Have you ever watched the movie Independence Day? Despite all its merits, the film has many moments that make viewers scrunch their faces in disbelief.
For starters, Will Smith’s character flies a spaceship on his first attempt. Then, there’s the small matter of an alien invasion.
Yet, the moment developers will likely scoff at is when Jeff Goldblum’s character integrates his Apple PowerBook with the Alien mainframe. From there, he uploads a computer virus and saves the day.
Piers Buckley, Co-Founder of babelforce, struggled with this. “Call me a geek, but that doesn’t ring true,” he says. “Most businesses struggle to integrate their CRM with a telephony system.”
Indeed, systems integration is often the most significant obstacle in enterprise tech. Many have palpable fear when the initiatives they kickstart involve connecting multiple solutions.
That fear ratchets up several notches when it comes to call center integrations.
Where do Call Center Integrations Go Wrong?
Call centers are complex environments. They are the point where all systems meet – including CCaaS, CRM, ERP, UCaaS, tracking, and payment solutions.
Indeed, agents alone leverage an average of 8.2 tools to resolve customer queries every day.
As such, integrating new solutions into such a complicated ecosystem often proves to be a testing process. Yet, many operations have made life more difficult by implementing boxed solutions.
Many businesses still do this when deploying new channels, bolting on RCS, video, and WhatsApp rather than integrating them within the broader call center architecture.
As Mark Wood, a Senior Software Product and Project Manager at Streem, told CX Today in a recent interview, that brings challenges for end-users and the business.
“Boxed solutions make users switch to separate web apps, with agents losing the context they have in their CRM,” he said. “That can be time-consuming as there is no inherent data connection between the platforms.”
“Also, that results in lots of switching between tabs, copying and pasting, alongside manual input errors.”
As such, IT teams spend significant sums of cash retrospectively integrating software through custom development, which drains resources.
More pressingly, when integrating with a CX provider such as Salesforce, that burden does not ever go away. Instead, it deepens.
Why? Because Salesforce prioritizes customization. The CRM pioneer recognizes that workflows will change over time and continues to evolve its platform – putting pressure on custom integrations.
“That drives upfront and ongoing costs that businesses often overlook as they start building out processes,” concludes Wood.