Integrate Enterprise CRM and Web Content Management
Print This Post
In recent years, as customer experience management (CEM / CXM) and web experience management (WEM) have begun stealing focus from garden-variety web content management (WCM), the teams involved with WCM technology are seeing ever more use cases for the integration of enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) systems and WCM systems.
CRM/WCM integration is of increasingly practical value to the enterprise. A few use cases include:
- Targeting Content: An integration would allow you to use CRM data to drive more personalized web and mobile content experiences. For example, knowing that a prospect has been to your site and works within a specific industry makes it possible to serve industry-specific content options on his or her next visit.
- Closed-loop Marketing: Pushing website visitor data—such as form data–back to SalesForce for lead nurturing and detailed reporting can be of immediate use to sales and marketing teams.
- Greater Business-process Efficiency: Capturing new conversions and lead data and populating the CRM system to begin order processing could shorten process times.
Some WCM Systems Make CRM Integration Easy, Many Don’t
One factor slowing the process of getting such integrations done is the technical challenge of integrating CRM and many WCM systems. As Beth Stackpole noted in a recent TechTarget article, “Most Web content management software platforms lack preconfigured integration capabilities and have a less than robust set of application programming interfaces, according to industry analysts and consultants.”
Key Evaluation Points
However, some of the latest generation of WCM platforms do provide either plug-and-play integrations with SalesForce and other CRM systems or the APIs that make such integrations easier to accomplish. As with any enterprise software evaluation, it’s a best practice to dig into the details of how each vendor accomplishes WCM/CRM integrations and how easily. Additionally, it makes good sense to ask WCM vendors for case studies or reference accounts for such integrations.
Related Reading: Enable an Integration between SharePoint and WCM