What are the benefits of CTI Integration in the call center?

Question

Many call centers are running CRM applications such as Siebel, or SAP. They can create integration between the telephony system and the CRM system... But why would you do this? What are the benefits? Also, you can generate the same kind of integration with email systems. Why would you do this? Are there clear arguments for these kind of functionality?

Answer 1

The main benefits to integration between your customer data that resides in a CRM system and any form of communication is being able to know your customer. By being able to trace a customer's interactions and also have an interactive communication with your customer you are given a chance to up-sell or even do predictive marketing to your customer.
For example, if you call your credit card company for your statement balance, if the telephone system in linked into your CRM, you can run business rules to know what type of customer is calling and then customize the on-hold messages to target them specifically. Such as, if you know that the credit card customer has purchased items from a baby store, you could offer discounts from a partner business for baby items.
For email integration you can gleam more information about your customer such as email address, time zone, and then the content of the email itself to be able to build a larger amount of customer data and with a larger amount of data, you can get a better picture of that customer so you can service that customer better (ie sell them more goods/services)
If you don't integrate phone and email into your CRM system you are missing out on chances to get to know your customer better.
These are examples of automatic interaction with a CRM system, but you can also see that if you have a call-center operator, that operator could add notes to the customer's profile such as, hear dog in the back ground, Child crying, sounds like they are driving, etc which would allow you to use that information to partner with other businesses that have good or services that would be for that type of customer.

Answer 2

Siebel Cti Integration

Answer 3

The most obvious benefit would be that the customer ticket can follow the call through the system as it is transferred; it can also be pre-populated with customer data based on automated entry (i.e. "please enter your account number on your touch-tone telephone before speaking with a representative").

The clear argument is that customer service representatives and call-takers do not have to waste their time, energy or thought gathering or correlating information in front of them based on who's on the phone at a given time, or what that person needs - that is done for them, so they can take care of solving the customer's problem in a shorter time.