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.