What Is Contact Center CRM Software? | Twilio

A contact center enables businesses to build impactful, long-lasting digital relationships with customers using various mediums. In contrast to a conventional call center, a multichannel contact center gives customers their choice of contact method—phone, email, webchat, or social media—to receive the support they need for your company’s product or service.

Then, with robust customer relationship management (CRM) software, your organization can store customer interactions and leads across all channels. This tool allows your company to collect data, route inbound queries more effectively, ensure positive outcomes, and follow up with customers to maintain loyalty.

Here, we’ll explore why a contact center CRM is beneficial and which features to look for as you consider software options.

Does my contact center need CRM?

As contact centers rely heavily on personal, human-to-human interactions, the best call center CRM software helps enhance communication and deliver a positive customer experience. When you track customer conversations and save account history, individual preferences, and service reports, you can resume customer interactions and showcase high-level responsiveness seamlessly.

From an employee perspective, CRM software for your call center streamlines daily operations and drives greater work satisfaction through efficiency. Automated and centralized, a CRM frees agents to build authentic customer relationships and leaves routine note-taking to software automation. With convenient access to real-time user data and high cross-team visibility, you can maximize every opportunity to impress your customers, upsell, and achieve quick resolutions.

Benefits of contact center CRM software

When you automate various customer-centric tasks, you save time—and time is money. But contact center CRM boosts your business in several other ways:

Retains customers

CRM for call centers allows you to track customer interactions, anticipate questions, and resolve problems before escalation. You may also send customized messages, vital reminders, and satisfaction surveys to maintain communication with specific users and create an optimal experience. In the long-term, a CRM-powered, proactive approach can improve retention rates and build stronger brand loyalty.

Streamlines collaboration

More than half of customers (54%) feel a major disconnect as they communicate across departments within a company. You can imagine how time-consuming and disjointed it is—for both employees and consumers—when 65% of customers have to repeat their inquiries to various representatives. With a CRM call center, every agent, regardless of department, can access the same information for effective, real-time collaboration.

Improves productivity

Call center CRM software can automate repetitive and tedious tasks, like data entry or incoming ticket routing. Workflow simplification decreases your customers’ wait time and allows you to address their needs faster.

Tracks performance insights

A contact center CRM collects and tracks key performance indicators that can ultimately improve your customer service. Once you know the average handle time or abandoned call rate, you can identify top performers, provide necessary training, and track agents’ improvement over time.

Personalizes customer service

A CRM system unites data from various points of a customer’s journey, from their contact history to survey feedback. With this information, you can assess their wants more accurately and offer tailored solutions that serve their interests.

5 must-have call center CRM features

As you browse CRM software for call centers, consider your organizational goals and core functions that best align with these needs. Do I want to reduce manual tasks or gain more insight on my customers interests and habits? How much support does my internal team need to initiate this project?

Consider the following contact center CRM features as you narrow down your search:

Automation

An automated call center CRM can cut down on operational costs and reduce the need for human interference. Let’s say that customers have common, recurring questions about a particular product. Instead of agent referrals that use up internal resources, your CRM can automate prewritten responses or lead customers to a relevant FAQ page instead. Your agents can then prioritize higher-level tickets and respond more quickly.

Omnichannel support

CRM software with omnichannel support enables you to communicate with your customers across several channels, such as phone, email, live chat, or all of the above. Providing various choices can foster a more streamlined interaction, as it allows people to freely switch between channels during your conversations. For example, a customer may initially contact you via call but later transition to email to send additional details about their issue. Your CRM can be a powerful tool to keep you connected.

Real-time analytics and reporting

Your CRM can generate real-time analytics reports to help you track crucial call center metrics that reflect your quality of service. For example, if you want to analyze your representatives’ performance, you can measure their average answer speed, first response time, or customer wait time. You can then use this information to equip your workers with the tools and knowledge to address user requests more effectively.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

An AI-powered contact center CRM can be customer- and agent-facing. For customers, your CRM can act as a virtual assistant to resolve common inquiries or pinpoint specific needs. Technology like natural language processing can identify keywords and phrases to offer relevant fixes. For employees, your contact center CRM can leverage predictive analytics to plan the user journey, recognize trends and patterns, and suggest personalized recommendations.

Third-party tool integration

Third-party tool integration can add telephony features like interactive voice response to route calls or multilingual support to communicate with customers globally. Your CRM platform is a powerful, flexible hub for all tools that drive efficiency and maximize potential.

Discover Twilio Flex

If you need a robust customer engagement solution, Twilio Flex can help. With a cloud-based digital engagement platform, you gain the visibility and customization flexibility you need to transform daily interactions into revenue-generating conversions.

With Flex, you can:

• Build personalized customer and agent workflows across multiple channels.
• Integrate with systems like Zendesk and Salesforce to reduce information silos.
• Improve employee satisfaction with tools that enhance productivity.
• Strengthen your existing customer relationships with our in-app digital concierge.

As you modernize your contact center, we recognize that one of the biggest hurdles is consolidating customer touchpoints into a single, streamlined system. We’re here to make that process as seamless as possible. Reach out to our Sales team, and we’ll walk you through your call center CRM integration to take your customer relationships to new heights, or check out our other productivity products for free!