capabilities of the CRM software you’re using. Here are some of the most common types of CRM integrations:
Email integration connects your CRM platform with an email marketing software or service provider. This integration achieves three primary functions:
Through email integration, all emails sent and received by sales reps or customer service agents are automatically logged and linked with the associated leads, contacts, or accounts. You can connect most CRMs with email clients like Gmail and Outlook.
Sales team members can access their email correspondence within the CRM anytime, making all relevant details about a lead or customer readily available without switching between multiple applications to view communication history or respond to emails.
Another use case of email integration is that you can create and automate email campaigns within the CRM platform using email marketing software like Mailchimp.
You can use the rich customer data at your disposal to segment your customers or customers based on predetermined factors and deliver targeted, personalized email campaigns.
For example, you can send special offers to leads who have shown interest in the past but are yet to make a purchase or follow-up emails to customers who recently subscribed to your services.
You can also track metrics like bounce rate, open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and more through email integration. You can use such insights to fine-tune your email marketing efforts.
Every business schedules meetings and appointments through apps like Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook Calendar, and Calendly.
Calendar integration in CRM enables you to do this and to track these events from within the CRM platform. Calendar integration offers four significant benefits, including:
With calendar integrations, the changes you make in the CRM calendar reflect in the external calendar and vice versa.
You can create, update, or delete appointments and events within the CRM platform, and these changes are automatically reflected in Calendly or any external calendar.
Similarly, changes made in the external calendar are synced back to the CRM, ensuring consistency and accuracy of scheduling across both platforms.
Calendar integration also provides a centralized view of appointment schedules from within the CRM interface. Team heads can see upcoming events and take proactive actions when the assigned sales rep is unavailable.
Team heads can reassign meetings to another sales rep as necessary or contact the client to reschedule them in emergency cases.
This centralized view of the schedule also makes it easy to identify a sales rep’s availability for meetings when joint meetings are needed, facilitating the coordination of activities.
Another benefit of using calendar integration is that you can set up reminders and alerts for meetings, ensuring you stay organized and well-prepared.
Accounting integration establishes a two-way sync between your CRM software and an accounting tool like Quickbooks Online and Sage Accounting.
As such, when you create an invoice or receive any payment in the accounting software, the relevant data is automatically synced with your CRM, ensuring that customer records are up-to-date with accurate financial information.
Similarly, any changes to customer details on the CRM are reflected in the accounting software in real time.
Consequently, you can easily view payment history, outstanding balances, and transaction details for each customer from within the CRM system, providing a comprehensive view of customer financial interactions.
Other advantages of accounting integration include:
You can easily tie revenue to the right sources, such as sales conversations, marketing activities, and email campaigns within the CRM, by connecting CRM and sales data.
Knowing what sources contribute to the bottom line makes it easier to understand what strategies work and which sales agents are productive and effective.
Accounting integration also streamlines the invoicing process by allowing you to create and send invoices directly from the CRM platform (or accounting software).
Social media integration connects your CRM software to all the social media platforms you’re active on. With this integration, you can:
Integrating social media into your CRM system allows you to harvest more customer data. You can capture data such as interests, demographics, and engagement history and associate them with customer records.
This provides a better profile for each customer, helping you craft better marketing strategies and personalize your interactions.
You can tailor content, offers, and recommendations to customers' interests and preferences, driving customer engagement and conversions.
Social media integration allows you to capture social media interactions and convert them into leads. Most CRM systems will also automatically create lead records from social media interactions. You can then manually or automatically assign each lead to sales representatives for follow-up.
Social media integration also helps you monitor conversations and sentiments about your brand, products, or services. Thus, you can proactively address negative sentiments about your products in real-time.
Connecting your CRM to surveys and customer feedback platforms can help you stay ahead of your customers’ needs. SurveyMonkey reports that 83% of successful companies actively measure customer satisfaction.
This integration helps you gather valuable insights from customers, prospects, and stakeholders at different interaction points and across multiple channels.
Ways survey and feedback integration helps businesses include:
With this integration, CRM systems can survey responses and sentiments and associate them with the relevant customer record.
These survey and feedback insights can enrich each customer’s profile, providing valuable information to segment and personalize your interactions with each customer.
The insights also help you refine your marketing messages on a macro level.
Survey and feedback integration allows you to create survey templates and feedback forms and design the distribution of the same when specific events or actions are triggered.
For example, you sometimes get a feedback form in your mail after interacting with the support staff of another startup. Automating survey distribution can increase response rates, allowing you to collect valuable, actionable insights at critical junctures.
Another major type of CRM integration is connecting CRM with customer service platforms like Zendesk, LiveChat, and Intercom. Customer service tools enable businesses to deliver excellent support through features such as ticket management, analytics, and help desk management.
Customer service integration provides the following:
When a customer submits a ticket or phones in, support staff can readily access the customer’s information, including details such as past purchases, previous tickets, and preferences.
This information helps customer service reps deliver more context-rich and personalized support, effectively addressing issues and increasing customer satisfaction.
You’ll likely want your most experienced support staff to attend to your top-tier customers. Customer service integrations ensure support tickets are assigned based on predefined criteria, such as experience, skillset, workload, or specialization.
We’ve talked extensively about the different third-party integrations possible with CRM systems.
Top companies combine these integrations to increase efficiency, boost productivity, gain customer insights, and ultimately increase sales and revenue.
Here are some of the innovative ways successful companies use third-party integrations:
Sales forecasting is a vital endeavor for all businesses. Leveraging additional data and insights from your CRM system, in addition to historical sales data, makes the process more dynamic and accurate.
With the different integrations we discussed earlier, you have consolidated customer data in one central location, making the sales forecasting process more streamlined.
Additionally, you can finetune your sales forecast using customer preferences, behaviors, and feedback. For example, Lead Quality Evaluation provides insights into which leads are more likely to convert to sales.
Combining this insight with metrics like conversion rate and sales velocity can help you better estimate how many of your current leads will convert to sales and when.
An accurate picture of your leads pipeline will transform your sales forecast and make them more precise.
While many CRM tools come with lead qualification and nurturing features, third-party integrations help provide a more holistic view of each lead, leading to better conversion rates.
For example, you can integrate your CRM system with web forms and surveys that help collect more information about a customer. And since you already have your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), you can filter out leads that are more likely to convert.
Integration with marketing automation tools helps you engage and nurture high-potential leads, nudging them through the sales funnel. Automation ensures customers receive timely follow-up and relevant content that addresses their needs.
Because you have comprehensive data from multiple sources on each lead, you can personalize your outreach individually or by segmenting leads into groups.
Integrations with calendar tools help you schedule 1:1 or 1:many meetings, demos, or webinars with your leads.
We’ve already mentioned how customer service integration makes customer data accessible to support teams, enabling personalized support.
Another way top companies use CRM integrations is by automating customer service tasks. For example, many companies track customer satisfaction by mailing feedback forms after you’ve interacted with their customer service agent.
Your response will also elicit further action from the company, primarily if you provide a negative rating. These emails are automated and based on specific triggers.
Implementing a similar strategy, you can use customer feedback to identify areas for improvement.
Automated emails also confirm to the customer that you received their request. The automated emails may also contain helpful resources, with the client potentially no longer needing human support.
Integrating CRM with third-party apps, especially marketing automation and data enrichment tools, can shorten the sales process, reducing the time it takes every lead to pass through the sales funnel.
This is possible through:
Top companies also leverage CRM integrations to predict future customer behavior. This can help you manage and allocate resources more effectively.
Rather than chasing numerous leads simultaneously, tools such as customer scoring can help focus efforts and resources on a few leads that are more likely to convert. Customer scoring attaches a score to each lead based on their conversion likelihood.
Another predictive tool, early customer detection, can enable you to identify customers likely to churn, helping you take proactive measures to keep them.
Predictive analytics also helps unearth potential cross-selling and upselling opportunities among your customers.
All these are possible because of the rich data bank built through third-party integrations with numerous vital apps.
Many CRM tools have pre-built connections to connect with popular external apps like Gmail, Slack, Outlook, SurveyMonkey, and more.
However, these built-in connections only cover some software in the market, hence the need for CRM integration tools. These tools, or Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS), serve as a bridge to connect disparate software.
The best tools in this group include:
Zapier is a tool that connects different apps and makes them work together. It lets you create automated tasks, called "Zaps," without needing any coding skills.
For example, you can automatically save email attachments to Dropbox or send new leads from a form to a CRM. The automated tasks are triggered based on the rules you set.
Integrately’s one-click automation makes it a must-have in our list. With millions of pre-built workflows and over 1,000 apps, its extensive integration options will likely suffice for your needs.
Integrately also features more than 2,500 Hubspot CRM integrations.
MuleSoft, now acquired by Salesforce, is an IPaaS platform favoring more complex and custom integration needs with its API framework.
The platform features a drag-and-drop feature, making the integration process intuitive and straightforward.
CRM integration is essential and beneficial to all businesses, but its implementation has some challenges.
The scale and complexity of the challenges typically depend on the size of the business, the fragmentation of the existing tech stack, and individual needs. For example, some complex integrations may require building custom connections from scratch.
Here are some of the most common CRM integration challenges you’ll likely experience:
Data consistency can be challenging when syncing data from multiple sources due to inconsistent data standards and formats. To avoid data inconsistency, perform data mapping and normalization before integrating the third-party app into your CRM.
Most CRM systems have integrations, but you may need to subscribe to a higher tier to access some of them. Using CRM systems with broad ecosystems can minimize costs.
For example, the HubSpot ecosystem includes a CRM, marketing automation tool, content marketing tool, and more, making integration easier and cost-friendly.
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Integrating disparate systems with varying technologies, APIs, and data structures may result in compatibility issues. Careful planning and testing before going live can mitigate this risk.
The more external apps you connect with your CRM, the more exposed it is. It’s, therefore, essential to secure and protect sensitive customer data and ensure compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
Some of the best practices to minimize disruptions and overcome the challenges discussed above include:
Third-party integrations play a pivotal role in enhancing CRM systems for top companies.
Connecting various applications allows you to streamline processes, boost productivity, and gain deeper insights into customer behavior.
These integrations offer multiple benefits, from sales forecasting to providing prompt customer service and leveraging predictive analytics. Despite common challenges like data inconsistency and compatibility issues, implementing best practices ensures successful integration.
Ultimately, effectively using CRM integrations is essential for business growth and nurturing better customer relationships.
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