For anyone trying to deliver the best customer experience, app and data fragmentation is a big problem. Because businesses rely on one or more CRMs and/or contact center applications, customer data typically lives in multiple places.
It is not uncommon, even for small companies, to store customers’ purchase history in Salesforce and to keep customers’ contact information and activity history in Zendesk. Most people work across multiple apps, doing sales in Salesforce and offering support in Zendesk, for example. Constantly logging into and switching between systems takes valuable time, making agents less productive while crushing customer satisfaction.
Responding to customer requests quickly while also getting a broad, meaningful view of customer data across systems can be tricky, as people lose focus when switching between apps and managing data that’s dispersed across them all. The ideal communications solution has to support all systems to enable collaboration across all departments.
What’s more, app and data fragmentation causes businesses to have a lot of data that’s just not useful to them, resulting in a disjointed view of how omnichannel customer interactions relate. Having an aggregated report of all customer data from all applications isn’t the solution either, if it’s not presented in a way that’s relevant to the services managed by a contact center’s teams.
Omnichannel is just one of the drivers that pushes people to upgrade their systems, and this is where they start to consider other systems that might include communication capabilities from their CRM vendor. When some analysts discuss omnichannel, however, they don’t acknowledge that CRM apps that boast communication support are unlikely to integrate with other applications.
If you go omnichannel, you need to "omnichannel" your apps. This is why at Bright Pattern, we think it is not just important that contact center applications have built-in integrations with a broad set of CRM applications and workstream collaboration tools such Slack and Spark. We also believe they must provide real-time federation of the customer information from the various apps to best personalize interactions.