Enterprise Integration – Your Key to Deliver Connected CX in 2023 & Beyond

Today, brands are constantly adding new apps, data, and software to their tech stack to enhance their organization’s capabilities. Each department in an organization may act independently, but if your systems aren’t connected with other departments, this can create data silos and a disconnection crisis.

And such silos and disconnections are the number one cause of derailing digital initiatives. According to a report by MuleSoft^[i], data silos remain a significant challenge to creating integrated user experiences.

Disconnected technology leads to disconnected experiences. The majority of disconnection today is driven by your technology stack. Disconnected systems operate independently, creating silos between important data and tools that can’t communicate with each other.

That lack of communication creates inefficiencies, slowing teams down and forcing them to work in complete silos. And as your platforms don’t communicate with each other, neither do your teams, which can trickle down to their interactions with customers. Therefore, enterprise integration is the need of the hour.

Looking forward to 2023, the way your company cultivates connected experiences for the customers may be worth evaluating.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about the what and the why of connected CX and how you can deliver connected experiences leveraging enterprise integration to grow your business better.

The What and the Why of Connected Experiences?

Connected experiences leverage data from automated processes and self-learning software to foster meaningful customer relationships across channels. It helps businesses across industries witness better revenue and strengthen their competitive edge. You can deliver connected CX by integrating different applications in your technology stack that will help you:

• Create a single view of customers
• Get more out of your customer data
• Access data from anywhere, any time
• Streamline work processes
• Analyze data in real-time

Deliver Connected Experience to Your Customers With Enterprise Integration

Disparate systems and data silos are the two biggest roadblocks to an organization’s success. Another report by MuleSoft^[ii] highlights that 89% of IT leaders report that silos negatively impact their business’s digital transformation initiatives. Regardless of where your customers interact with you, they need to have a delightful and connected experience. But how do you do it? Enterprise integration is the answer!

Enterprise integration encompasses the technologies, processes, devices, and team structure that connect data applications and devices from anywhere in your IT organization. It enables better visibility and access to key data by creating a single source of truth for all cross-functional teams. Enterprise integration is important for businesses to:

• Optimize and automate business processes to provide compelling CX
• Make systems communicate and share data seamlessly
• Simplify processes and help businesses improve their operational scalability
• Automate workflows that eliminate the need for manual data re-entry and enhance transparency
• Ensure that companies are always up-to-date on the state of their B2B processes and gain more visibility than they’ve ever had before

Key Elements of Enterprise Integration – Points to Remember

Your systems and technologies across your business ecosystem must work together. This may include the processes built around your applications, systems, and the people involved in managing those processes. And there are important enterprise integration elements that make this integration a success. These are:

1. API Management

APIs (Application Programming Interface) process data transfer between different systems. They enable businesses to share data and functionality of their applications with third-party developers, business partners, and internal departments. Also, APIs provide the ability to access external data sources and integrate them with data sources within the organization.

2. Data Accessibility

Easy accessibility of real-world operational data enables continuous improvement of enterprise architecture. Data is used to assess the complexity and usage of integrations and determine their target state. When analyzed correctly, data can reveal recommended target integration patterns, consolidation possibilities, and other inputs that help define the target integration state.

3. Application Integration

It is the enablement of the individual applications, each designed for a specific purpose, to work collaboratively. By making it easier to share data and combine workflows and processes, businesses can benefit from integration that modernizes infrastructures without rework. In addition, application integration helps on-premise systems and cloud-based enterprise systems like CRMs and ERPs interact successfully without major changes to the application.

Platforms That Will Help You Deliver Connected CX if Integrated

Integrating disparate systems enables the powers of one system to complement the powers of others. Therefore, your entire tech stack can help you to streamline internal processes, make better decisions, and create seamless digital experiences. Here’s a quick look at platforms that will make a solid impact, maximize the capability of your tech stack, and help you deliver a connected CX if integrated.

1. CRM and Jira Integration

This type of integration will enable you to establish a secure and controlled bidirectional flow of information between CRM and Jira for better collaboration, increased productivity, and improved customer satisfaction. The ability to view customer information within the CRM software is what makes this integration powerful.

2. Community-CRM Integration

Integrating community activity with CRM will help you to serve your customers better and achieve diverse goals. Brands can obtain a 360-degree view of their customers and the activities happening in the community with advanced tools to enrich the user experience and make case escalation, logging, and closure easier.

3. CMS-Marketing Automation Integration

You can’t manage content in your marketing automation platform like you do in a CMS (Content Management System) and you can’t create and run campaigns in your CMS as you do in your marketing automation platform. Therefore, to maximize their power, you need to integrate them and reap the benefits of both platforms. It will help you enhance user experience and boost website conversions.

4. eCommerce-Marketing Automation Integration

When you use your eCommerce and marketing automation platforms separately, you miss out on the trick to deliver the best shopping experience to your customers. Integrating your eCommerce store with your marketing automation platform will help you enhance UX, increase content engagement, and set up nurture campaigns (to minimize cart abandonment) to help customers complete their orders.

5. Knowledge Base Integration

Integrating your knowledge base with communities or knowledge bases of other platforms will help you leverage the power of user-generated content and deliver suitable content for better CX. Also, this powerful integration will help you to sync articles automatically, map data types easily, and manage data more effectively.

The Bottom Line

Brands that will win in the future marketing landscape are the ones that will focus on delivering connected customer experiences through enterprise integration. And many ‘Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For’ are already using these integrations to connect customers, platforms, and their businesses to thrive in the age of connected CX.

Ready to Deliver Connected CX Using Enterprise Integrations? Let’s Talk!

Statistics References

^[i] Mulesoft.com
^[ii] Mulesoft.com