As a businessperson, your success hinges on knowing your customers well. You likely get to know your customers through a variety of sources, be it through forms filled out on your website, verbal conversations, or social media.

It would, of course, be impossible to remember all of this information about so many different people, so you record it across the various tools you use to operate your business. You likely store the most important details, such as name, company, and contact info, in your CRM solution and refer to your other tools for finer details. But what if there was a way to eliminate the need to flip back and forth?

The answer is CRM integrations, and they’re essential for getting the most out of your CRM platform and seeing the clearest snapshot of your customers. Here’s a definitive list of the integrations you should consider for your business.

Customer Service

How many times have you had to call a company’s customer service line only to discover that the representative doesn’t know your call or email history? Frustrating, right?

You may not be surprised, then, to hear that in a 2018 study from NewVoiceMedia, 39 percent of participants said they are likely to never do business again with a company after having a poor experience. In today’s world, where consumers have access to a variety of products and services, you can’t afford to offer bad customer experience.

Look for these customer service solutions that are integration-friendly with your CRM:

• Zendesk
• Five9
• Nextiva

Calendars

Scheduling conflicts are annoying at best. At worst, they can cost you time and money.

Let’s say you’ve been working a new lead for a couple weeks now, exchanging emails to get a sense of their needs and answering any questions they might have. You finally have a product demo scheduled only to discover the day before that you accidentally double-booked yourself. Yikes.

Communication breakdowns between your business data sources cause major frustration for customers.

If you’re lucky, your potential client will be fine with pushing the demo back an hour or so. Or you could enter the downward spiral of rescheduling — that fateful process that begins with good intentions and ends with the client deciding rescheduling is more trouble than it’s worth.

Most modern CRMs will help you avoid such catastrophes with calendar and scheduling integration.

Look for these calendar and scheduling solutions that integrate with your CRM:

• Google Calendar
• Office 365 Calendar
• Calendly

Marketing Campaigns

By now you may be noticing a common thread: Communication breakdowns between your business data sources cause major frustration for customers. And few things in life are more rage-inducing than receiving multiple emails from multiple sources containing the same basic message.

ALSO READ: Customer Segmentation: Methods, Techniques, and Real Examples

Modern email marketing is all about customer segmentation. Email marketers send different email campaigns to different groups of customers based on what they know about those specific groups. This is a wonderful benefit of automating your marketing practices, but it can present problems if the sales team also interacts with one of those customers.

Look for these email marketing solutions that integrate with your CRM to prevent repeat messaging:

• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• Mailigen

Social Media

Thanks to the Internet, your customers are now everywhere, especially on social media sites such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Conversations happen all the time on these platforms, not only between friends and family, but also between brands and consumers. Businesses have always needed to be where their customers are, and that includes social media.

Consumers expect to be able to communicate with brands on social media now, and many brands use platforms like Twitter and Facebook to field complaints from customers. It’s essential, therefore, to see messages on social media from customers when they’re sent and to reply promptly.

Look for these social media management solutions when adding integrations to your CRM:

• HootSuite
• Buffer
• Falcon.io

Billing and Invoicing

Remember that customer service scenario we talked about earlier? It applies to billing and invoicing as well. Customers don’t like being told that your company can’t see where they’ve made a purchase or return in the past. It’s frustrating, but it also makes them feel like you simply don’t care.

Sure, you can always check with your company’s billing team or log into your billing portal to check an invoice number, but why would you do that when you could just integrate your billing and invoicing systems with your CRM?

Look for opportunities to integrate these billing and invoicing solutions with your CRM:

• QuickBooks
• FreshBooks

Performance Management

You manage a customer service team. Your VoIP system displays details about call volume and available agents, your customer service solution shows you how many tickets you have open, and your social media management platform prepares metrics on engagement. You’ve integrated these systems to your CRM so you can see overviews of all this information in one place, but what if you wanted to set performance-boosting goals for individual representatives on your team based on this data?

Integrating your performance management software with your CRM makes it easier than ever before to set data-based goals and to compare performance in real time.

Look for these performance management solutions that integrate with your CRM:

• BirdDogHR
• Trakstar
• Ambition

Inventory Management

What do you get when you mix an excited customer, an order for an item that just went out of stock, and no communication from the company? The punchline here is likely an uncomfortable phone call in a few weeks.

Thankfully, this situation can be avoided entirely if you integrate your inventory management solution with your CRM. If you haven’t already started practicing proactive customer service, this would also be a good opportunity to begin.

Integrating your inventory management solution with your CRM will keep you informed of customers who managed to place orders for items that are out of stock, presenting you with the opportunity to proactively reach out to that customer and narrow down a solution. This will not only prevent you from having to deal with an embarrassing situation, but it will show customers you care and possibly turn them into advocates for your brand.

Look for these CRM integration-enabled inventory management solutions:

• FinancialForce SCM
• Fishbowl Warehouse
• Epicor Vista for Information Services

Ecommerce

There’s nothing quite like tasteful upselling, especially when you can pull it off without ever having to leave the comfort of your CRM to frantically launch your ecommerce platform and search a product code.

Similar to the benefits you’ll realize with integrating an inventory management system, integrating your ecommerce platform with your CRM is a powerful way to improve the customer experience, land more sales, and quickly offer promotions or discounts to loyal customers.

Look for opportunities to integrate these ecommerce solutions with your CRM:

• Shopify
• Elastic Path
• CoreCommerce

Being properly equipped with the tools you need to run your business is important, but you may be better-equipped than you previously thought if you aren’t making the most of your current tools. One of the easiest ways to do this is to integrate your existing business software with a powerful CRM.

If you’re having a hard time deciding which CRM is best for you or if you’re looking for additional integrations to maximize the utility of your current CRM, check out our CRM Software software category page for more resources.

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