Contact Center and CRM Systems: Two Great Technologies That Work Well Together

CRM systems have certain strengths. They keep a record of touchpoints with your customers, their buying habits and everything you’ve ever tried to sell them. A contact center solution has some amazing contributions of its own. It optimizes the agent’s time and ensures that the right call gets to the right agent at the right time. But businesses often suffer from a disconnect between the marketing engine that collects leads and adds them to the CRM system, and the sales team who closes deals and builds revenue. Automating the workflow and eliminating the manual effort of passing the baton from one team to another overcomes this obstacle.

Combining the CRM system and contact center technologies to leverage the best of both is a “peanut butter and jelly” technology love story—taking two things that are great on their own and combining them to make something that’s even better together. That’s the case with the new Genesys PureCloud for Salesforce Campaign Management integration.

The PureCloud for Salesforce Campaign Management feature ties together the standard Salesforce campaign object and PureCloud Dialer campaigns, so you can connect the right call with the right agent at the right time. The campaign members that are part of the Salesforce campaign are synced to a corresponding contact list within the PureCloud platform, placing them in the list of upcoming outbound phone calls. Scheduling, time zone assignments, and even the sort order of the contact list are set from within Salesforce, allowing the CRM system to drive these outbound dialer calls.

Automatic Integration Capabilities

Hooking into the standard Salesforce campaign object highlights the benefits of each system. The CRM system allows workflows to determine when to add someone to the campaign based on a set criteria. For example, if a prospect filled out an online form and was verified to have a valid phone number, email address and physical address, you could add that prospect to the campaign and call him first. This is where the integration kicks in, passing the baton to the PureCloud platform.

PureCloud now has that customer entered in the contact list and placed in line based on the sort order. The Dialer looks for factors—such as the number of agents available, pacing of calls and configuration of the campaign—to determine when to place the call. It then uses the ACD engine to route the call to the right agent based on workflow rules, skills-based assessments and any other constraints you’ve added to the contact center. Once the call reaches the right agent, a screen pop appears on the customer’s contact record in Salesforce, delivering all of the CRM context to the agent. This helps the agent close the deal.

If the agent uses the PureCloud for Salesforce client, an activity record that logs the call is created and associated to the contact. The whole process happens automatically—from the web form to the call log and everything in between.

Improved Reporting Without Significant Customization

The integration also improves reporting capabilities. Campaigns in Salesforce generally start as marketing activities; whether it’s a radio advertisement, direct email campaign or a new promo on your website, each campaign lets you define a budget for that set of activities. The PureCloud Dialer Campaigns can be a subset of these activities, complete with their own budget.

When the agent closes the sale with the customer, the revenue from that sale is attributed back to the Salesforce campaign. This gives you access to a variety of reports that can calculate the ROI of the Dialer campaign, the web form or any set of metrics you want to analyze regarding the money you receive from your customer versus your marketing spend. These reports also provide a straightforward way to attribute revenue back to the Dialer—something that often required significant customization in the past.

The integration still works if you’re in predictive dialing mode, but do not have an agent associated at the time the call is made, or if you’re running an agentless campaign. At the end of the campaign, the integration reconciles the results from the Dialer contact list back to the campaign member in Salesforce. This provides the final disposition of the contact list for use in reports within Salesforce, closing the loop for you—even if the call never connected to an agent to generate a call log.

This integration enables you to use the PureCloud Dialer feature in more sales- and marketing-focused projects. By leveraging existing business workflows in the CRM system to determine who to dial, and then allowing the Dialer to determine when to call them, you supercharge the entire process.

The Dialer makes your agents more efficient at handling calls while the CRM system makes those calls more efficient by putting context directly at the agents’ fingertips. It’s just another example of the contact center and CRM system working better together.

For more information about campaign management in PureCloud for Salesforce, visit the PureCloud Resource Center.