CRM Integration: A Complete Guide

Your customer relationship management (CRM) software is an information powerhouse that lets you access data across the entire customer lifecycle, helping you strengthen customer relationships with every interaction. But customer data exists in other areas, too — in your company’s website, in legacy systems, and in a host of third-party applications. In fact, the average organization uses nearly 1,000 separate applications.

How do you connect all your external apps with your CRM to make it the single source of truth for your company? CRM integration is the answer. When you unite all your external apps with your CRM, you enhance collaboration, streamline operations, improve data accuracy, and create better customer experiences. And if your CRM is powered by predictive and generative AI, you can also automate complex processes, analyze data, and create forecasts. Let’s look at how CRM integration can help you gain all these benefits.

What we’ll cover

• What is CRM integration?
• Why CRM integration matters
• 5 benefits of CRM integration
• 5 types of CRM integration
• How to use APIs to integrate your CRM

CRM integration is the process of connecting your third-party applications — which may exist in the cloud, in legacy systems, and in on-premise hardware and software — to your CRM platform so that data can be automatically synced between them. For example, if you run a campaign using integrated marketing automation software, any customer data collected through that campaign will be automatically available in your CRM and in every other integrated application.

Every company department uses multiple software applications and systems, such as tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP), order and inventory management, project management, supply chain management, social media, and collaboration — and they all host their own data. Some departments might even have their own CRM software. If each department acts independently, and if its systems aren’t integrated with other departments, data silos can arise. It’s a widespread challenge: The average business has integrated only 28% of its applications, and 81% of IT leaders say silos are impeding their digital transformation efforts.

CRM integration helps break down data silos and ensures that everyone in the company is using the same data. If you want to maximize your IT investments — especially artificial intelligence (AI) — it’s crucial to integrate your CRM.

On its own, a CRM provides numerous benefits: By giving you a complete view of your customer data, it helps you manage customer relationships more effectively and build a more customer-centric business. But when you integrate your CRM with your third-party applications, the benefits are even greater. Let’s take a look.

CRM integration creates a single source of truth that helps teams throughout your company communicate and collaborate more effectively. When sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams use one unified platform to access the same customer data — including data previously held in third-party applications — they can create customer-focused strategies based on accurate, real-time information.

Disconnected data means clunky and time-consuming workflows, such as signing in to multiple systems, and switching between them to access and manage data. With an integrated CRM, all your data is hosted in one unified system, updated immediately and accessible to everyone. Streamlined processes help teams stay focused and on track. And embedded AI tools that are grounded in your trusted company data can help create even greater efficiencies across teams.

With an integrated CRM, data is automatically synced between your CRM and third-party apps, so you’re always working with the most accurate and up-to-date information. For example, connected inventory systems can give retail or customer service teams better insights into warehouse inventory, such as when items are at low volume or out of stock. An integrated CRM also means you can run automated reports and pull AI-generated, actionable intelligence from one centralized source — and your analyses will be richer because you’re working with more data points.

CRM integration lets you take advantage of customer data collected from web forms, marketing automation software, and sales and prospecting tools so you can turn leads into prospects, and prospects into sales. Ecommerce teams can customize their marketing efforts based on customer purchase history data and product availability, using up-to-date information from integrated storefronts and inventory systems.

An integrated CRM lets you streamline service operations and reduce churn. Connecting customer history records and help desk systems with your CRM gives reps a complete view of service issues and allows digital agents to access service libraries. The result: faster case resolution and a better customer experience. Integrated systems can also provide data to help analyze service performance based on relevant metrics.

The best CRMs include built-in apps so all your data is already in one place, but you probably still use a number of third-party apps that aren’t integrated. You can directly connect those outliers to your CRM by using a data platform that offers out-of-the-box connectors and integrations. When developing and implementing a CRM strategy, look for a platform that supports integration, whether you’re a small business or a large organization.

With an integrated AI-powered CRM, marketers can build target audience segments based on marketing, commerce, sales, service, revenue, and campaign data, and activate them across channels. Integrated engagement data from your social and marketing campaigns and your website can help marketers turn customer and prospect behavior into AI-generated personalized messaging, content, and offers.

An integrated AI CRM can pull in buyer intent signals such as web interactions, marketing campaign engagement, and social media activity to automatically identify the hottest leads. It can also alert sellers to the best time to connect with prospects based on engagement data from web, social, and marketing.

Service leaders can assess customer health with an integrated AI-powered CRM that collects data on customer cases, billing disputes, and customer feedback, and can assess operations through telemetry, which is the process of pulling data from IoT and other devices. They can also analyze service performance via dashboards that provide metrics like customer satisfaction scores, case resolution times, and agent productivity. Integrated data can also be used to identify at-risk customers, so reps can address customer issues as soon as they occur.

Commerce teams can use integrated web and social-media engagement data along with your CRM’s commerce and marketing data to create AI-driven personalized shopping journeys and offer contextualized product recommendations, promotions, and tailored pricing. Integrated inventory and order management data can trigger back-in-stock alerts and automatically create service cases, making merchandising more efficient.

You can integrate CRM collaboration tools like Slack with your CRM data from sales, service, marketing, and commerce to better connect with your customers. Channels let you build focused collections of your conversations and data, and AI-powered search lets you quickly find what you need in channels and threads. Slack also lets you connect your third-party tools, including those for project management, content management, file management, file sharing, document signing, videoconferencing, and productivity, so you can work more efficiently.

If you’re ready to integrate your CRM system, there are three options to consider:

1. Invest in products and services from just one provider so all your programs and tools automatically integrate and share data. This generally isn’t the best option, though, given how many programs the average company uses.
2. Have your developers write quick lines of code to force two systems to communicate. But this strategy often results in a messy web of code that breaks with updates and new integrations, creating headaches for IT teams and users.
3. Use an application programming interface (API), which is software that allows two applications to talk to each other. Since not all third-party apps were built with integration in mind, an API is the easiest, fastest, and most beneficial integration strategy.

APIs can quickly integrate current and future applications and processes, which means they protect your IT investments. If no out-of-the-box integration exists for a certain application, an integration platform can help: It lets you connect applications, data sources, and APIs so you can create a seamless flow of data across your diverse systems and streamline your operations. The platform, which supports both on-site and cloud-based integrations, offers a library of prebuilt connectors that are tailored for business applications, databases, and protocols. It also provides tools for designing, building, and managing APIs.

Using an API-led strategy for CRM integration requires three tiers of APIs, each developed for a specific purpose: to extract data from systems, to unify data into processes, or to deliver an experience.

System APIs pull data from specific systems. For example, to give a customer a shipping update, you’d use a system API to access data from the shipping company’s system, such as one used by UPS, FedEx, or the U.S. Postal Service. For CRM integration, system APIs can be used with ERP, customer, and billing systems, and with proprietary databases such as third-party payment processors.

Process APIs combine system APIs for a specific business purpose. In the case of the shipping update, you might need multiple system APIs — from the shipping company and from toll shipments — to alert the customer to a shipment’s location, to tell them if the shipment is delayed, and so on.Companies that use APIs to connect their disparate systems enjoy faster project completion and an easier time with data integration. APIs help CRM platforms become a company’s single source of truth, which then makes it possible to derive data-based insights from all corners of the company’s infrastructure. These insights enable companies to accurately and quickly serve their customers, thus driving profitability and success.

Experience APIs use multiple system and process APIs, often to support more complex processes. For example, an experience API lets a customer service rep see not only the customer’s history with service, but also with marketing, sales, accounting, and social media. This helps the rep better assess the customer’s needs, answer questions, and provide assistance.

Better collaboration, richer and more accurate data, and more productive teams: They’re all part of the benefits you’ll get when you connect your CRM with your third-party systems. Start a free trial today.

Missy Roback is an award-winning writer and editor with deep experience in journalism and marketing. She’s also a published fiction writer, a singer-songwriter, a vintage fanatic, and a devoted cat lady.