Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become vital to marketing. Most organizations have a similar process in converting leads to sales even though their businesses are varied. A CRM software provides insight into the progress of the leads from the time they were generated as a contact record, through their life-cycle, till they reach fruition. Along the way, contact centers are used to increase the effectiveness of reaching out and communicating with current and future customers.
The contact center solutions follow work-flow processes meant to increase the effectiveness of taking contact records to positive conclusions. The days of the predictive dialer being unleashed on a large cold list is long gone. The process of customer contact has evolved and it has required changes to the work-flow of a call center software to accommodate the lead flow management within the CRM software.
Most contact centers handle inbound, outbound, email, and chat, all in a unified work-flow. Therefore the user interface for the customer call handling representatives should have the inherent flexibility to allow the management to modify the work-flow to suit the initiatives of the organization. This is possible only if the contact center ACD and dialer software has the required flexibility and interfaces.
There are many CRM vendors like Saleforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, SugarCRM and Kana. Similarly there are many more contact center software providers. The growth and evolution of Asterisk as a telephony platform has impacted the availability and economics of the contact centers tremendously in a positive sense.
Both the CRM software and the contact center solutions are available as Multi-tenant cloud offering from managed service providers. Work-flow integration should be an important consideration while selecting a service provider. Multi-tenant contact center ACD and Dialer solutions based on Asterisk telephony offer viable back-end integration to CRM software and databases providing the necessary work-flow integration.