It is constantly being emphasised that customer experience is the key to high customer satisfaction. Providing customers with reliable and timely customer service encourages repeat business, therefore contributing to the creation of a loyal customer base.
The use of cloud-based applications, including customer service software like Zendesk, is becoming increasingly popular in business. Today, Zendesk allows several organisations to run a faster and more efficient customer service department by handling tickets managed by support teams of all sizes in one place on the cloud.
When assigned a new ticket, agents can view past tickets from the same customer or tickets with similar issues from different customers. However, they would probably be able to provide an even better service if they had access to more data about the customer at hand.
Different departments in an organisation gather different types of information relevant to their relationships and interactions with customers, and these are often stored separately. Yet, having all this data together would give support agents a better perspective, allowing them to solve issues more efficiently. One useful set of data for support agents to have access to, is customer data stored in CRM software such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which includes data about customers and their relationship with the organisation.
Zendesk’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration tool provides a great solution to this matter by providing users with one complete customer record, by integrating ticket data and customer data. When a Zendesk ticket is submitted by a customer, data related to that particular customer is extracted from CRM and presented to the support agent. This includes information about the relationship of the customer’s organisation with the company and the role the contact person has within that organisation.
This additional information provides agents with a better perspective about the context of the problem, as well as the customer they are dealing with, allowing them to provide a more personalised service. They can better understand the customer history and the relationship they have with that particular customer, whether the customer has experienced this issue before, and the technical level of understanding the person they are communicating with has, allowing them to give the best possible advice.
Support agents are not the only members of an organisation who benefit from this integration tool. Zendesk data can also be viewed in CRM, because tickets are automatically converted into CRM cases. Thus, CRM users can also view their customers’ Zendesk support history.
Users can also make use of CRM’s reporting and analytical tools with Zendesk ticket data. Customer satisfaction can be measured more efficiently and more trends may be discovered. This gives management a complete view of support and sales team operations.
Generally speaking, the integration of Zendesk and CRM facilitates the sharing of information across an organisation. It allows individual departments to see the bigger picture and provide their customers with the best service possible, thus adding value to the organisation as a whole.
