The most important step to a CRM integration

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is a technology that can help any company manage, organize and track customer’s behavior and data. The purpose of integrating an app, or website with a CRM is to use customer information and data to gain a more unified view of the business and improve the decision-making process and enhance business strategy.

What is the source of truth?

When planning a CRM integration the most important first step is to determine a single source of truth (SOT). Having a single SOT offers a single data set that everyone in the company can work from. It also enables better customer experiences by having the full view of every person and company in one place.

So, what are the challenges involved in arriving at a single source of truth? 

• Data sources are often siloed. You need to find a way to integrate siloed data into a complete, unified profile of every person that has interacted with your company. 

• Data can be difficult to use depending on the source. User/customer data that has been acquired through forms can have errors or missing data - open text fields. Competing data sources often have to compete with one another and often some sources inevitably are more accurate in terms of their precision and consistency. So, cleansing and unifying customer data are incredibly important for the most “true” source of truth.

• Need data to update in real-time, or as close to real-time as possible. Companies need to make decisions at the moment and need a constant source of truth, unified and updated all the time, from which to draw on. The goal with a CRM integration is for data to be reliable at all times so companies can rely on it to make important decisions instantly.

How are you going to identify your customers/users?

A stable identifier is integral to being able to match data and avoid duplicate contacts and accounts and dropped data. The problem with using phone numbers, names, email addresses is that very often a single customer may have multiple emails, phone numbers, and variations in how their name appears in the data sources that are funneling into the CRM.

So, to counter this issue, you need a stable identifier within each of the data sources and then a stable identifier to associate known identifiers across data sources.

Now what?

So, you’ve decided that your company needs to integrate your data with a CRM, what do you do? Well, find a company like The SilverLogic located in Boca Raton, FL to help you with your CRM integration project. The SilverLogic (TSL) is a client-focused, value-driven, custom software development company led by founder and CEO David Hartmann. Working closely with you and your company, TSL will provide the innovation and automation needed to identify and eliminate operational inefficiencies, deliver scalable growth, and develop custom technology solutions that drive measurable business outcomes.