With business across all sectors increasingly taking advantage of cloud-based offers, they are also waking up to the potential to increase the value of solutions and processes by capitalising on integration between them. This used to be a technical and highly specialised area, but things have changed dramatically in the last year or so.

Most cloud-based solutions offer APIs that allow them to be combined with others. So, an order processing system can be connected to a CRM, allowing important data to be shared between them and for the two to remain synchronised. Indeed, many of the leading CRM solutions come ready with a wide range of existing integration packages, allowing simple connectivity to be enabled.

There’s also a growing series of resources that are available to download, which effectively enable off-the-shelf integration, so that almost anyone can now take advantages of the benefits of connecting different systems.

All of which makes life a lot easier and brings new efficiencies within the reach of any business. Basically, if you are considering a new solution, then the ability to connect it to others you use is now a key consideration when choosing from different offers and providers.

We’ve been doing this for years. Almost every solution we deliver has to be connected to something else in the enterprise, be it a CRM, a resource planning solution or some other software function that provides specialist capabilities for particular industries. This latter area is the one to which we have to pay most attention. While many systems are used by industries from all sectors, many others are designed for the needs of healthcare, or insurance or something else.

We make sure that we allow for any integration need, to ensure that valuable information from the call center is shared with other processes, allowing them to track customer communication, messages and more. What we’re seeing is that the enterprise domain is becoming increasingly unified, which increases efficiency and ensures that systems and processed are updated with valuable data.

If you haven’t taken steps to integrate your contact center with other processes that are valuable to your business, then perhaps it should be a key goal for 2018. It will definitely deliver benefits and the effort isn’t as much as you might think. And, if you want help in doing this – or if your existing contact center solution cannot cater to these needs, then perhaps you should talk to us. We can definitely help you create a more connected, unified enterprise and enhance the performance of your business.