With CRM investments expected to reach more than $80 billion in revenues by 2025, enterprise organizations globally continue to invest heavily with the goal of creating better customer interactions to stay ahead of the competition, improve efficiencies, and make capturing customer data easier and more intuitive. Companies deploying CRM expect to make immediate gains in these areas.
Often times, organizations quickly realize that creating seamless data flow between CRM, calendar, and inbox is as critical as choosing the right CRM application. When default CRM-provided sync options don’t meet expectations and requirements – for instance in highly regulated industries – companies turn to Riva.
With Riva, organizations avoid the hiccups of introducing new applications. Riva’s powerful engine works behind the scenes to wrangle data and create beautiful interoperability between CRM, calendar, and inbox – without having to change the behavior of staff. Individuals can use the workflows and apps they prefer – with no need to re-enter data in multiple systems in an attempt to keep data up to date.
Mature, Scalable, Ready-to-Use Solutions
Riva is sophisticated, elegant, and simple to install and manage. Our advanced integration solutions appeal to businesses that need the flexibility for their employees to move relationships forward and really understand their customers at a deeper level while maintaining complete control of data access.
Here are the top five considerations to keep in mind when choosing your CRM, calendar, and inbox integration:
1. Automated Category Mapping
Riva provides the ability to directly track CRM and calendar activities without leaving your inbox by automatically synchronizing CRM activity “types” as categories in the email client. CRM category types can include any number of activity types against which reporting, metrics, or workflows are required. Examples of assignable CRM types include on-site meetings, phone calls, billable meetings, discovery meetings, visit follow-up, and webinar sessions. When a new appointment is created, you can assign the email category and automatically track against the appropriate activity type in CRM.
2. Synchronization of CRM Resources and Email System Public Calendars
Many organizations seek to improve staff efficiency by publishing the availability of CRM or email system resources such as meeting rooms, conference facilities, physical objects (video data projectors, planes, laptops) to their CRM or email calendaring system. Many users find booking these resources is more intuitive and better achieved through their email client. Unfortunately, CRMs do not provide the ability to synchronize CRM resources or public calendars.
Riva’s advanced calendar sync provides the ability to synchronize CRM to your email calendaring system as resources or as public calendars. It also can sync your email calendaring system resources or public calendars to your CRM. This means you can reserve a CRM meeting room resource or email calendaring system resource for your meeting to schedule the meeting in your CRM calendar or your Outlook, IBM Notes, or GroupWise calendar. Customers appreciate how Riva delivers improved efficiency by allowing users to see and book CRM resources directly from their email calendaring system.
Salesforce (resources & public calendars) and Microsoft Dynamics (facilities & equipment calendars) have default support for resource objects which do not require a separate CRM license. For CRMs that do not have native resource objects, an additional CRM license needs to be purchased for each CRM resource you want to be mapped to an equivalent email calendaring system resource.
3. CRM Calendar Invitation Management
Most organizations seek to provide user-friendly, intuitive tools, and applications to their staff. Similarly, most organizations strive to make interactions between their customers and sales, marketing, and service teams as simple, convenient, and painless as possible.
Many organizations find CRM-generated appointment invitations inadequate. Since meeting requests sent from the CRM system aren’t standard calendar meeting requests that use the iCal protocol, they cause many CRM-originating meetings to be missed by users, and significant frustration and inconvenience.
One of Riva’s advanced calendar sync options is to have CRM meeting requests be sent directly from the email calendaring system on behalf of the CRM user. This means that meeting invitations can be prepared in CRM (and therefore respect all CRM object relationship requirements) but are no longer sent and managed from the CRM system. By sending CRM originating appointments from your email calendaring system, the full calendar invitation and response lifecycle are carried out by your email calendaring system.
4. Synchronization of CRM Custom Calendar Objects
Many CRM customers implement custom calendar objects to the specific demands of their industry vertical. Custom calendar objects are not able to be transparently synchronized by the default CRM calendar sync process.
This is caused by:
- restrictive security;
- limitations with custom fields and custom field types;
- restricted text length for custom fields;
- no lookup for custom fields.
Riva customizes CRM objects with your email calendaring system.
5. Synchronization of CRM Related Information to Appointment Body or Subject
Riva allows for information related to CRM contacts, opportunities, projects, cases, or other related information to be extracted from the CRM and included in the subject of the body of a meeting appointment. This allows users to see information related to the appointment in all calendar clients, including all mobile devices. Examples of related information could include attendee phone numbers, email addresses, physical address, links to the CRM related account, associated opportunities, etc.
Join tens of thousands of users who benefit from Riva’s Relationship Engine to achieve their data integration requirements and deliver full ROI for their CRM investment.