Customer Relationship Management

What Is CRM Integration? A Business Owner Guide

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What Is CRM Integration & Why You Need It to Boost Growth

Customer data collection and analysis is crucial for businesses of any size. It can help you get a much better understanding of your target market, improve your marketing and sales strategies, and personalize customer experiences.
But as your business grows, so does the amount of data you need to manage. From demographics and customer interactions with marketing campaigns to purchase histories, there is a mountain of information to record and analyze. Data management can easily become time-consuming and tedious. 
To make customer data management easier, businesses often turn to CRM integrations. CRM systems like Podium offer <a href="https://www.podium.com/integrations/">integration</a> with many different applications. This integration enables you to consolidate and access data from several sources in a single platform. 
In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about CRM integrations.
<h2>What is CRM integration? </h2>
CRM integration connects other business applications to your CRM tool, allowing data to flow to, from, or between them seamlessly. The goal of CRM integration is to get a bird’s eye view of customer data, improve knowledge of customer needs, and ensure that all business processes run smoothly.
When<a href="https://www.podium.com/article/key-crm-features-you-should-look-for/"> choosing a CRM system</a>, integration is one of the features you should consider.<a href="https://www.podium.com/article/12-benefits-of-crm-why-your-business-needs-one/"> Customer relationship management</a> (CRM) system integration enables independently designed systems to work together and offers many benefits, such as preventing data silos and issues that come with it.
<h2>Benefits of CRM Integration</h2>
As previously mentioned, there are many benefits to integrating your<a href="https://www.podium.com/article/crm-for-small-business/"> CRM platform</a> with other applications your company uses. An integrated CRM can serve as the central hub for all your company data and will allow: 
<h3>1. Streamlined Data Management</h3>
By integrating your CRM with the rest of your tech stack, you can consolidate data from several sources into a unified data layer. It makes it easier to spot and prevent inaccurate and duplicate data. You will also be able to access and analyze data faster and more effectively.
<h3>2. Enhanced Customer Experience</h3>
By consolidating customer information from various sources, you and your marketing and sales team can get a comprehensive view of each customer. It will help you understand customer needs better and create highly personalized marketing messages and product recommendations.0
<h3>3. Improved Efficiency and Productivity</h3>
Integrating your CRM with applications used by different departments improves efficiency and productivity. Employees from different teams will be able to easily access whatever relevant business or customer information they need to do their job. 
<h3>4. Better Sales and Marketing Alignment</h3>
Sales and marketing teams typically use separate applications. CRM integration creates a bridge between these two departments, allowing sales reps and marketing professionals to access a single source of truth. It ensures a consistent understanding of prospects and customers throughout the organization. 
<h3>5. Accurate Reporting and Analytics</h3>
Integrating your CRM with the tools you use also helps ensure that data remains accurate and up-to-date. Some integrations automatically sync information between solutions in real time, eliminating data silos and mismatched contact information that keep teams in the dark. 
 
And since an integrated CRM system can acquire every bit of useful information from all your business solutions, you’ll get better insights and analytics that you can use to make the best marketing and business decisions.
<h3>6. Scalability and Flexibility</h3>
Some CRM solutions are cloud-based, which offers scalability. The system can adjust to your company’s scope of operation, which means you can scale up or down depending on your business needs without any technical difficulties. The only thing you will need from the CRM to accommodate any increase in data input is sufficient system capacity.
<h2>Types of CRM Integrations </h2>
There are several types of CRM integrations—below are some to consider. 
<h3>1. CRM Website Integration</h3>
If your business has a website, consider integrating it with your CRM software. It is the easiest type of integration you can do.  
CRM website integration means integrating your CRM tool with your website and lead generation forms. This integration allows you to capture leads easily and ensure your contact list stays updated.
There are many other things CRM website integration will let you do. For example, it will allow your CRM to automatically assign leads and responsibilities to sales agents. Other benefits of CRM website integration are better customer experience, better profiling, keeping customer churn to a minimum, and better decision-making.
<h3>2. CRM Marketing Automation</h3>
Most companies only use CRM tools for sales. But it can become an indispensable tool in marketing as well. By integrating CRM with your marketing tools, your marketing department can use data from sales and other relevant departments to assess and adjust their tactics. It can be particularly helpful in perfecting marketing strategies and attracting more customers.
<h3>3. CRM Data Integration</h3>
CRM is arguably built for data integration. It can take many different forms, depending on the number of software your business uses as well as the number of employees and customers you have. 
For small businesses that deal with a manageable amount of information, CRMs designed for this business size often have everything for compiling data. On the other hand, larger enterprises with a wide customer base and hundreds of employees will often need the help of an API strategy for gathering data. 
Whatever your case is, CRM data integration allows you to create a database that holds all customer-related data in a single place accessible to authorized team members. Your sales team can use this centralized data to get the full picture of each customer and compare it to other customer profiles with just a single click. 
<h3>4. CRM ERP Integration</h3>
CRM and ERP are designed to help improve your company’s performance. Enterprise resource planning or ERP software is used to handle financial data and operations, while CRM systems are used in sales, marketing, and customer service. A notable difference between these two solutions is that ERP software can include a CRM component, but a CRM often doesn’t have ERP features.  
CRM ERP integration can be very useful for those using a separate ERP system. Integrating your CRM with ERP offers many benefits, like reducing the risk of losing or duplicating reimbursement forms and financial reports. And since your team can access a combination of sales and inventory reports, sales forecasting can significantly improve. 
Your customer service representatives can benefit from this as well. The access to inventory will allow your sales reps to provide customers with more accurate quotes. Overall, this integration can help boost your team’s productivity in the long run.
<h2> How to integrate CRM software? </h2>
<h3>1. Customize your code.</h3>
Writing custom code is one of the ways to integrate CRM software with other apps, but it is typically not the ideal choice, especially if you don’t have experience in coding. 
CRM system developers usually make constant changes to improve the software and ensure it remains functional. When you integrate your CRM software using custom code, you will also need to constantly update your codes to keep up with all changes made by the CRM developer.
<h3>2. Create your APIs.</h3>
API (application programming interfaces) is one of the CRM integration tools you can use, and it is often a much better choice than writing custom code. API is like a software intermediary that enables two applications to talk to each other. But how exactly does this work? Let’s use a travel application as an example.
When you use a travel app to search for available flights to a specific place on a particular date, it will instantly give you a list of different airlines and their flight schedules. The airlines and the travel app are different businesses, so how did the travel app gain access to that information in an instant? API is the answer.
These travel websites or apps use API to communicate with airline websites. Each time a query is made, the travel website will ask the airline websites for relevant information and then take it back to the customer. 
Can the travel website access all data on airline websites? No, because airlines can limit what information the third-party app can view. They can only access relevant data.
The majority<a href="https://www.podium.com/article/crm-examples/"> of CRMs</a> you can find nowadays, including Podium, offer an<a href="https://developer.podium.com/"> API</a> that developers can use to connect the app with their platforms. Guides and instructions on how to use them are often available, but if things become confusing, you can ask a professional for help. With Podium, you don’t need to worry about the technical aspect of integration because the team can handle it during onboarding.
<h3>3. Look for built-in CRM integrations.</h3>
The Majority of CRM systems offer built-in CRM integrations, like social media integration. It means the CRM automatically connects with particular applications. There’s no need to use an API or write your code. 
Among your options for integrating your CRM tool with other apps, this solution is the most convenient one. All you need to do is find out what apps your prospective CRM system supports. 
Most CRM systems connect to hundreds of solutions. For example, Podium integrates with<a href="https://www.podium.com/integrations/"> over 180 applications</a> commonly used in its target industries. 
<h3>4. Use connector integrations.</h3>
If your CRM tool does not support other applications your business utilizes and does not offer API, you can use connector integrations. Connector integration is a service for linking your CRM system with other applications. An example of this is Zapier, a platform that allows you to connect your CRM and automatically exchange data with over 1,000 third-party applications. 
Connector integrations serve as the middleman who facilitates the connection between your CRM system and other applications. These solutions even allow you to create custom integration to facilitate particular tasks.
<h2>CRM Integration Examples for Your Business </h2>
<h3>1. CRM Marketing Automation Integration</h3>
CRM and marketing automation software are two different types of technologies that make it easier for the marketing and sales team to do their job. By connecting these two applications, your business’s marketing and sales process becomes more streamlined, enabling your team to convert more prospects into leads faster and more effectively.  
CRM marketing automation integration provides your marketing and sales team with better visibility. Access to centralized data will enable your professionals to find and understand the gaps and friction points in their processes, discover why prospects are closing, ensure consistent messaging, and minimize costly human error.
<h3>2. CRM Ecommerce Integration</h3>
If you sell goods and services over the internet, you’ll surely benefit from CRM e-commerce integration. It’s the process of connecting your CRM system with whatever e-commerce platform your business is using to manage sales processes, like order management and payment collection. 
CRM is a critical tool in the world of sales, as it records and collects data on leads and current customers across various channels. Integrating it with your e-commerce tools makes data collection and other business processes more seamless. Your products, orders, and contacts are automatically synced within one platform. 
<h3>4. CRM Customer Service Integration</h3>
When customers reach out to your business for help or to get answers to questions, tickets are generated. And these tickets need to be organized and tracked along with other information like returns and warranties. 
CRM customer service integration merges all these customer service data with other customer information. It provides customer support with a 360-degree view of their customers. It allows them to assess their customer needs better, answer their queries, and provide reliable assistance.
<h2>Customer Data and Communications Solutions for Small Businesses  </h2>
Podium is an all-in-one solution and tool to streamline your customer data and relationship management. It offers the best <a href="https://www.podium.com/contacts/">CRM for small businesses</a> and various communication tools, including text messages, web chat, and inbox that <a href="https://www.podium.com/inbox/">make customer communication faster</a> and easier.
Podium also integrates with nearly 200 third-party applications that are typically used by businesses in the automotive, home services, retail, professional services, healthcare, and dental. But if you haven’t found the tools you use in the collection of integrations or you’re using an in-house system, public APIs are available in the site’s developer portal. 
For more information on integration and pricing, please feel free to contact Podium today.
<h2>CRM Integration FAQs </h2>
<h3>Q: What is an example of a CRM system?</h3>
A: Podium is an example of a CRM system specifically built for small, local businesses. This platform offers everything your small business needs to manage interactions and nurture relationships with leads and existing customers.
<h3>Q: Why is CRM integration important?</h3>
A: CRM integration ensures all your customer data stays accurate and updated. It allows customer information to flow freely between the systems you use to run your business. Moreover, it enables different departments to collaborate effectively, minimize human errors, and increase overall productivity.  
<h3>Q: What is CRM and API?</h3>
A: CRM stands for customer relationship management, a technology for managing customer data and tracking customer interactions. On the other hand, API, or application programming interface, is a software intermediary that you can use to connect your CRM tool with other platforms you use.

What Is CRM Integration? A Business Owner Guide

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