What is CRM integration?

CRM systems are usually integrated with other systems or data sources by using application programming interfaces (APIs), an integration platform as a service (iPaaS), middleware, or prebuilt connectors, which synchronize the data and workflows among the various applications.

By integrating CRM platforms with other business systems, organizations can create a single source of truth (SSOT). A unified system can deliver greater data accuracy and context, which can accelerate and improve analysis, planning and forecasts. It can also strengthen workflows and performance in related initiatives such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), e-commerce, marketing automation and support desks.

Automation is often used in integrated systems to organize data and streamline workflows. In the case of CRM integration, an IT team might deploy automations that centralize customer data from various applications, such as email, e-commerce or subscription platforms. This consolidated data can then be used to help create more targeted sales or marketing initiatives that drive revenue and customer retention.

By improving data visibility, CRM integration helps organizations manage and measure their lead generation and sales pipelines on a single, customizable dashboard—helping to boost productivity.

CRM systems and integrations continue to advance by using artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver new capabilities and efficiencies across the entire customer lifecycle. For example, customer service can rely on conversational AI to respond to customer requests. Marketing teams can use generative AI to create personalized emails. And the sales team can use predictive AI to score leads.

Many CRM solutions, whether for large enterprises or small businesses include built-in connectors for integration with additional data sources that help business teams extract valuable insights from cross-platform data. Data is usually stored at every step of the customer lifecycle, with a business process in place for every touch point. Integrating CRM data with every step can help make every contact more efficient and reliable.

• Accounting and billing
• Business intelligence and analytics
• Commerce
• Customer service
• ERP
• Help desk
• Marketing
• Sales
• Social media 

Integrating accounting software with CRM software might help to streamline functionality by eliminating duplicate data entry and creating new efficiencies. For example, an integrated CRM might send out payment reminders and make automatic updates when bills are paid. Contact information, purchase histories, invoices and payments can all be integrated. 

Business intelligence—a “set of technological processes for collecting, managing and analyzing organizational data”—and analytics can be integrated into existing workflows to help sales reps, marketers and other stakeholders make more informed decisions.

Many sales intelligence implementations seamlessly integrate data collection and analysis into daily activities and existing platforms. For example, AI-powered agents can make CRM updates, indicating lead prioritization and follow-ups. CRM integration helps ensure that data is available when and where sales reps need it most, while cross-departmental collaboration maintains alignment.

A new customer’s first point of contact is often a website. With CRM integration, data captured from those interactions can be automatically updated in a CRM solution without manual data entry. E-commerce and retail communications can combine CRM data with web interactions, social media contacts or shopping profiles to help tailor follow-ups, including product recommendations, offers and special pricing.

A contact center as a service (CCaaS) platform provider might integrate an organization’s existing systems, including its CRM system. A CCaaS can also support omnichannel communications such as voice calls, messaging apps, email, live chat, social media and SMS (short message service).

To quickly assist customers with questions or complaints, customer support teams might have access to integrated data, including complete contact information, inventory, shipping, billing, sales history, current marketing campaigns and past interactions.

Customer service and incident solutions include Jira, Salesforce Service Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud and Zendesk. Even an e-signature service, such as Docusign, can be integrated with CRM to speed the signing of contracts and NDAs (non-disclosure agreements).

Organizations use enterprise resource planning systems to connect and manage core business processes, such as finance, procurement or supply chain in an integrated system. They are designed to manage and streamline an organization’s functions, processes and workflows by using automation and integration.

An ERP system can be combined with a CRM system to help provide a smooth data flow between sales, inventory, customer support, production and finance departments. This integration offers a complete view of operations and customer interactions, enabling informed decision-making across departments and enhanced customer service. 

A support team member can more quickly assist a customer contacting the organization’s help desk if they have immediate access to a robust customer profile. For example, being able to view all customer information and the customer profile together with past or current support tickets, plus current web or phone actions.

Focused marketing campaigns are often based on highly specific targeting data. Those targeted segments or individuals can be determined, and corresponding messaging developed, with CRM information combined with available data for past campaign responses, sales history, service records and current inventory. Integrations with email platforms and apps such as Slack can enable targeted customer activation.

Sales team performance can be boosted by integrating information about prospects, customers, competitors and market conditions. This information can help sales reps identify opportunities, personalize sales strategies and use real-time data to close deals more effectively.

This data-driven approach helps sales reps understand their target audience’s pain points, buying behaviors and decision-making processes.

Social media can be a valuable source of customer data when social media platforms and aggregators are integrated with a CRM platform. Many platforms can automatically gather and save social media messages, enriching the insights into each customer. This information might assist with customer service and sales initiatives—such as creating customer segmentation—and can help drive customer satisfaction.

A CRM can be integrated with other apps and services in multiple ways. A common first step in the integration process is to consider which apps will be connected and how much technical expertise will be required.

Many CRM suppliers either include prebuilt connectors or offer them off-the-shelf to be downloaded, installed and maintained with minimal expertise. These “native integrations” are generally highly reliable, because they were developed for a particular system by the systems developer and often for connection to a particular app. This specific intended use might also mean that they are less flexible than other connectors.

When native integrations are not offered, there are often third-party integrations available for connecting CRMs to other platforms and applications, such as Zapier and Workato. Because they are created independently from the CRM or other applications, they are usually designed to be more flexible and are suited to multi-platform integrations. Often, these connectors are offered as low-code or no-code tools, meaning that a developer is not needed for configuration and creating automated processes. 

CRM integration can be simplified with an integration platform as a service (iPaaS), which is a suite of self-service, cloud-based tools and solutions used to integrate data from multiple applications hosted in different IT environments. iPaaS platforms can help improve organizational flexibility, facilitating the integration of many applications and platforms, regardless of where they are hosted. iPaaS enables enterprises to build and deploy integration flows that connect applications and data hosted in public and private clouds and between the cloud and on-premises data centers.

By connecting ERP systems and CRM systems through an iPaaS provider, an enterprise can help eliminate data silos, build cross-platform automations and save themselves the extra technical tasks of configuring and maintaining an integration. 

If they have the expertise in-house, organizations might have developers write the code for their own tailored integration. This custom development might provide exactly the tools required by an organization, but this also includes the ongoing responsibility to maintain that system. Any changes to the CRM or integrated applications might stop them from functioning together.

Integrating a CRM platform together with almost any software application or system will enrich the value of both. By helping to break down data silos—such as between CRM software and project management, social media, enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain, or order and inventory—a well-planned CRM strategy helps organizations use internal data together with third-party applications—on-premises, legacy or in the cloud—to work smarter and faster.

Regardless of organization size, integrated CRM platforms help unify data entry, business processes and security. Forrester’s CRM Playbook indicates that 61% of global software decision-makers were implementing, had implemented, or were expanding their implementation of customer service software. Meanwhile, 58% of software decision-makers intend to do the same for sales force automation (SFA) applications.

• Boost sales
• Better customer service
• Improve efficiency and ROI
• Clearer insights
• Greater data accuracy
• Closer team collaboration

By integrating customer data with other systems and existing workflows—such as inventory systems—together with complete customer data, organizations can build detailed customer profiles so that sales reps are able to close sales with more confidence. If inventory is low or out-of-stock, the representative might make alternative suggestions or even upsells.

Purchase history can be compared to product availability for an e-commerce team to send targeted offers. Integrated data might be drawn from marketing automation tools, prospecting tools or webpages to help turn leads into customers.

Using a single source of truth, with access to customer history, a customer service team can streamline the customer experience with quick and accurate information. For analysis of customer service team performance, integrated systems with consolidated dashboards might show metrics such as customer satisfaction score (CSAT), average speed of answer (ASA) and average resolution time (ART).

Siloed data sources might require multiple sign-ins, redundant data input and cross-checking—and cause potential confusion. With all customer interaction data in a unified system, access can be in real-time and clearer to all teams, helping to streamline analysis and tasks.

Manual processes that might be needed to reconcile various databases can be eliminated, helping speed business functions. Within an integrated system, many functions—such as customer support and email marketing—can be automated to save even more time, with many CRM systems including simple-to-use automation builders.

Before integration and a centralized customer database, multiple and conflicting sources of customer data can cause confusion. In a commissioned study conducted by Forrester on behalf of Salesforce, 58% of respondents agree or strongly agree that “customer, prospect, and account data comes from too many sources to easily make sense of it.” 

Using integrated CRM solutions, customer information and data can be synced automatically between a CRM and multiple software applications, helping to better define market segmentation. The connected apps can include internal data sources, and even third-party services, such as Salesforce, in multiple locations so that all teams have the latest and most accurate information.

A data integration can speed cross-platform workflows, to both increase accuracy and save time. For example, with CMS integration, an event in a Google Calendar can be automatically updated in a CRM platform. Or, if a client payment is recorded by integrated accounting software, that payment can be updated in the individual client file—saving the time and effort of redundant input.

Integrating CRM with other systems helps to provide a single source of truth across an entire organization. This SSOT enables customer service teams, IT, marketing and sales to improve forecasting, and to view and act on the same customer data. 

While there are many advantages to integrating a CRM with other data sources, there are also potential issues to be considered.

• Data duplication
• Overconfidence in automation
• Security risks
• User training

When a CRM is integrated with other data sources, there might be duplicate information from those other sources or conflicting information—which might lead to confusion, slower performance or the overwriting of valid information.

Increased automation can be a time-saver, but might also take attention away from verifying how, when, where and by whom data is being accessed. Careful oversight is important for data security. 

Because data is being shared across multiple platforms and each platform might have different privacy, security and encryption standards, a security issue or breach in any platform might endanger the data in all of them. In addition, permissions issues or varying permissions needs for different platforms can complicate integrations. Many iPaaS solutions provide tools that enable tiered access and permissions.

Each team is familiar with their own systems and might at first resist the new integrated system. Clear and well-administered training can help teams embrace the benefits of new integrated systems. 

New AI-powered tools integrated with, or embedded in, CRM systems can speed and strengthen customer service, sales and marketing efforts. For example:

• Conversational AI can power chatbots and virtual agents to respond to customer requests and help them gather the information they want—enhancing their customer experience.
  
  
• Generative AI can create personalized communications and intelligent notifications such as emails and texts to quickly and efficiently maintain a dialog with customers. 
  
  The vast amount of data generated by an integrated CRM platform might overwhelm a traditional system. Making sense of this flood of data is another way generative AI tools are changing how CRM systems work today. 
  
  
• Predictive AI can analyze datasets to spot trends, score leads, forecast sales and plan for future campaigns.