Expanding the Power of CRM through API Automation

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a people-oriented technology.

Designed to capture all available information about your customer, contact information, and account demographics, CRM helps us manage the sales pipeline, monitor deal progress, and obtain business intelligence needed to gain customer insight throughout the sales cycle—as well as setting the stage to enrich future engagements—and maintain customer satisfaction.

But CRM is also a process-oriented technology.

CRM collaborates across all lines of business (LOB)

Because it is often considered the best, single source for new, current, and archived customer data, CRM collaboratively performs a major role in operational business processes such as:

• Order-to-cash

• Purchase-to-pay

• Sales-to-order

• Contact-to-lead management

• Proposal-to-contract processing

Consider this CRM-driven ‘contact-to-lead nurturing’ workflow, which references UiPath pre-built connectors for HubSpot CRM, Oracle Eloqua, and Marketo.

Note the workflow presents a use case where multiple CRM systems can effectively be synchronized across one integration.

But while integrations open the door to system connectivity, it is the robots that walk through the door and do the work.

Enter the robots: UI/API-enabled automation through UiPath Integration Service

Recently introduced as an important addition to the UiPath end-to-end automation platform, Integration Service provides the ability to combine both user interface (UI) and API automation within a single automated workflow. Developers will find the two forms of integration available in one, easy-to-use design environment provided by UiPath Studio.

The accessibility of both UI and API integration capabilities takes us to an entirely new paradigm.

With the help of prebuilt connectors, pre-established and authorized connections—plus the use of powerful triggers—we can quickly activate next steps across any CRM automation.

Contact-to-lead nurturing revisited

Employing little to no human intervention, here's a more detailed description of software robots taking on the heavy, automated lifting for the contact-to-lead nurturing process:

• Step 1: Robot automatically creates a new customer contact in HubSpot CRM. Many processes start with a record being created or updated. This will ‘trigger’ a specific robot task, that in turn can activate numerous downstream processes.

• Step 2: Oracle Eloqua localizes and personalizes marketing content for the new customer contact. UiPath Integration Service provides activity packs for different CRM systems allowing robots to search for new customer contact records. By using key, filtered criteria, the robot fetches details for a given record or may be instructed to update key information.

• Step 3: Oracle Eloqua moves customer contact into marketing automation.

• Step 4: Robot starts an email (part of an email nurturing campaign) for the new customer contact in Marketo.

Use case: Salesforce Connector accelerates the sales-to-order process

By combing UI and API integration, a sales-to-order process, requiring collaboration between Salesforce and SAP®, can be triggered as an end-to-end automation, starting with record changes in Salesforce.

UiPath Connector for Salesforce allows process owners to employ the unique Salesforce flow, instructing the robot to automatically create an order in SAP any time a sales opportunity changes to ‘close’ or ‘won’.

Once an opportunity is updated and the UiPath process started, the Salesforce Activity Pack enables finding additional accounts and customer details needed to create the SAP order.

The bi-directional automation between Salesforce and SAP substantially speeds up workflow, frees up employee resources, eliminates process errors, and effectively closes business sooner.

See more opportunities to streamline sales and customer service processes through UiPath integrations with Salesforce.

Growing CRM connector catalog

In addition to UiPath being a leading provider of combined UI and API automaton, we should also note the immediate availability of the following, pre-built CRM connectors:

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM

• Salesforce

• Oracle Eloqua

• SAP Cloud for Customer

• Sugar Enterprise

And soon to be released CRM integrations:

• Act! 365

• Constant Contact

• HubSpot CRM

• Zoho

For more details about using UiPath API integration to help expand CRM automation, this webinar recording discusses building CRM automations, use cases, and demos: