Updated on by Hayley Brown
For many organisations, customer experience and customer service are key components of their business strategy. Therefore using support applications is vital as they can help with communication, and increase customer loyalty, and engagement. As well as provide an organisation with a competitive edge.
Therefore implementing support integrations that are synced with your other third-party applications through native integrations can amplify your customer experience and service.
What is a support application?
A support application serves to bridge the gap between organisations and their customers or clients. They are a modern method of communication for sales, support and customer engagement.
They tend to operate with chat systems where customers can input a request, issue or question and a ticket are generated for the organisation to research and respond. Hopefully answering or solve their issue. They can also be used for targeted content, behaviour-driven messages, and conversational support when customers are browsing a website.
Popular Support Connectors
Typical Support Integrations
There is a multitude of integrations for your support applications and these automated workflows can have numerous benefits for your organisation, and help your employees streamline their processes and increase their productivity.
Support & CRM Integrations
Your CRM system houses all of your customer data. Therefore building integrated workflows with your support application helps to maintain and update the data continuously. For instance, a contact can be automatically updated when they submit a ticket. Alternatively, a tag or note can be added to a contact’s profile when an issue has been submitted. This can then trigger notification via email to follow up. Automating manual processes and allowing your users to follow up if necessary.
Other Integration Examples
1. Add notes to CRM company/deal records from unresolved/resolved support tickets
2. Create new leads in your CRM from support tickets
3. Update support tickets when deals move through your CRM pipeline
Email & Support Integrations
Syncing your support with email is a useful way of notifying the necessary parties of what needs to be resolved and who for whom. For example, when a new support ticket has been created it can be sorted based on the issue, question or request through tags. This then triggers emails to relevant departments to resolve and respond.
Other Integration Examples
1. Add new support users to an email marketing list
2. Add new email messages to support as tickets
3. Add new inbound email messages to support as tickets and as events in the calendar
Support & Project Management Integrations
Using a support platform and a project management application is useful for keeping track of issues that arise. Building an integration between the two can allow for new submitted tickets to be automatically added to a project management platform as a new task. There the ticket can be continuously tracked and modified when solved.
Other Integration Examples
1. Add new support tickets to project management as tasks
2. Send notifications for new support tickets
3. Create new events for support tickets in the team calendar
eCommerce & Support Integrations
Support, especially chat-based applications, is a typical third-party integration with eCommerce sites. Designed to help users with a new product or an existing product they own. They allow for quick interactions and improve a customer’s experience with a website. For instance, when an existing customer abandons their cart, this could trigger an integration for a ticket to be created, and a tag added to their account. Then the integration could send out an SMS to the customer reminding them of the items in their cart.
Other Integration Examples
1. Add new eCommerce customers to support as users
2. Generate tickets in support of newly-paid orders in eCommerce
3. When a new abandoned cart happens, add or update the user in support
Support & Form Integrations
Low-code tools allow anyone to build integrations. Syncing support platform functionality and forms or surveys is useful for improving services or products. For instance, generating new support tickets from new form entries. As well as triggering alternative customer experience forms based on the user’s responsibility to support.
Other Integration Examples
1. Create a new ticket from new survey entries
2. Trigger different customer experience questionnaires depending on a users response to support service
3. When new action has happened on an existing support ticket, update the multiple-choice options in the survey.
SMS & Support Integrations
Providing great customer service can be integrated with your SMS. A support application integration could look something like creating a new SMS contact when a new user has submitted a ticket. Once the ticket has been solved a support form can be sent to the contact to review the service they received.
Other Integration Examples
1. Create a new contact when a new user has been added to messaging channel
2. Send a new message alert as an SMS
How are these types of integrations useful for an organisation?
Support integrations are therefore useful to your organisation because they provide the ability to streamline manual processes. They can not only save your support team time but increase customer satisfaction due to responsive messages. This can result in increased customer loyalty, and engagement. As well as providing the organisation with a competitive advantage over others in the same market.
Building native integrations are easy with an embedded iPaaS. With orchestration tools, automated workflows can be built quickly, and efficiently by anyone. An integration platform helps to keep your data flowing between API connectors and be a reliable solution.
