Contact Centre: How to Seamlessly Consolidate Customer Interaction

Why contact centre and CRM consolidation matters: Kakapo Unity, Cisco Broadsoft and major CRMs bring omnichannel data, screen pops and one UI. Published on UC T

Simon Wright

Consolidating customer interaction in the contact centre

The lines are blurring everywhere.

Thanks to cloud-powered communication and collaboration platforms, what was once pure telephony is now telephony plus messaging plus video conferencing. And what was once work from home is now work from anywhere.

Many of these technological unifications of previously-siloed workplace tools are reimagining how the world does its business, and how enterprises interact with their customers.

What’s more, the high-value data contained within those interactions can now be captured, stored, and re-purposed: vital business intelligence capable of enhancing the experience for all parties.

Brilliantly, the contact centre, where the quality of that experience matters most, is now integrating more and more with the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system - the latest blurring of lines delivering increased harmony, productivity, and, ultimately, profitability.

Get that fusion of customer-facing functionality and back-office smarts right, and organisations and their IT managed service provider partners can drive significant efficiencies across the piece.

“Where does the contact centre and the CRM meet? The answer is that the point of merger should be all but invisible,” says Steve Tutt, Commercial Director at leading Cisco Broadsoft-powered application innovator Kakapo, whose white-label Unity contact centre solution integrates seamlessly – and fully – with all of the major CRMs.

“For small-medium-sized businesses in particular, these have been separate platforms, with all of the post-sale customer contact information in the contact centre and all of the customer buying behaviours and marketing information in the CRM.

Bringing all of that information together onto one platform puts it all right there in front of service agents. Only then is there full visibility of every interaction, and every piece of intelligence. It takes ‘Know Your Customer’ to a whole new level, whilst simultaneously streamlining the entire customer engagement process.”

The Unity contact centre solution cleverly journals every omnichannel interaction and transaction into an integrated CRM so that they exist separately in both platforms but are conjoined and visible via a single user interface.

Having that rich customer history to hand can make a huge difference to the quality of a customer/contact centre agent conversation – providing, in real-time, both a factual log of engagement activity as well as wider contextual information such as personal profile, buying behaviours, and cross-sell potential.

“If a customer is on an organisation’s website and starts a webchat, an agent can instantly see whether they are already in the CRM and, if they are, Unity will trigger a screen pop if required,” says Tutt.

“It will share with the agent a history of all previous conversations, regardless of the channel that was used. The agent is then able to engage with that customer on a much more personal and informed level. The customer feels connected with the organisation and feels much more valued; like the agent knows them and is properly invested in the interaction and its outcome. That’s the kind of high-quality experience customers crave, and it is the kind of experience which encourages agents to feel empowered and confident.”

Indeed, even in the case of small businesses, that desire for a high-quality experience is now ever-present. Customers do not make allowances for poor communication simply because an organisation is small or immature.

“The contact centre is the front door to any business and anyone who walks through it expects the same experience they get when dealing with very large, very customer service-focused businesses,” says Tutt.

“Contact centres used to only troubleshoot but now they are also inextricably linked to the generation of revenue. From the point of initial interest, to the closing of a sale, to responding to a support ticket, to resolving an issue; it all now happens in the contact centre. That means there is huge value in investing in a solution which brings together all of the information relating to all of those different processes. Instead of working harder, work smarter.”

To learn more about how Unity by Kakapo can help your and your customers’ businesses leverage the integration of contact centre and CRM functionality, click here.

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