How to Integrate Live Chat with Your CRM

Integrating any live chat software on your website with your online CRM integrates all the chat messages, leads, and customer data into one place. The benefit of being synced up with your CRM is that your sales team is able to follow up faster, keep track of customer conversations, and get to closing the sale, all without losing any important information. 

For most modern businesses, this is a must-have for any business with a focused sales growth strategy, a customer retention approach, and an ongoing high-quality customer experience.  When both live chat and your CRM are integrated, your team is able to qualify leads on the spot, place leads in the designated sales pipeline, trigger automated follow-up, and use existing customer data to personalize the conversation. Live chat and CRM integration are helpful for everyone.

At the end of this article, you will be able to integrate live chat with your CRM system, compare the best tools, avoid setup mistakes, and follow practices that are used by top-performing sales and support teams.

• Automated Lead Capture creates leads automatically, saves time.

• Personalized Customer Interaction helps to access past chats.

• Enhanced Sales Follow-Up emails.

• Unified Customer History centralizes chat, email, and call data.

• Top Tools for Integration are Chatboq, Tidio, LiveChat, etc.

Live chat CRM integration connects the live chat tool on your website to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. By doing this, you can gather customer information during a chat, without any additional work, and send it to your CRM instantly. You also receive a complete record of each conversation, meaning your team always knows whom they are talking to and what they talked about.

When a user launches a conversation on your website through the live chat tool, it collects user information such as the user's name, email, and the content of the message. This information is automatically sent to your CRM, where it automatically creates a new contact or lead.

The entire chat is saved in that person's profile in the CRM so that later your team can see the entire user interaction. At this point, the salesperson or support contact could follow up directly. For example, if a visitor asks about pricing, the system could log a potential customer and notify the sales rep to follow up with them immediately.

The integration of live chat with your CRM enables your business to manage customer conversations more efficiently and convert chats into genuine sales opportunities. 

1. Automatic Lead Capture

With a CRM chat integration, new leads are added automatically, so you won't have to copy names and emails from chat messages. This saves time and ensures that you don't miss any possible customers.

2. Personalized Customer Conversations

When agents chat with someone, they can review previous messages, purchases, or problems inside the CRM, which improves customer satisfaction when legitimate agents provide better answers, as well as making the customer feel valued.

3. Better Sales Follow-Up Response

After the chat, the CRM can assign leads to specific sales reps and automate the follow-up emails to ensure customers are contacted again, which keeps the sales conversation alive and increases the possibility that a sale will close. 

4. A Unified Customer History

All emails, chats, and call notes are in one central program, and your team is able to see all customer history in order to better assist customers and collaborate with team members to reach a resolution.

5. Better Analytics

You will be able to see which chat messages generate the most leads, how quickly your team responds, and what questions clients ask the most frequently. Improving performance against these metrics improves sales and support performance.

Selecting the perfect live chat application can make your integration into a CRM platform a simpler and more efficient process. Listed below are some of the finest live chat tools.

1. Chatboq

Chatboq offers the perfect combo of AI-driven chat with seamless CRM integrations. Chatboq can automatically capture leads, assign leads to their correct sales pipeline, and sync the chat history with your CRM to make follow-ups easier and more organized.

2. Tidio

Tidio works particularly well for online stores, but it also connects to some of the most popular CRMs. It allows users to handle their live chat, set up chatbots, and automate email communication toward marketing and sales to ensure that leads are tracked, questions are answered quickly, and sales are maximized.

3. LiveChat

LiveChat focuses on attracting website visitors into leads. It connects with many CRMs and allows sales and support teams to easily see chat history and create tickets to efficiently track customer engagement.

4. Intercom

Intercom combines live chat with age + sale automations for support and follow-up. They can assign leads to the correct rep, send automated messages, and house all of that conversation data in a CRM follow-up.

5. Zendesk Chat

When it comes to customer support teams, Zendesk Chat is a perfect fit. Each chat can be converted into a support ticket in your CRM, allowing you to track all interactions with customers while keeping your teams agile and focused.

Step 1: Select Your CRM and Live Chat Solution

Select a CRM solution that will fit your needs and a live chat solution that has integration capability. For example, some solutions include HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce, Chatboq, Tidio, and LiveChat.

Step 2: Integrate via API / Plugin / Zapier

Connect your live chat application to the CRM via their native integration, a plugin, or automation tool (like Zapier) by following the step-by-step setup guidance of the tools.

Step 3: Map Fields (Name, Email, Tags, Source)

Ensure that everything captured in chat - customer name, email, chat message, and tags - is mapped correctly to the emulated corresponding fields in the CRM application to flow the data correctly.

Step 4: Establish Lead Routing Rules

Create rules to automatically assign inbound leads/chat users to the appropriate sales representative or support team members, based on region, product interest, or priority.

Step 5: Build Follow-Up Workflow

Develop workflow automation, such as sending follow-up emails, alerts, or assigning follow-up tasks in CRM for leads to be contacted, regardless of any manual activity.

Step 6: Test the Integration

Have a few test chats to ensure that the data is sync properly, leads are being routed properly, and workflows are triggered as expected. Adjust settings before going live.

1. Smart Lead Qualification

Define criteria to automatically identify good leads. This way, your sales team is focused on the leads most likely to buy.

2. Automated Tagging

Leads conversation data into tags related to the subject of conversation, products discussed, or urgency of follow-up. This is helpful for organizing leads and making reporting easier.

3. Chat to Email Follow-Ups

Use your CRM to trigger follow-up emails after each chat. This keeps the conversation going, and the odds of a sale increase.

4. CRM Pipeline Visibility

Make sure all chat leads get logged in the CRM pipeline. This gives your team visibility on lead status and what to do next.

5. Agent Performance Tracking

Track agent response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction. Tracking performance is valuable in improving agent efficiency and customer experience. Understanding current live chat trends can help you optimize your support strategy.

1. Repetitive Records 

The Challenge: You notice multiple records in your CRM for the same customer. 

The Solution: When integrated with your CRM, turn on duplicate detection and set the rules to merge records or prevent duplicates from being added automatically.

2. Missing Customer Data 

The Challenge: You are not seeing chat info sync into your CRM. 

The Solution: During setup, check your field mappings to make sure that all necessary chat data (name, email, message, tags, etc.) are mapped to their respective CRM fields.

3. Getting Slow Syncing 

The Challenge: It is taking too long for the data to show in the CRM. 

The Solution: If you are utilizing either native integrations or third-party automation tools like Zapier, be sure to test your connections to ensure that they are syncing your data in real-time.

When live chat is linked to your CRM, security and compliance must come first. Make sure that your integrations are GDPR compliant: only necessary information should be collected, consent obtained, and if a user requests access to or deletion of their data, that process should be simple and easy. Moreover, always encrypt the data, whether it is chat messages or those stored in the CRM, in order to protect the sensitive customer information. These steps, as a whole, are protecting customer data, trust is being kept, and your organization is going in the same direction as privacy and security regulations.

Integrating the live chat with your Customer Relations Management system (CRM) is a valuable method to make sure that your business is consistently and automatically capturing new leads, personalizing interactions with customers, making it easier to follow up after the sale with the customer, and centralizing customer information. Using the right tools and implementing the best practices will lead to a smoother  integration, better performance for your team, and increased customer satisfaction.

If you're looking to enhance your customer service operations, consider exploring how chatbots can improve customer service alongside your live chat integration. Additionally, if you intend to proceed with this, first ensure that a compatible CRM and live chat tool have been selected, the mapping of the fields is correct, the setting up of lead routing is complete, and the testing of workflows is done to be able to avoid the common mistakes.