Integrate the Power of WordPress and CRM

There are so many platforms available for website creation. But, many developers prefer working with WordPress.

You might also be using WordPress.

In fact, according to a study done by Kinsta, more than 29% of websites’ development is in WordPress. This number is huge. It means that more than one-fourth of the websites on the internet use WordPress.

It truly showcases the power of open source software. Today WordPress is a large community. Not only on the developing side but, millions of people use WordPress to manage their website’s content.

Because of its robust features, WordPress has turned out to be a favorite tool for many people.

This was all about CMS. Now, let’s look at the CRMs. Companies use CRMs to maintain the records of their customers to provide them with better user experience and customer service.

CMS handles your website and CRMs handle your customers’ data. But, the real magic happens when they both are in synchronization.

For this, portals play a vital role. They bridge the gap between CRMs and CMS. Portals are helping companies a lot to manage their customers, optimize their customer journey and serve them better.

There are various types of portals available like CRM customer portal, knowledge portal, self-service portal, etc. each with a unique use case and companies either purchase or develop them according to their needs and business model.

These various types of portals are available on a variety of platforms. So, you can decide which portal you want to use on the basis of the CRM and CMS you have. You can even decide which type of portals you want to serve your customers with.

Let’s say you are using SugarCRM for your storing your clients’ data and WordPress as your CMS then, you need to make sure that your portal integrates with both of them.

Many small and medium sized businesses use SugarCRM. It is known for its open source nature and robust functionalities. It helps you to streamline your business by helping you manage all your customers and their data.

Just imagine the power of SugarCRM WordPress Integration with portals as a cherry on the cake can be.

SugarCRM WordPress Synchronizing:

SugarCRM WordPress integration is the best combination for small and medium sized companies. This integration is a good opportunity for your employees to reach out to your clients easily.

Let’s explore the benefits of using this:

Lead Data Management:

When your visitors fill up the form on your website which is in WordPress, you will be able to see their details in the backend in your SugarCRM. This makes it an easy way to collect, store and manage your leads’ data in your CRM.

Not only this but with the help of these leads also you can start cold calling and try to convert them into your clients. Your CRM will have your clients’ data and this will help you analyze and understand your users. Additionally, it will even help you to streamline various processes to help you grow bigger.

Precise Data:

When your CRM and CMS are in proper sync, the data within will be precise and it’ll be easier for you to maintain data hygiene. The data travels from CMS to CRM and then SugarCRM with its functionalities gives you the freedom to utilize that data the way you want. Both of these platforms being secure also gives an assurance that there’ll be no data loss in the process.

User Activity Tracking:

You can know which web pages your clients are visiting and track their activity on your website. This data, in turn, will help you to understand your users’ behavior better. You can send them custom messages on the basis of their interaction with your website, decrease bounce rate, and enhance your customer service.

Create Custom Form Designs:

SugarCRM provides you a feature called a WYSIWYG builder. This lets you create a custom field for your form. You can have complete control of what you wish to develop, you can even showcase your creativity, maintain your brand value and use color combination with respect to your brand.

User Specific Access:

You can provide specific access to each user according to their use and WordPress assures you that only authenticated users can make changes in your WordPress site.

Optimized Lead Journey:

This integration will let you engage and analyze visitors on your WordPress website and helps you to convert them into efficient clients for your business. It provides you insights into what people are looking for on your website, you can know about your target audience, customer habits and understand their behavior.

Final Words:

This integration will help you get the best of both worlds. You can easily create responsive websites using WordPress and SugarCRM and the portals, an interface for your customers, will work as a cherry on the cake for you. It will help you understand your users effectively; gain insights and help you increase your business.

Bringing Together the Power of CRM and IoT

According to research carried out by Gartner, more than 25 billion devices will be connecting by 2020. And, here we are, already in 2020.
As per the Gartner’s research, IoT forms a connection between people-to-people, people-to-things, and things-to-things.

Apart from that, it also changes the way we live and constantly transforms our surroundings. For example, it expands the internet connectivity beyond the basic devices like laptop, mobiles, etc. and even connects devices like thermostats, our watches, etc.

With such larger capabilities, it can make a win-win combination with CRM products. For example, Sugar CRM client portals help businesses serving their customers for better. Now, when you combine them and IoT together it can help you in serving your customers in a better way.

Mixing Automation for Ease:

IoT changes the way we live, and Sugar CRM transforms the way enterprises operate. Imagine the wonders the combination of these two can create. For example, this synergy helping the environment of predictive and preventive functionalities to send alerts for future actions. Such a system will notify customers in advance before they come across any problem, provide a service or the solution to the issues they might face. Additionally, it will decode the buying pattern of the customer in real-time, helping the SugarCRM customer portal to include them in the right marketing campaign.

IoT decodes the buying pattern of customers in real-time by sharing data that help your staff members to use in the SugarCRM client portal or application to find the correct way of a marketing campaign.

The Possibilities

Yes! You can integrate the “Internet of Things” with the Sugar CRM client portal and its applications.

The following are the three vital components of IoT. They will be generating huge benefits for various organizations:

Sensors
Wireless Internet Connectivity
Data Processing Capability

Recently, Gartner did a study on the drivers of CRM applications. According to that study, the most important attributes for CRM drivers are Mobile, Cloud, Big Data and Social Networking. Not only this but they even stated that the Internet of Things is said to be the fifth driver after these four.

Let’s understand that with an example.

Suppose, there is a hearing aid company. It has become more advanced by introducing technology aspects. Now, it is trying to bring innovative features in their product lists.

Those features could be Long battery life, Bluetooth compatibility, noise reduction. Not only this, but it is also introducing products for controlling hearing aid devices through smartphones.

Here is how the synergy of IoT and CRM can work in the below scenarios:

A customer’s hearing aid’s instrument battery is malfunctioning and needs replacement in a few days. So, here IoT will help in notifying the status of the machine. This will even help the staff to inform customers about the issue actively and update them. Additionally, this will help customers to replace the battery and will make sure that they do not face issues while using the product.
Considering the second scenario, a customer’s hearing aid is still under warranty and failing to work properly. Here, the IoT will make sure that your staff comes to know about it immediately. Your customer service representative can call the customer and they can even get the failed hearing aid replaced as it is under warranty.
Due to some reason, if a customer is not using the new features of the hearing aid, here IoT analytics will be helpful to you. The analytics will send alerts and your support team will reach out to your customers to ask them for training to make them aware of those new features and they can start using them.

Wrapping it up:

The IoT and CRM help you in the functioning of sales and marketing in multiple ways. The real-time data generated by IoT helps you to understand your customers in various ways.

It helps you in knowing the usage of products, purchase patterns of customers, understanding the opportunities for cross-selling or upselling, etc. These aspects help your sales team to understand and analyze the IoT generated data.

Additionally, it will help you reduce the cost of market research and your team can focus on potential users with this data. Not only this but after studying important aspects of these users, your staff can run a number of campaigns to turn them into customers.

Source: https://www.sooperarticles.com/technology-articles/software-articles/bringing-together-power-crm-iot-1757819.html

5 Must-Have Features in Your SugarCRM WordPress Customer Portal

SugarCRM is a popular name in the CRM industry. For anyone who wants an enterprise solution the first stop in the enterprise grade options is SugarCRM. Similarly, when it comes to Content Management Systems, the name WordPress is synonymous with it. So it is clear that it has a large market. When you are building a business, you generally look for tools that are established brands in the industry.

If your business is an ecommerce store, then you must need both: a CRM and a CMS. But that is not all. You also need a customer portal to interact with your customers. Let us look a little more in detail as to what features you need to have in your customer portal:

5 Features of a SugarCRM Customer Portal:

Data entry:

Data entry is an extremely basic task. But does that mean it is easy to do when there is a huge customer base? Not at all. A customer portal gives your customer the access to add in their information, like name, phone number, address, etc. These are basic details that cannot go wrong because they have to be in the invoices. This saves a lot of hassle for your staff because they don’t have to handle any changes in this information.

Live Chat

The SugarCRM WordPress customer portal comes with live chat option. This way, your customer will never have to leave unanswered. And you can chat with them to solve their queries. It helps you give them the best assistance without much effort. This adds heftily in customer satisfaction.

Single Sign On

Single Sign On is an extremely popular and easy way of signing in. This is because creating strong passwords is a difficult task. A huge number of people use ‘123456’ or ‘password’ as their password and this is highly unsafe. With SSO, you don’t have to worry about coming up with a unique password again and it is secure! It’s the best of both worlds!

Role based access

SugarCRM customer portal gives you the flexibility to assign specific level of access to certain modules, based on their requirement. You don’t need to give unlimited access to your CRM to every portal user. This way you can limit the potential data leaks, while still making sure all the operations run smoothly.

Mass Credential Generation

Imagine you have to create a username and password for a 1000 people. It can be a tedious task. But if your WordPress customer portal has a feature to create mass credentials, then that task becomes instantly much simpler.

Your SugarCRM customer portal helps you extend your CRM capabilities and more importantly helps you connect with your customers. Since these are the most popular brands in their respective fields, their coming together for your website gives you the best experience. A portal built on that gives you the best of both worlds. You and your users get to take advantage of it.

Once you pick the CRM and CMS, the next item on your checklist should be to buy a portal. And for this, you have to be very careful. After investing in the right CRM and CMS, if you get the cheaper, gimmicky portal, it will affect your business. You should instead choose one that has all the above features, and a company that can give you customization services

After all, a portal that represents your company should follow the same design and style language. Customization also gives you the option to choose modules, dashboard variants, colour, etc.

A customer portal represents your company just as much as a website does. Even more so, if you think about how it directly affects user interaction in lieu of how a website’s interaction with the user is. Would you let anything affect this interaction negatively?

Pick the perfect SugarCRM WordPress customer portal today!

CRM Portals Through the Customer Perspective

CRM is a powerful tool. Since its inception, it has helped many companies gain insight into customer behavior. CRMs have a specific purpose and they serve it well. But they have a limited scope. That is why we need plugins. Plugins significantly increase the scope of the CRM. Perhaps the most important example of CRM plugins is a customer portal.

New technology can be overwhelming. Because of this, it is easy to overlook a few details. Ironically, while using the CRM, sometimes you might end up overlooking the customer’s perspective. How does CRM affect the customer? When you think about it, you’ll find how perfectly the customer portal fits into this picture.

The core function of a CRM is to facilitate orderly interactions with the prospects and clients. However, this is the era of self-managed customers, who can access the quotes, invoices & contracts with minimal involvement of your team. This is your average customer today. And to appease such a customer, you need a way to give him role-based access to certain modules of your CRM. Like a Salesforce customer portal integrated with CMS will help you materialize this idea and wrap it up in an elegant package.

A portal will overcome certain drawbacks while enhancing other features. To understand how this works, we must consider the various factors involved in this process:

Customer Services: Many companies use CRM to assist in customer services. You may consider a call center software to be a good example of this. Portals take this one step further by giving access to a well-documented knowledge base. They let the customer issue support tickets and allow live chat options through the portal itself.

Customer Response: For large companies with a big database of customers, it was previously impossible to keep track of customer feedback. CRM helped to overcome this challenge to a certain extent. A portal improves upon it further by keeping track of your chat history with the customer so that you can review it when required.

Response Time: Giving the customer access to the knowledge base reduces the need for you to engage directly. And when you do need to engage, the ticketing system makes sure that you deal with the customer queries promptly.

Additionally, when based on a CMS like WordPress it gives the customizability that you need to enhance its looks and charm; highlighting the simplicity that it is known for. A customer has access to the following features to customize the way the portal looks:

Change the name of the portal, upload a logo, and choose the records to display on the page. You may even set and change the theme color.
Use templates to make it easier to customize.
Add a profile picture using the portal.

All these details add up to a simple and effective client management system. One may infer that a SuiteCRM Customer Portal or SugarCRM customer portal or any customer portal is going to be an indispensable piece of software in the near future. Presently, it is undergoing mass adoption with early-users lauding its simplicity.

It is evident that adopting a WordPress client management plugin will have a positive impact on customer satisfaction. Happy customers make happy companies. Let us analyze how using this plugin can affect you as a company.

Brand Loyalty:

One distinguishing characteristic of great companies is that they treat customer retention with due importance. Inculcating this in the company philosophy leads to long term relationships with the customers. A CRM plugin like this gives you the tools to achieve brand loyalty.

Automated Communication

You can address common customer queries by making the required information available to them through portals. This is important; especially when you need to keep the info private and share it with relevant people only. The customer portal is an easy solution to this.

Insight into Customer Behaviour

Modern businesses are built on the premise of customer behavior. This knowledge can be leveraged in many ways. You may base your product research on customer tastes and needs, or optimize your marketing plan based on this info.

And that summarizes how a customer portal can guide your business to greatness. Most online businesses are opting for some form of portal. As a result, it is becoming habitual for the customer. Eventually, they’ll start expecting them and it’ll appear to be the most obvious way of customer engagement. However, you can take advantage of it right now and position yourself as industry leaders.

In this way, the CRM customer portal extends the functionality of a CRM. This improves customer retention by empowering them and giving them control.

Customer Satisfaction

The self-managing customer can be of great benefit to the company. If you map your customers on Everett M. Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations, you will find these to be the innovators. These are the proactive users that you can convert into evangelists. This is the machinery that drives your word-of-mouth marketing. Therefore, you must consider serving them to be a privilege.

In fact, you should consider it a privilege to serve all of your customers. And to treat them in this manner, what better tool than a customer portal? When you put it that way, it seems to be a heavy software but, in reality, it is quite simple.

One More Thing

An important thing to consider is the adoption by people who are not that adept in technology. Though this a minority in today’s time, it is still a large number. With that in mind, any decent portal will come with an easy to navigate dashboard that uses icons wherever possible.

Conclusion

The overall experience of the average customer is generally favorable to portals as compared to the traditional methods that use phone calls and e-mails to communicate. A customer can access the information and address their queries at a suitable time and place making a Customer Portal the best solution for customer relationship management.

View Source: https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/crm-portals-through-the-customer-perspective/

Salesforce WordPress Integration: Things You Need to Consider

WordPress and Salesforce are no less than a match made in heaven. When you go for a WordPress Salesforce Integration (WordPress website with Salesforce as your CRM) lead generation becomes easy. Now, the visitors that come to your WordPress website provide you with their information in two ways. One, by signing up to the newsletter and two, by registering for an event. The task of your CRM is to collect that information and store the data at one place enabling you to keep it organized.

However, if you wish to provide your customers with a more personalized browsing experience and boost engagement, you need to integrate WordPress and Salesforce in the best way possible. This can include anything right from plugins like Salesforce Portal for WordPress and apps to customized integrations. Let’s know about the aspects you need to consider in case you go for Salesforce WordPress Integration:

Integration through Apps

Third-Party apps are a widely used option when it comes to integrating Salesforce CRM and WordPress. You can make use of these apps to implement certain functionalities. For e.g., if you’re running an email campaign and you wish to link your emails with Salesforce, you can make use of a popular email marketing software named – Mailchimp. It helps you to create sign-up forms for your website, fetch subscriber details and shoot broadcast emails with ease.

As MailChimp provides you with an option to integrate it with Salesforce, it is possible for you to import your Salesforce contacts to your list and get an access to the data whenever you want. You might have to invest a little into these apps but they’re quite cost-effective and user-friendly.

Robust Form Builders

Advanced form building tools help a lot when you want to map form fields to and from Salesforce. Although these tools have a lot of features, they can burn a little hole in your pocket. They help you to conduct complicated tasks like pre-filling the fields in the form. The only drawback is, it can get difficult to use them as it might ask for strong coding skills or advanced Salesforce knowledge.

If you are looking for a tool that doesn’t need coding, go for FormStack. It helps you to create mobile-friendly surveys and forms. The best part about FormStack is the native form builder for Salesforce which enables you to set up forms with the help of a drag and drop design. User-friendly and robust, at the same time!

Custom Integrations

Complex requirements ask for a complex solution. And this is when you need custom-built forms. Through custom built forms, you can enable your customers to update their payment details or create a searchable database. Now, crafting these solutions asks for a detailed knowledge of API and development skills; for which you might have to hire an expert to help.

Although obtaining this service can prove to be expensive, you won’t have to spend on licensing costs and you will have control over the style of forms and presentation.

How to Choose the Integration That Works?

When you integrate Salesforce and WordPress, your lead generation is sure to get better. However, the integration plugin you decide to use depends on your budget and needs. To start with, you can try a simple form builder and figure out whether or not you would be able to work around it. In case you feel that it isn’t flexible, you can go for an advanced version or go for a plugin customized to your needs.

If you want to make the most out of your WordPress website and Salesforce CRM, you can choose to invest into CRMJetty Portals.

Here’s why our portals are the best:

We build Salesforce WordPress Plugin in such a way that they take the functionality of your product to another level. To be able to do that, we have put in our best efforts and created a portal that surpasses the Salesforce features.
One of the major goals of our customer portal is to help you lessen your operational costs by offering automation. It also accelerates your customer support process.
Rest assure about the confidentiality of your data as we do not fetch any of your data to our database and you can host it on your servers. Also, there wouldn’t be any vulnerabilities added to your CRM data.

Why not get in touch with us and find out more about our WordPress Salesforce Customer Portal? Book a demo with us now!

View Source: https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/things-you-need-to-consider-while-integrating-wordpress-and-salesforce/