Salesforce & Customer Support Software: Integrating the Two
All successful businesses now have some sort of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software in place. From free solutions for small businesses to million dollar contracts for global companies, CRM software can range greatly in price, value, and capabilities. One of the most popular tools for businesses of all sizes to manage their relationships with customers is Salesforce. Let’s look at why companies choose Salesforce, how it’s different from customer support software, and most importantly how the two work together.
What’s the difference between customer support software and a CRM like Salesforce?
First, let’s define a CRM and its specific uses. A CRM is meant for keeping track of customer records – interactions with emails, websites, salespeople, and everything in between – so it’s easy to determine how many times a customer has interacted with your business and what your employees have told them in the past. This intelligence is leveraged to create smarter and more efficient customer communication.
While some companies do use a CRM as customer support software, it’s far from an ideal fit. The big difference is that support software is designed to handle customer issues more efficiently and aims to prevent future issues. Support software records and tracks the issues customers are having with your company as well as any feature and product requests they may have. Support software powers these issue-related conversations through collaborative solutions such as live chat and email tickets. This lets employees work together in real-time to resolve customer issues.
How does Salesforce and a customer support software work together?
As noted above, there certainly is some overlap between a CRM like Salesforce and support software because both are in the businesses of having smarter customer conversations. This overlap can be utilized to share information through a bi-directional information link between the two systems. A link is important to break down the silos between the business development and support teams so each group knows what the other is doing. A Salesforce CRM integration also eliminates the need to re-enter information such as customer contact information, ticket data, and values in custom fields so they are in both systems.
For example, let’s say a key contact at a large customer gets a new phone number. Instead of having two different phone numbers in two systems and wondering which one is right, the number entered most recently will overwrite the old one. This happens regardless of whether the new number was entered in Salesforce or the support software.
Customer support software can also be valuable to Salesforce users in other ways. Automated emails can be created and managed in the support software to help with customer-related communication. In addition, these emails can be triggered from actions within either system. It’s also easy to add a button in Salesforce to provide one-click access to a support software solution for all employees.
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In short, a CRM like Salesforce and customer support software work together seamlessly. Once you understand the difference between the two, creating a link between them that is properly configured doesn’t take a lot of time. This link shares information between both systems so multiple customer-facing groups within your company are able to combine their knowledge in real-time with no additional effort.
Salesforce is a huge company and their capabilities are profound, but especially in B2B (business-to-business) it’s important to make customers feel like you are meeting their needs. The extra emphasis on the customer relationship via a support software solution helps in boosting KPIs, in particular customer satisfaction and overall happiness.
