There’s no denying the value of customer experience. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, 79% of consumers perceive the experience a company provides as equally important to its product or services. This figure is even higher for millennials (83%) showing that for the dominant consumer, experience is only becoming more important.
This is because the dynamic between customer and company has been changing for some time. It’s about more than a transaction, with 53% of customers saying they feel an emotional connection with the brands they buy from.
The pandemic has only amplified this, with customers seeking more of a connection—and often support—from the brands that occupy a place in their everyday lives. It’s great for companies who thrive off this connection and have something to offer the customer beyond the product.
But those who don’t stand to lose out. That’s because the average American consumer tells nine to 15 people about a bad experience (some even tell 20 or more!).
A strong customer experience can flip this stat on its head and make your customers into advocates, not detractors—meaning positive experiences are all their friends and family will hear about.
For this to happen though, you need your sales team well-equipped to deliver all the value, resolution, and connection that make a great customer experience. And for that, they need integrations.
Why Integrations Matter for Customer Experience
Despite the technical nuts and bolts of integrations, they still bring huge benefits to the customer. That’s because integrations free up your sales and support reps and enable them to meaningfully engage with their customers.
Done right, this can deliver a range of benefits to your customers including:
- Seamless experiences, so no call feels like they’re starting from scratch
- Reduced response time
- More focus on their needs
- More meaningful connections through ever-present support reps
- Reaction (and action) to feedback
All of which contribute to a stronger customer experience.
It might sound ambitious to expect your sales reps to achieve all of the above when juggling a packed call schedule, as well as having their KPIs and latest customer insights ticking away in the back of their mind.
But this is why integrations matter to customer experience—because they make delivering it so much simpler.
Creating an Integrated Customer Experience
There are dozens (at least!) of choices when it comes to tools designed to help your reps boost CX performance.
But before you fill up that taskbar, it’s always worth noting the importance of integrations, and building a tech stack where apps exist in harmony with one another.
A great bedrock for this is choosing a cloud-based calling software like our partner, Aircall. One of the reasons Aircall is such an asset to your sales and support team is down to its integrations. Through the way it works with other apps, it can be scaled up to help your reps deliver strong customer experiences through connected tools and heightened productivity.
Done right, integrations can prove transformative for your sales and support teams—and the customer experience they provide—in several ways:
1. Motivate with autonomy
Visibility can help drive KPIs, leading your team to find their own path to success. After all, your sales team’s growth is far more nuanced than “just do better”—it comes down to personal strengths and individuality.
Through an integration like Aircall and Plecto’s, you can make data-driven decisions to improve performance and motivate your team to be more autonomous and take responsibility for their, their team’s, and their company’s performance. Manual data entry is gone, and striving toward ultimate customer performance takes its place.
2. Stop inefficiencies
What takes up more time than manually entering data? Well, doing it several times using several apps. The integration and automated procedures Plecto offers carry over crucial data like the number of calls made, sales, and hit rates, meaning your team can focus on hitting their calls and KPIs and being more present in customer conversations.
This set-up brings accuracy into your operations too. Updating several sets of data manually increases the margin for error. Letting your integrations do the work instead eliminates this. It means your sales reps are armed with the most up-to-date customer data, whatever app they’re using–because when your apps are integrated, updating one is the same as updating them all.
3. Better data means better conversations
Having such an interconnected tech stack means the customer insights you’re getting benefit from a wider net of data entry being cast. It also makes it easier to access this information when talking to your customers, meaning you’re cutting down on the um’s and er’s and making every second of a customer call count.
Nothing will frustrate a customer more than feeling like they’re back to square one in their journey with your team. It might not be possible for the same rep to answer their call every time, but through better-shared data, your sales and support teams can benefit from one another’s hard work.
4. Nothing is lost
An integrated tech stack means valuable data doesn’t slip through the cracks or sit idle on someone’s desktop. Instead, it’s there for all to see and can easily be pulled up onto a dashboard—something Plecto’s Partner Manager, Genesis Garcia, identifies as a major benefit of Plecto’s integration with Aircall.
"“With Aircall, we can track everything through advanced dashboards. Things like how many calls sales reps made this month versus last month and when the busiest hours are. These are precisely the data points that physical phones don’t give you, and these are critical performance metrics for us.”"
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Software to Boost Your Customer Experience
So when it comes to picking software to help you boost your customer experience, where do you start? It can help by looking into the key services they provide.
Help Desk & Support Software — Ensure your customers get the support and help they’re after and all your calls integrate into one accessible place.
Sales Software — Easily access your sales-to-date, seeing how they compare with the rest of the team to encourage some healthy competition. This can even mean gamifying your sales team’s KPIs through hosting contests, offering rewards, and celebrating achievements.
Marketing Software — Access your customer’s details and journey at the click of a button, meaning their interactions with your company are there for you to brush up on in seconds. This information is essential to guide you through a customer call with context.
E-Commerce Software — Get easy access to your customers’ purchase details so their transactions are top of mind.
Productivity Software — Get visibility of the tasks your team is currently working across and help them avoid rework through clear allocations. Remember: Transparency helps teamwork.
Quality Assurance Software — You should be learning from every customer call, and the right software can take the grind out of quality assurance by automating transcripts of calls and offering easy-to-access recordings for you to showcase best-case examples.
An integrated future awaits
Gaze into our crystal ball, and you’ll see integration—not only for your sales reps and their tech stacks but for your customers too. That’s because one relies as much on the other.
For a customer to truly build a meaningful connection with your company and to want to keep coming back, they need to have a memorable customer experience. And for this to happen, your team needs to have the right integrated software to ensure their focus is on the call and not on time sucks like manual data entry or searching through multiple apps for the most up-to-date information.
Get your customer experience right, and integration won’t be the only thing in your future—customer satisfaction will be too!
See how the Plecto and Aircall integration can skyrocket your sales team's performance with your Plecto 14-day free trial—and start outperforming today!
