Amazon Connect and Salesforce: Bringing CCaaS and CRM Together

Get to grips with how to connect the prominent CCaaS and CRM solutions

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Amazon Connect and Salesforce Bringing CCaaS and CRM Together - CX Today
Contact CentreCRMInsightsNews Analysis

Published: March 13, 2023

Charlie Mitchell

55 percent think CRM will replace contact centre platforms within five years – according to Metrigy.

The statistic highlights the market potential for CRM providers to add CCaaS capabilities to their solutions – which they are seizing on.

Indeed, Salesforce, Microsoft, and HubSpot are each adding contact management, agent desktop, and service reporting capabilities to their portfolios.

In doing so, they can offer support operations easy access to customer data records, use these to enable contact automation, and support businesses in consolidating their technologies.

Yet, Robin Gareiss, CEO of Metrigy, is sceptical that CRM platforms will ever replace CCaaS, particularly in enterprises and mid-market businesses. She notes:

Though CRM providers have started offering voice on their own or through partnerships, they simply aren’t as reliable or advanced as contact centre providers. And, many large contact centres are complex and rooted in the technology from their contact centre platform providers.

So, instead of complete platform convergence, Gareiss advocates for “incredibly tight” integrations between the contact centre and CRM alongside other platforms, including CPaaS, ERP, and marketing automation.

Bridging the Gap Between the CRM and Contact Centre

AWS leads the CCaaS market in customer acquisition. Meanwhile, Salesforce still outsells its closest CRM competitor by four-to-one.

As such, when brands consider bridging the gap between CRM and the contact centre, many will focus on tying Service Cloud and Amazon Connect together.

Recognising this need, both brands teamed up to launch Service Cloud Voice.

The new proposition allows Salesforce users to add Amazon Connect telephony into the Service Cloud environment.

Already, Service Cloud offered users the tools to converse with customers across digital channels, storing the transcripts and sharing reports into each interaction.

Yet, with this addition, businesses can converse with customers across all mainstream contact centre channels – including voice – within the same agent interface.

They may also utilise other elements of AWS’s contact centre portfolio to bulk up this voice proposition, including Amazon Lex and Polly. These enable contact automation through the IVR.

Also, AWS Lambda and Amazon Simple Storage Services allow businesses to transfer data from Amazon Connect into Salesforce.

Moreover, AWS offers additional services – including Event Bridge, CloudWatch and its Notification Service – to ensure the Service Cloud contact centre runs smoothly.

With the proposition, businesses can intertwine their CCaaS and CRM offerings and empower agents – both live and virtual – with the information they need to support the customer.

Yet, this is only one option. Many contact centres may want to keep the agent experience within Amazon Connect – especially as recent Gartner research suggests that agents often avoid new tech.

In addition, businesses may prefer the AWS environment, from which they can easily leverage the solutions within AWS’s extensive marketplace.

As such, these service operations may choose to integrate Amazon Connect with Salesforce through the latter’s open CTI connector – which pulls data records into the AWS environment.

From here, the contact centre may leverage solutions – such as Amazon Lex, Polly, and Lamda – and enjoy all the benefits of a market-leading CCaaS solution.

The Benefits of Unifying Technology

Using a CTI connector, businesses have integrated CRM and contact centre solutions for many years. In doing so, they have attained many benefits. These include:

  • A Simplified Agent Experience – If agents can dip into a CRM without toggling between different tools, they can retrieve customer information much more rapidly.
  • Omnichannel Support – By plugging all customer engagement channels into a CRM, all conversations with a customer will appear in a single thread – alongside their purchase history and other information. This enables omnichannel support – alongside various hyper-personalisation initiatives.
  • Cross-Platform Automation – Contact centre agents typically complete their after call work (ACW) – also known as post-call processing – in the CRM. Yet, service operations may automate these processes by harnessing the analytics technologies within the CCaaS platform. That will shave valuable seconds from every contact centre conversation.
  • Support for Conversational AI – Many CCaaS solutions now come with conversational AI tools. Connecting these to the CRM helps train them, enabling virtual agents to combat more challenging customer queries.
  • New Customer Engagement Opportunities – CCaaS tools, including sentiment analysis, pull additional customer information from customer conversations. Such data can enable much more intelligent customer engagement initiatives, including proactive outreach.

Yet, it is not only the CRM system that contact centres should consider integrating with. Indeed, as customer expectations continue to evolve and CCaaS solutions advance, many organisations recognise a need for greater synchronisation across the CX stack.

Such a stack often includes ERP, ITSM, and CPaaS solutions – alongside many possible additions.

Thankfully, both Amazon Connect and Salesforce offer deep marketplaces, connecting with stalwart providers across these platforms, including Oracle, ServiceNow, and Webex.

As such, businesses can connect the enterprise with further integrations. These will pass conversational data across the enterprise – enabling many possible benefits – which require another comprehensive article to cover.

Integrate Amazon Connect and Salesforce With Confidence

As the demand to integrate Amazon Connect and Salesforce rises, finding the proper support is often tricky. After all, specialists that deploy CCaaS and CRM solutions typically have different skillsets.

As such, businesses should look for a partner with deep knowledge of Amazon Connect and the Salesforce ecosystem when considering implementing Service Cloud Voice or integrating the technologies through the CTI. This is especially critical for enterprise deployments.

Here is where a tech partner adds real value. They take the time to get to know each client and can marry together the technologies to meet their most pressing requirements.

Sabio Group is an excellent example. It specialises in both Amazon Connect and Salesforce (through its specialist Salesforce CRM consultancy, makepositive) and understands how to lift the benefits of each – as separate and integrated solutions.

To delve deeper into its expertise, visit: sabiogroup.com 

 

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