What is Contact Center CRM Software?

Contact center CRM software, also known as customer relationship management software, is a tool used by contact centers to improve customer experiences. The software stores information about customers, tracks customer interactions, and simplifies communication and customer service channels — all in one place. In short, it helps businesses resolve issues faster.

Our research finds that 82% of service professionals say customer expectations are higher than they used to be. With expectations on the rise, it’s important to choose a high-quality contact center solution with your customer experience in mind. Here’s everything you need to know about contact center CRM software.

Investing in contact center CRM software can help you in a few key ways, including:

• A seamless customer experience: Contact center CRM software allows customer service agents to handle customer questions and issues across channels. Whether your customers are calling, emailing, or posting on social media (or a combination of the three), your business can provide the consistent experience that your customers expect.
• Better collaboration: With features like case management and collaborative customer service tools, agents can easily share information, ask questions, and escalate cases to subject matter experts. This leads to faster and more accurate issue resolution.
• More self-service options: Contact center CRM software helps organizations create an online self-service experience, meaning customers can find solutions and get updates on their cases without the need to contact customer support. This not only improves customer satisfaction, but also reduces service costs and response times.

Although some people use the terms call center and contact center interchangeably, there are important differences. It’s important to understand how CRM software may be used for each.

A call center primarily handles phone-based interactions, whereas a contact center offers a comprehensive range of communication channels. These channels include phone, AI agents, email, and self-service portals, ensuring customers can reach out in any way they please.

Today’s demanding customers need a fully modernized contact center to meet their needs. Here are some of the top contact center features that can help you satisfy customer expectations.

• Real-time views and complete histories: Contact center CRM software can provide a complete view of all customer data, including current and past interactions across all channels, previous purchases, account information, and more. This allows your contact center to handle a wide range of customer needs from a single platform.
• Connected omnichannel engagement: An omnichannel contact center uses cloud-based software to manage customer interactions across multiple channels. It helps you deliver a connected experience no matter how a customer contacts you.
• AI and automation: AI customer service software boosts rep productivity by automating routine processes and tasks. In fact, our research finds that in service organizations currently using AI, 81% of reps say the technology frees them to work on more complex cases.
• Intelligent routing: Customer satisfaction depends on being routed to the right place. Effective contact centers can route customers directly to the person or AI agent best equipped to give them the help they need.
• Customer self-service: Contact centers with self-service resources, such as AI agents and searchable help centers, give customers a convenient way to get help any time, day or night.

Your CRM isn't just a record-keeper. It's the foundation everything is built on. The leading contact centers are building AI on native customer data — one unified platform where full customer context powers every interaction, from voice to digital.

CRM tools can help you connect with customers quickly and easily in a number of ways, but there are still a few steps to take to really see the results you want — faster. How you use the software ultimately depends on what customer service problems you’re trying to solve.

Here are some common ways to make a contact center CRM work for you:

1. Give customers multiple support options: Customers like choices. Engage with customers wherever they are, such as chat, WhatsApp, and phone.
2. Let customers help themselves: Self-service options can increase customer satisfaction and even boost your team's productivity by handling FAQs with ease.
3. Give service reps a complete customer view: Integrating your CRM with your contact center allows your team to help customers faster and personalize their experience.
4. Adopt automation and AI customer support: Automated customer service can help you streamline manual (and repetitive) tasks like follow-ups or escalations.
5. Collect actionable insights: Use analytics software to identify customer preferences, pain points, and other insights to continuously improve customer experience.

CRM tools can help you connect with customers quickly and easily in a number of ways, but there are still a few steps to take to really see the results you want — faster. How you use the software ultimately depends on what customer service problems you’re trying to solve.

Here are some common ways to make a contact center CRM work for you:

• Start with one channel, such as in-app messaging, and then add additional ways for your customers to get in touch such as chat, WhatsApp, and phone.
• Deploy AI-powered chatbots (built directly into the CRM platform) to make it easier to automate personalized customer service across all channels.
• Design personalized customer journeys that make it easy for customers to get help from automated services or a human agent, ensuring everyone receives the support they need on the channel they prefer.
• Boost productivity with more efficient collaboration and communication between teams and departments. Automated workflows can help you streamline manual (and repetitive) tasks like follow-ups or escalations.

Investing in a new enterprise technology — even one like contact center CRM software that can have an immediate impact — can seem daunting. Service Cloud uses a centralized approach, providing all the necessary tools via a comprehensive customer service platform that centralizes customer data, interactions, and support processes.

The journey to the right technology solution can take time. To learn more about contact center strategy, consider free education resources like Trailhead or learning from peers through the Serviceblazer community on Slack.