Why CRM Integrations are Necessary for Construction Companies?

In earlier days, the only technology required to run a construction business successfully were the tools and equipment needed in the construction of a building or a bridge. Although companies from various industries are embracing technological changes to excel in the digital economy, real estate and construction is an industry that has always been immune to technological changes.

Recently, construction companies have now started using tools like CRMs to improve their business processes, enhance client satisfaction, track essential data, and records, etc. However, to achieve these goals, construction companies must consider third-party CRM integrations. Today, CRM systems are so advance, that they can be integrated with marketing automation plugin, ERP, legacy databases, social media plugins, and phone systems. These third-party CRM integrations can bring tremendous benefits to your construction business.

5 Benefits of CRM Integrations

1. Document Management

Being in the construction business involves a lot of paperwork. Starting from creating proposals to creating invoices and quotes. Standalone CRM cannot handle such documents in one place. To overcome this problem, you’ll require a third-party integration such as iManage that helps you to manage your documents better. Purchasing the integration will take you halfway through. To achieve full efficiency, you’ll have to hire web developers who can make these two applications speak to each other.

Integrating external document manager with your existing CRM will help you avoid human errors and better manage every document, including your client names and addresses.

2. Marketing Automation and Email Marketing

Communication with your clients and employees is an essential element to scale up your business. Since most professional communication is done via email, you need to integrate email plugin into your existing CRM. Plugins such as MailChimp and SendGrid create, schedule, and disseminate emails easily. Also, you can create a list of customers whom you want to send updates about your work regularly. Using these plugins, you can share your upcoming projects with your past clients. It will automatically shoot an email as soon as you update the content. You can also send information or updates regarding the organization to your employees using the plugins.

3. Resource Planning

Currently, you must be using an ERP for cost estimation, bid management, project tracking, inventory management, reporting, payroll processing, and more. Since CRM and ERP both have separate databases, it might slow down certain operations such as bill processing, renewing inventory levels, arranging product returns for customers, and more. To complete these processes, you’ll need both CRM as well as ERP.

The core benefits you’ll achieve by integrating CRM and ERP are as follows,

• From support and sales to accounting and finance, integrating CRM and ERP will help you get a 360-degree view of your clients
• Get access to critical information faster
• You’ll be able to eliminate the unnecessary data entry in ERP and CRM
• The integration will help you improve inventory, order, and quote management
• It reduces total IT costs since now you’ll only need to maintain one system

4. Social Media Integration

The importance of social media is growing exponentially. You need to have a strong presence on social media to grow your business and build your brand. Integrating various social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. to your CRM will help your social media manager to manage your social media accounts efficiently.

5. Customer Support

Currently, you might be receiving inquiries about your construction projects via phone or email. Gone are the days when phone calls were the primary medium of communication. Help your customer support staff by integrating plugins such as Zendesk and LiveChat. Using their live chat feature, your executive can chat with your customers and solve their queries instantly.

Conclusion

These CRM integrations will help you streamline your daily operations and increase your employee productivity. The database guy will no longer have to spend hours in migrating data from CRM to ERP and vice-versa. Employees will be able to receive organizational updates faster. The over-all paperwork will reduce to a great extent. The accounts manager will be able to manage accounts and finance seamlessly.

By integrating plugins for all the above applications and use cases, your CRM will no longer remain a CRM. It will be the next-generation system that has all the necessary elements to help you excel in the digital economy. Hire web developers now to merge all your legacy apps into one centralized system.