Welcome to Ask the Experts, brought to you by CloudServicesUniversity.com. In this video, Intelisys’ Cloud Evangelist Brandon Knight discusses how ACD and CRM integration can enhance cloud contact center solutions and provide incredible flexibility with Serenova’s John Charles. Learn more about contact center solutions from the Serenova team here: https://cloudservicesuniversity.com/supplier-directory/serenova/
| Brandon: | All right, here we go, guys. We’re talking in this segment, this Ask the Experts, about the marriage of ACD and CRM. So, we’re going to bring back one of my old friends, John Charles from Serenova. How’s it going, John? |
| John: | It’s going good, Brandon. Thanks for having me. |
| Brandon: | All right, well, the first thing I got to ask you is, are you married? |
| John: | I am married. |
| Brandon: | All right. Okay, good. All right, all right. So, you’re equipped then to tell us about this, the importance of a balanced relationship, right? So, talk to me about what we know as being the key factors in having a healthy ACD-CRM marriage. |
| John: | Yeah. With CRM integration, with the cloud contact center, it’s really about the exchanging of data back and forth. What I mean by that is the initial inbound call that’s on the cloud contact center, we want to actually do a screen pop using the CRM–be it Salesforce.com, or Zendesk, or whatever it may be. That’s the first part of the integration marriage, if you will. The second part is actually the ability to reverse that and actually do a click-to-dial. So, if an agent, or a supervisor, or a manager were in the CRM and they noted a phone number, as an example, that they wanted to call, they can simply do a click-to-dial without physically having to type in the 10-digit number. |
| The third part to the marriage is the actual data exchange between the applications. So, being able to take all the call information. Meaning the call timestamp when the call came in, when it was delivered, and being able to push that information to the CRM and vice versa. So, we need to be able to get that data from the CRM into either a toolbar that somehow embedded into the application or even the API. So, there may be some homegrown CRMs that can leverage Serenova’s CxEngage platform, actually write an integration into their application using those RESTful APIs. | |
| Brandon: | Perfect, perfect. Now, we know the major players out there like Dynamics and Salesforce. And I like those because when I was young, my daddy always told me to marry up. Right? That’s what we try to do. But what if an organization isn’t quite ready for that? What are some of the other CRMs that we’ve seen play nicely in that middle market in the contact center space? |
| John: | Yeah. That’s a great question. The ones that we started out with, with the CxEngage platform is Salesforce.com. And the reason why is they’re one of our large customers, so you can imagine they wanted to be integrated. That’s the first one we have out of the box. We also have a Zendesk integration as well. But the nice thing about the platform that we provide to customers is it’s very, very flexible. So, using the example of our toolbar–it’s actually an iframe–so they can take their homegrown CRM or maybe Oracle RightNow, and a handful of other ones. The Zoho are different CRMs, but we can actually embed the application just using these iframe technologies–which pretty much every CRM in the market has that capability to embed an application inside of itself. |
| Brandon: | Wow, wow. That’s incredible flexibility. Guys, right there. Whether you’re talking to an organization that is currently using Dynamics, or Salesforce, or someone who’s just in Zendesk, or Zoho, or they have a proprietary system that they need integration–you can easily see how Serenova has the right tools to make that integration work. John, thanks for your time. For those of you that want to find out more information, not just about these integrations but other things that Serenova offers, please check out their site on iCSU. |
