To provide the best customer support at any phase in your customer’s lifecycle, your teams need access to contact and company data—and every team must have access to the same information. This requires a centralized location for all relevant communications and open support tickets, and the ability to streamline information between sales, marketing, and support teams. At tech scale-ups, streamlining customer data requires organizing information from a customer support ticketing system (like Zendesk) and marketing and sales tools (like HubSpot).

So, how can integrations between your support platform and tools like your CRM improve the customer experience? When data is integrated into all the tools your customer-facing teams use, you can employ contact management, automation, and advanced analytics to ensure a delightful customer experience and eliminate silos between teams.

This is critical as your tech scale-up grows—specifically, if you are EMEA-based or have clients in EMEA—and you run into security concerns (like GDPR compliance), more complex opt-in and communication management, and higher expectations from your audience for a personalized experience.

Benefits of centralized and connected data

When customer data lives in multiple places, it only makes it more difficult and frustrating for your support team to assist customers. Even answering a simple question can lead them down a rabbit hole of raw data, leading to inconsistencies that are sure to annoy customers.

In our digital age, consumers expect excellent experiences and fast delivery from the brands they do business with. When your customer data is centralized, your teams can stay in sync and ensure they are all delivering the same messages and have the same understanding of the situation. This saves customers from having to repeat their stories over and over again.

Once you combine your customer support data with sales and marketing data using tools like the Zendesk and HubSpot integration, you can uncover new audience segments, improve customer interactions, and facilitate team collaboration.

Whether they work in marketing, sales, or support, every single person on your team will be able to get a 360-degree customer view in one convenient location, giving them a complete picture of the customer’s journey with your company and projections about where they’re headed. Your team can see previous conversations, open tickets, or details about the customer’s unique situation, which enables them to provide a personalized experience and quick solutions while avoiding missteps.

“Our team relies on HubSpot as the source of truth for all prospect and customer-centric data,” says Callie Mulvihill, director of revenue operations at Tovuti LMS. “Using DataSync with Zendesk, we ensure we have the most up-to-date information, protect our agents’ time by giving them context all in one place, and gather segment-specific insights from HubSpot.”

Challenges of keeping a software stack in sync

Your business likely uses multiple cloud-based apps to manage a tremendous amount of data. Growing startups tend to rely on numerous software platforms that have the power to scale as they scale, and each one provides a ton of customer and prospect data. After all, internet users generate roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. That number is only expected to rise as the demand for remote work, learning, and entertainment continues.

One of the most important apps in your stack is your CRM. Are you still working with spreadsheets? You’ll eventually outgrow the ability to keep up and access data—plus, the sooner you adopt a CRM, the sooner you can start to share information between teams. Use a CRM to track prospects, convert them into clients, and provide support to those customers regularly. However, for this process to work efficiently, data must be consistent across your tech stack, which is no easy feat considering how many data points your team tracks.

Here are a few common challenges when it comes to syncing a software stack:

1. Manually importing and exporting data is inefficient and inaccurate

If your sales, marketing, and support systems don’t speak to one another, you need to update each team individually on customer changes, like product upgrades and technical difficulties. Manually keeping up with customers might work when you first start your business, but once you begin to grow, your ability to track every single touchpoint becomes impossible. Plus, ensuring that you meet GDPR compliance and maintain data security isn’t a job for individual sales representatives or marketers.

2. Apps without integration solutions create manual work

If your business collects data through various apps (such as your CRM, lead gen tools, billing solutions, etc.) that don’t offer integration solutions, your teams might be recreating the wheel when it comes to maintaining data.

For example, if each app is managed by a different department, every team likely has its own process for inputting, updating, and tracking data. They may be adding data that already exists in another application, but they don’t know about it because it’s siloed: isolated from the rest of the organization. It’s also possible that individual teams enter data in different formats, leading to inconsistencies across customer interactions and communications.

3. Apps with limited integration solutions can cut off access to important data

Think about the number of customer data points your team collects. Now, consider the time and resources needed to import and export that data from one app to the next. Many businesses that choose to use integration solutions discover too late in the game that there are limitations.

A common issue is that the integration doesn’t sync historical data. This means all the data that was entered before the integration must be manually pushed to the next platform. To truly sync two databases, you need a solution that offers two-way integration.