CRM integration: What it is, benefits, and examples

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms are essential tools for organizations of all sizes, helping teams across marketing, sales, and customer support manage their interactions with customers and prospects. Any team that regularly engages with customers or handles important account information can benefit from the visibility and organization a CRM provides.

However, a CRM is most powerful when it does not operate in isolation. Most CRM platforms offer integrations with a wide range of business tools, allowing data to flow seamlessly between systems. If your teams rely on tools like Google Workspace, project management platforms, or a business phone system, chances are there is a CRM integration designed to streamline your workflow and improve efficiency.

What is a CRM integration?

A CRM integration is the process of connecting your CRM system to other business applications so data can move between them in a unified and seamless way. This type of integrated customer relationship management helps ensure that information stays consistent across tools, reduces manual data entry, and supports automated workflows that keep teams aligned.

With an integrated CRM (HubSpot and Salesforce are popular CRMs, for example), sales, support, and marketing teams can access the same up to date customer information without switching between apps or updating records in multiple places. Since most businesses rely on many different tools throughout the customer journey, CRM integrations help streamline processes, improve data accuracy, and create a more efficient experience for both employees and customers. This is why so many organizations consider CRM essential to achieving revenue and growth goals.

What are the benefits of CRM integration?

Implementing an integration for CRM systems brings all your customer data into one unified view, which helps teams work more efficiently and make better informed decisions. When your CRM integrates with the other tools you use every day, information stays consistent across platforms and updates automatically. This allows sales teams to track deals more accurately, support teams to respond faster, and marketing teams to deliver more personalized experiences. A strong CRM integration also reduces manual data entry and app switching, giving employees more time to focus on meaningful customer interactions. Ultimately, CRM integrations help businesses improve performance, streamline workflows, and create a stronger customer journey.

Streamlined workflows

CRM systems and CRM call center software are designed to make it easier for you to log all your customer interactions—by doing it for you! This is by far one of the biggest reasons to use software integrations. Data entry is one of the most time-consuming (and least valuable) tasks a person can do, especially if you’re a salesperson whose time could be better spent having actual conversations with prospects. A CRM can give you that time back.

Centralized customer data

The better you understand your customers, the better the customer experience you can provide. But not everyone can know every little thing about every customer. CRM integrations can help here because they’re your library—they store all your customer data from demographics to past interaction history, and make it easy for you to access. You don’t need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of your customers when your CRM can store it all.

Customer satisfaction

A better sales process = better customer service. This is another huge benefit of CRM integration. Imagine if your sales reps had instant access to all the information they need about their customer and their account on a single platform.

For example, integrating Salesforce with Dialpad's cloud contact center solution allows agents or reps to take a call from a customer—and see everything they need to know about that person in a pop-up:

Increased productivity and efficiency

CRM integrations reduce the need to switch between apps by bringing communication, customer data, and task management into a single workflow. Automations handle repetitive tasks, while shared data ensures teams always work with the most current information. This gives employees more time to focus on strategic work and improves overall operational efficiency.

Improved collaboration

When CRM data flows across marketing, sales, and support tools, teams can coordinate more effectively. Everyone has visibility into customer activity, open tasks, and communication history, which reduces misalignment and duplicate work. An integrated CRM environment helps teams stay connected and work toward shared goals.

Data security

CRM integrations centralize customer data inside a platform that is built for secure storage and access control. Instead of having information scattered across different tools with varying security levels, integrations allow businesses to manage permissions and compliance requirements more easily. This improves data protection and reduces the risk of errors or unauthorized access.

What are the different types of CRM integrations?

There are many ways to set up an integration for CRM systems, but most of them fall into two main categories: integrations that support specific business functions and integrations that connect the CRM to other systems or tools. Business function integrations help teams automate tasks related to sales, marketing, or customer support, ensuring that customer data flows smoothly through every stage of the journey. Systems and tool integrations focus on syncing information between the CRM and platforms such as communication tools, productivity suites, or analytics software. Together, these types of CRM integrate strategies help organizations improve efficiency, reduce manual work, and create a more connected digital workspace.

CRM business function integrations

CRM business function integrations connect your customer relationship data with the tools different teams use every day. These integrations help automate workflows, improve communication, and create a more integrated customer relationship management experience. By aligning your CRM with marketing, sales, support, e commerce, finance, and collaboration tools, teams can work with the same information and reduce manual effort across the entire customer lifecycle.

Marketing and sales integration

Marketing and sales integrations connect your CRM with email marketing tools, lead generation systems, and sales engagement platforms. This ensures that customer interactions, campaign activity, and deal progress are automatically synced, helping teams prioritize leads and personalize outreach. An integration for CRM in this category strengthens collaboration between marketing and sales and makes it easier to track the customer journey from first touch to closed deal.

Customer service integration

Customer service integrations connect your CRM with call center software, ticketing systems, and communication channels so support teams always have the full context of each customer. This allows agents to access account details, previous interactions, and open issues without switching tools. A strong CRM integrate setup helps teams respond faster, improve accuracy, and deliver more consistent service.

eCommerce integration

eCommerce integrations connect customer purchase history, product data, and shopping behavior directly to your CRM. This gives teams a clearer view of how customers engage across online channels, enabling more personalized recommendations and targeted marketing. These integrations also help automate order tracking, account updates, and follow up communication.

Finance integration

Finance integrations link your CRM to billing systems, invoicing platforms, and payment tools. This ensures that financial data such as subscription status, outstanding invoices, and payment history stays up to date in the CRM. As a result, teams can manage renewals more effectively, improve forecasting, and create a smoother customer billing experience.

Collaboration integration

Collaboration integrations connect your CRM with internal communication tools like messaging platforms, video meetings, and shared project spaces. These integrations help teams communicate about customer accounts in real time and keep everyone aligned on next steps. By bringing collaboration tools into an integrated customer relationship management environment, organizations can reduce information silos and streamline teamwork.

CRM tool integrations

Communication integration

Communication integrations connect your CRM with the external channels your teams use to interact with customers, such as phone systems, video conferencing tools, SMS platforms, and omnichannel contact center solutions. These integrations allow customer facing teams to call, message, or meet directly from within the CRM while automatically capturing interaction details in the customer record. By pairing your CRM with the communication tools you rely on most, you can reduce app switching, improve data accuracy, and ensure that every conversation is stored in a single, unified view.

Note: See all the CRMs that Dialpad can integrate with.

Email integration

Email integrations act as the connector between your Gmail or Outlook inbox and your CRM system. This way, you can keep track of all your emails and access a range of productivity-enhancing tools like email templates and sequences for email marketing. You’ll be one click away from all your CRM contact data, customer information, and customer interactions.

Calendar integration

CRMs often allow for appointment scheduling and task management which is all made much easier with an integrated calendar. If you use Google or Microsoft Outlook calendar, you can integrate them with your CRM to automatically sync things like events and webinars over without duplicating anything or copying and pasting stuff over.

Fun fact: With Dialpad integrated with your CRM and calendar (it integrates with both Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook’s calendars), you can schedule meetings with automatically generated meeting links right inside those calendar platforms.

Social media integration

Social media integrations connect your CRM with platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or X so teams can capture customer interactions and insights directly within the CRM. These integrations help marketing and sales teams track engagement, gather profile data, and identify potential leads without manually searching across multiple channels. By automatically syncing social activity and contact information, social media integrations support better prospecting, more accurate qualification, and a deeper understanding of customer behavior.

Marketing automation integration

CRM systems break down the silos between sales and marketing departments. Marketing automation is a popular CRM integration that allows for potential and qualified leads to be passed on to sales teams.

With marketing automation integration, all teams can access, track, and analyze customer interactions and behaviors. This helps to create a unified ecosystem that allows marketing teams to better target and personalize campaigns to their particular audiences. This way, marketing teams can generate content like blog posts, social media posts, whitepapers, and more—all informed by accurate, up-to-date customer data.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Companies deploy ERP systems to help manage their daily business activities like accounting, sales, marketing, and manufacturing. CRM ERP integrations can help business owners and teams stay on top of various business processes from a single user interface.

Moreover, with the growing influence of AI in accounting, businesses are increasingly automating financial processes, streamlining tasks such as invoicing, payroll, and expense tracking.

Both ERP and CRM software includes storage of contact information and account data, so integrating them can help to save valuable time on duplicated data entry and management. Some software vendors, such as Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite, offer ERP and CRM software, whereas other CRM solutions like Salesforce integrate with ERP providers.

Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics integration

Business Intelligence and analytics integrations connect your CRM with reporting platforms that help transform raw customer data into actionable insights. These integrations allow businesses to measure performance across sales, marketing, and customer service by consolidating information into dashboards and visual reports. With a stronger integration for CRM systems, teams can identify customer trends, forecast revenue, and analyze behavior patterns more accurately.

BI tools also support better decision making by revealing which activities drive the most impact, helping organizations build a more integrated customer relationship management strategy. A well designed CRM integrate approach ensures that insights stay current and accessible to the teams who need them most.

How call centers benefit from CRM integrations

Call center CRM integration creates a seamless flow of customer data between the CRM and the communication tools agents use every day. When call center software connects directly to a CRM, agents can see customer history, account details, and previous interactions the moment a call, message, or chat comes in. This improves productivity by reducing handle times, increasing first call resolution rates, and helping agents deliver more personalized service.

Call center integration also ensures that every interaction is logged automatically, which creates consistent records and a better experience across channels. Dialpad’s contact center integrations include powerful options for Salesforce and HubSpot, giving teams real time context and the tools they need to support customers more effectively.

How to integrate your CRM platform

1. Examine your existing data

The first thing to do when integrating your CRM platform with your essential software applications is to examine and audit your existing data.

CRM systems are always accumulating information about your business prospects and customers. Your database is constantly growing every time a member of your sales team adds a new record or a prospective customer fills out a form on your landing page.

This information should be consistently updated to ensure your team has access to updated data and insights. When your CRM data is outdated it can result in problems for your business, such as convoluted sales cycles and poorly managed administrative tasks. Before you start integrating third-party sales apps into your CRM, you’ll need to ensure your existing data is up-to-date.

To examine your existing data, take a look at these five key areas:

• Accuracy: How accurate is your data?

• Completeness: Is your data complete? Do you have a record of all your important contact information and business IDs for every company?

• Consistency: Is naming and vocabulary consistent across records? If not, this could lead to problems in the future.

• Uniqueness: Is each entry unique or do you have duplicate entries for companies or contacts?

• Timeliness: Is all of your data up to date?

2. Construct a solid foundation

The current state of your CRM data might seem overwhelming and organizing it like a huge task ahead of you, but don’t worry! Most company information becomes outdated throughout the year for numerous reasons, and examining that data to fix inconsistencies is simply a part of the CRM integration process.

Once you’ve got an idea of the state of your data, it’s time to sort it out. Detect and delete outdated and inconsistent records from your database. Once that’s done, you’ll have plenty of room for your integrations to provide richer insights and salient data points.

Once your CRM is filled with the correct data, you’ll have a solid foundation from which to access important real-time company information that’ll help to inform better business strategies.

3. Choose the right CRM integrations

Once your data is organized in your CRM system, the next step is choosing the integrations that best support your business goals. The right integration for CRM platforms should align with your existing workflows, strengthen the way teams communicate, and fill gaps in your current tech stack. Rather than connecting every available tool, focus on the integrations that improve visibility, automate routine tasks, or enhance customer interactions.

Most software platforms offer CRM integrations for communication, marketing, sales, and analytics tools, allowing you to centralize critical information and streamline operations. By selecting integrations that match your priorities, your team gains a clearer view of the customer journey and easier access to the insights they need to work effectively.

Common challenges when you don't have CRM integrations

Manual processes everywhere

Every day, business owners and team members need to perform various processes manually. This can be very time-consuming and error-prone—and means companies don’t maximize the full potential of their employees and systems.

This sometimes also results in customer service complaints and employee dissatisfaction just because of the lack of visibility and inaccurate information. (Not to mention the added costs manual processes pile on for businesses due to increased resources, time, and human error.)

To avoid this, use CRM integrations to streamline manual tasks like data input, keeping contact records, or manual task checking. This will free up employees’ time so they can focus on more complex tasks like handling important customer interactions.

Hard to achieve customer experience goals

Ensuring customer satisfaction should be a business’s top priority. In one survey, 1,920 business professionals were asked about their number one priority for the next five years, and customer service came out on top, beating both product and pricing.

To provide a good customer experience, one of the most basic things a team should be able to do is to get information they need quickly, whether that’s information about the customer or prospect, information about the products, and so on.

Customer data mayhem

When all of your customer data is scattered across applications it can cause chaos when it comes to handling sales and support requests. This lack of organization and consistency when it comes to collecting data can be problematic, making your employees’ jobs more challenging than they need to be.

With CRM integration, you can store and manage all important customer data in one place that teams across departments can access easily. This saves time going back and forth with email or chat requests, as all customer information is stored and updated securely in the cloud-based CRM. This way, people from all teams can see which stage a customer is at in the sales cycle for better cohesion.

What’s more, if you do need to clarify something with another department before proceeding with the customer, you can simply shoot them a message or share files using team collaboration integration apps.

Wasting resources

Another major hurdle to working without a CRM is wasted resources. Consider the amount of energy, time, and resources your team spends gathering data if it’s scattered across various internal systems, apps, and external sites like Google Analytics.

Imagine the resources you could save if all the information was stored and updated in a centralized, cloud-based system. By integrating all your customer touchpoints and contact information with your CRM, your team can manage customer interactions and create and share reports without having to switch between apps — saving valuable resources.

Hindrances in finding and retaining customers

Without a CRM, business owners and team members are likely spending too much of their time on manual tasks rather than focusing on marketing to, attracting, and retaining customers. This means prospects might slip through the cracks in a siloed system and customer engagement might suffer as a result.

When all of your business apps and customer data are integrated with your CRM, you can focus more time on what really matters: Your customers. Moreover, when all contact data and interaction history is accessible through your CRM, your team will be able to make more targeted decisions towards prospects and existing customers to improve their overall experience with your business.