Today customer interactions happen over a number of channels from, but not limited to, eCommerce, social media, mobile devices, online marketplaces, forums, and calls to physical stores. Businesses today want to monitor and measure every small activity of their customers, across channels, hoping it will help them close more sales. This coupled with the increasing expectations of customers to provide a consistent and personalized experience across channels makes it imperative for businesses to have a centralized data base with all customer information.

But with businesses using independent systems to manage each one of these channels this is not an easy task to achieve. The solution is to integrate these independent systems to help them communicate and sync the required information with each other.

While true for all systems the business case is even stronger for two very important systems eCommerce and CRM. Customers today purchase online and expect their issues to be resolved on phone, order in store and track their shipment online, register once and have their information available everywhere, etc. Moreover the CRM and eCommerce integration introduces a wealth of new possibilities to track everything that happens online and leverage it to improve customer experience and drive more sales.

Few benefits of integrating eCommerce and CRM systems include

  • Improve Customer Experience

    – eCommerce and CRM integration can help you improve customer experience in multiple ways

    • By helping you provide self-service portals to let your customers access the order status, track shipment, check inventory and more.
    • By leveraging the information to provide your customers the omni-channel experience

  • Targeted Marketing & Promotional Campaigns

    – With information centralized you can now run targeted and personalized marketing & promotional campaigns.  These targeted and personalized campaigns are bound to be more effective and drive sales to your business.

  • Increase Sales by Empower Sales Team

    – Your sales/ customer service representatives can now access information like customer order history, payment history, product inventory and more and take informed sales decisions. For example, they can use the order history or browsing history (products viewed) to better cross-sell and up-sell products to your customers. In a B2B scenario, with access to customers’ payment history (YTD Sales, MTD Sales, A/R aging, Credit hold flag, etc.) your sales representatives can now better negotiate terms with your customers.

  • Improved Demand Planning and Scheduling

    – Enables customer centric demand planning and scheduling across the company. The company can now better forecast the demand for their products and manage their inventory (sales, sourcing, manufacturing, etc.) better.

  • Integrated RMA Management

    – RMA requests often originate from a CRM support case. Your customer support representative equipped with all the information is now better placed to resolve the customer issue via phone or via remote diagnostics.

  • Improved After Sales Service

    – After sales service is one of the most critical aspects of a CRM. With all the necessary information available on their fingertips, your customer representatives can now provide better after sales service to your customers. They can now not only address customer concerns regarding customer orders, product information and inventory but also improve sales by recommending products to customers.

  • Reduced Costs and Losses due to Errors

    – The automated information sync eliminates the need of manual data transfers which are prone to errors and can lead to unhappy customers (ultimately costing your business).

  • Gain Competitive Advantage

    – The new found efficiency and benefits can be the key to differentiate you from the competition.