The Power Of Unified Inbox – How Salesforce Integration Consulting Can Help
In today’s digital-first business landscape, meeting customer expectations is a 24/7 responsibility. Cloud-based CRM platforms, like Salesforce, offer the capability to seamlessly manage customer relations through multiple touchpoints and communication channels round-the-clock. However, sometimes, too many of these touchpoints create new challenges. Is your sales team juggling between inboxes, events calendars, to-do lists, and messaging apps? This may cause serious damage to their productivity and effectiveness. Salesforce Integration Consulting can solve such problems.
This article discusses how Salesforce integration consultants help companies deliver customer expectations consistently through interventions like unified inbox functionality.
What is Salesforce Integration Consulting?
Salesforce integration consulting is a professional service that helps companies synchronize business-critical systems for seamless exchange of data, enhanced workflow, and improved resilience in managing customer relationships. Every business process and system can have implications for delivering customer experience and matching their expectations. Instead of interacting with these systems in silos, people in charge of delivering customer experience and managing those experiences should be able to have a unified interface for holistic decision-making and actions. Some of the common business systems that may require integration support are enterprise mailing and messaging apps, ERPs, e-commerce tools, inbound and outbound customer servicing channels, and sales and marketing tools.
Example: Assume ABC is a B2C company selling personal care products online as well as through offline stores. It requires the sales team to interact with and respond to customer queries from multiple e-commerce platforms, distributors, store managers, and marketing campaigns across several channels. Juggling between several channels may cause clouded decision making, losing track of business-critical information, delay in responses and lost opportunities.
Salesforce Integration specialists can help design and develop custom-made Salesforce solutions to make these interactions seamless for more productive and effective customer engagement. Features like Unified Inbox can help sales teams track communications and respond to them without leaving the Salesforce interface.
What is Unified Inbox?
Unified Inbox is a CRM functionality that consolidates different customer-facing communication channels and provides customer service agents or sales representatives with a unified dashboard to view, respond to, and resolve customer queries. Besides, it also helps quicker interaction between other CRM stakeholders for a better customer experience.
Based on company-specific requirements, a Salesforce Integration Consulting services may take different approaches to deliver unified inbox functionality. For example, a company uses live chat, social media messaging, and dedicated customer service emails to receive customer queries. For this company, an integration consultant can synchronize communications from these three channels. Another company with multiple ongoing content marketing campaigns, e-commerce sites, and offline presence may require a complex strategy to implement integration.
Problems of not having an ‘Unified Inbox’ functionality
Smaller startups and MSMEs often ignore the importance of the unification of communication channels. Any customer relationship management system without a unified inbox functionality can create lots of problems in the future as the business expands.
Some of the common problems are:
Lack of organized communication
One of the benefits of digital technology is that it allows customer interaction across multiple channels. However, trying to interact across these channels in silos can make it difficult to track customer conversations, maintain context and ensure prompt resolution of queries. Besides, it can be frustrating for customer service representatives to sift through multiple channels repetitively.
Missed opportunities to follow-up
In the absence of a unified customer-facing communication interface, important customer queries or sales leads may get lost.
Data entry errors
Manually sifting through multiple inboxes and communication channels for copy-pasting data during customer interaction can be prone to errors. This can lead to serious lapses in customer servicing.
Outdated customer information
An important benefit of unified inbox functionality is real-time auto-synchronization of the central database with information and communications coming from multiple channels. In the absence of a similar facility, customer service representatives may require manually updating the database. This may lead to outdated customer data and poor decision-making.
Unproductive use of time
Juggling between multiple communication channels for tracking, responding and resolving customer-specific queries is not only frustrating but it also wastes valuable hours on unproductive jobs.
Poor lead conversion
Finally, converting a potential prospect into a customer and closing a sales deal requires investing lots of time and effort. Despite showing genuine interest and capability, a prospect may postpone or cancel a deal because of poor business communication and query resolution. So, a lack of a unified inbox may result in poor lead conversion.
Benefits of Salesforce integration consulting
A company can benefit in several ways through the integration of customer-facing communication channels.
Quicker responses to customer queries
Centralized communication through the Salesforce dashboard helps companies achieve faster and more effective responses to customer queries.
Improved collaboration between teams
Integration of communication channels keeps sales, marketing, customer servicing, and other CRM stakeholders on the same page. It helps them collaborate effectively.
Decision-making based on real-time intelligence
Access to centralized and auto-synced databases helps companies make better decisions on sales, marketing, and customer-servicing issues.
Increased CRM efficiency and effectiveness
Teams can make productive use of their time and focus their attention on key issues instead of juggling between communication channels.
Ensuring improved customer experience
Prompt query resolution improves customer satisfaction and helps build stronger relationships with existing and potential customers.
When should you hire a Salesforce Integration Consultant?
The services of a Salesforce Integration professional can be useful for companies of all sizes and industries. The earlier a company decides to integrate its communication channels, the better it is for its business growth.
However, you should especially consider hiring an integration consultant if your business faces any of the following issues.
- Integrating legacy systems with Cloud CRMs
- Migrating from legacy CRM practices
- Scaling up business operations across geographies
- Experiencing poor lead conversion
- Experiencing repeated service complaints from customers
- Sales team underperformance
- Facing compliance and security issues
Final words
Salesforce is a highly scalable and customizable cloud-based CRM platform with a tremendously large set of features and functionalities. Expert professional services, like Salesforce Integration Consulting, can help companies leverage the platform cost-effectively for the most efficient and productive customer engagement. Do you want to learn more about functionalities like a unified inbox? Consult Manras.
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