The Top 5 Apps & Software to Integrate With Your Contact Center

One of the most important functions of a contact center is to create a seamless experience for the customer. That’s true whether they connect with your business via phone, chat, email, or all of the above.

To make that seamless experience possible, contact center agents need the right tools to:

• Access customer data and context of previous interactions
• Communicate with customers and other team members on various channels
• Analyze past interactions and identify trends
• And more

Integrating the right apps and software into your cloud-based contact center helps you put these tools together in a single platform.

Not sure where to start? This post will cover the top 5 types of contact center software integrations that could benefit your business. Plus, we’ll look at how you can integrate these apps and software with Twilio Flex—our world-class contact center solution.

1. CRM software

Customer data is at the heart of an efficient contact center—it’s what allows you to know and understand your customers. And gathering customer data in a centralized place that agents can easily access allows for better personalization, which is key to creating a positive customer experience.

But while 75% of companies claim to provide good or excellent personalized services, nearly half of customers (48%) disagree. So what’s getting in the way of businesses providing personalized support? The answer is often data silos, which make it challenging for agents to access the context they need to achieve personalization.

That’s why it’s so important to integrate your contact center with your customer relationship management (CRM) software, like Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, or a custom-built solution. This integration facilitates the flow of customer data between your contact center and CRM and allows agents to access this data from a single platform.

With the context of a customer’s previous interactions and other important information, agents can provide tailored support without asking the customer repetitive, time-consuming questions. This reduces friction and contributes to quality customer engagement.

You can integrate Flex with any CRM, whether it’s on-premise, cloud based, or custom-built. Learn more about how to integrate your CRM.

2. AI tools

There are many ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) tools to automate tasks in your contact center, such as AI-powered chatbots, transcription, and sentiment analysis.

For example, integrating a tool like Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) can free up your agents’ time, so they can focus on complex interactions while a virtual agent answers common questions. AI can also surface relevant information and guidance based on customer intent to equip live agents to more effectively serve customers.

Other ways to use AI include text-to-speech transcription and data analysis to identify trends and common topics. This off-loading of some of these tasks from employees can help make contact centers more efficient and provide valuable insights on how you can better serve customers.

We partnered with Google Cloud’s CCAI to help businesses integrate AI into a Flex contact center and tap into these opportunities for increased efficiency. Learn more about integrating with Google Cloud’s CCAI.

3. Messaging applications

One of the major differences between a traditional call center and a contact center is the latter allows for an omnichannel approach. This means that businesses can connect with customers on various integrated channels to create a consistent, seamless experience for the customer.

Omnichannel communication is important because many customers today favor text-based support on messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Discord. Integrating these apps into your contact center makes it more convenient for customers to reach you. Plus, it allows agents to swiftly switch between channels while maintaining the context of previous interactions.

Flex can support communications via email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WebChat—all on one platform. Additionally, you can integrate Flex with messaging apps like Discord and even add sentiment analysis capabilities.

4. Translation platforms

For global businesses, offering support in the customer’s preferred language can take personalization to the next level. But it can be challenging for contact centers to offer multilingual support when few agents can speak multiple languages.

One solution is to integrate AI-powered translation into your digital, text-based channels. This allows agents to communicate with customers in their primary language and can help expand your contact center’s reach.

The Flex integration with Lionbridge Language Cloud enables multiple-language support for chat, SMS, and WhatsApp. This integration uses real-time, AI-based neural machine translation that allows the agent and customer to instantly communicate across languages.

5. Workflow automation platforms

Many businesses use workflow automation platforms like ServiceNow to handle IT tickets, escalations, and alerts for outages and other incidents. But sometimes customers need to communicate with an agent in real time instead of waiting for a ticket resolution. This is where integrating a platform like ServiceNow with your contact center can help.

With this integration, customers can connect with a live agent directly from the ServiceNow platform when they need additional support. Plus, agents can access previous incidents or escalations to get the full context to support customers.

Using Twilio Studio and Flex, you can integrate ServiceNow with your call center so customers can reach an agent directly from ServiceNow with the push of a button.

Integrate your existing apps with Twilio Flex

Twilio Flex is everything you’ve been looking for—a flexible contact center that empowers your business to deliver personalized customer experiences across various channels from a single powerful platform. You can integrate Flex with the apps and software you already use and work with our trusted partners to extend your contact center’s functionality.

The contact center integrations mentioned in this post are just the beginning. Check out our integration partners to discover everything you can integrate with Flex, including analytics tools, workforce management, payment clouds, and more.

Ready to give Flex a try? Request a demo today.