In our last post, we looked at the importance of voice, and how cloud-based telephony can be integrated into your CRM. This time, we wanted to look at some of the outcomes you gain when you combine your telephony with Salesforce.
For most companies, their Sales or Customer Support departments will rely heavily on their phone. As much as email, social media and slack dominate communication channels, there is nothing better than hopping on the phone to quickly sort out an issue, or finish closing a sale. For users of Salesforce, telephony can be directly integrated into Salesforce. This provides users with a whole host of features that would not be made possible without this link. Let’s dive in a bit deeper…
1. Everything in one place
Whether sales or customer service, you want it to be as easy as possible for your employees to just do their jobs. No one wants to be on the phone to IT or a Salesforce superuser when they should be dealing with prospects and customers. That’s why with telephony integrated into Salesforce, whenever your agents or sales teams log in, they simply go into App Launcher and open up the telephony application.
It’s simple, straight forward and doesn’t require a completely separate system to be logged into, single sign on is key to the user!
2. Call routing
I’m sure many of us can relate to calling a company telephone number and being passed around different members of the team which takes many minutes before you get to the right person. Well now imagine that you telephony app can identify exactly where they need to go by cross-referencing the data inside of Salesforce!
It might be to an inside sales team to progress a lead, to a sales support member if a field sales manager is on the road, or to a specialist customer service agent if there’s an ongoing issue linked to the account. The call can be routed dynamically based on who the caller is, or a particular state such as they have a key support case open or are set as a large value opportunity to your business right now!
3. Call recording
Hearing ‘this call may be recorded for training or monitoring purposes’ is almost background noise nowadays, it’s become so commonplace. While the practice isn’t new, being able to capture and store it within Salesforce is less common. Yet by doing so via telephony integration, recordings are at hand, linked to relevant accounts and easily accessible for review, coaching or to reference in case of a dispute. This removes the common barrier of having to go to a separate system, often via support or a specific admin for that system to get the recording you need. When a call recording needs to be reviewed it often needs to be found and listened to quickly to avoid further delays with the specific client waiting on your response.
For industries in which certain data must not be stored, agents can be given the capability to pause or disconnect recording with just the click of a button when customers are sharing sensitive information and reconnect afterwards. In that way, businesses remain compliant with relevant regulations and the customer receives a consistent experience during the call. Alternatively, where for example credit card details are being taken, the call recording can continue only capturing the spoken voice and eliminating the credit card details automatically to ensure PCI compliance.
4. Click to dial
When telephony is integrated into Salesforce, you’ve made Salesforce your phone system. This means simply clicking the required telephone number to make the call, an action which is tracked automatically. This means you can see who has called which customer and when, regardless of the agent making any note actions about the call! Often useful is being able to have a Salesforce Dashboard showing all calls over 2 minutes in length that happened (by agent), where the agent did not make any notes. Bringing real calls without agent action to the forefront for review.
It also means agents being able to easily control calls – hold, waiting and transfer all through the Salesforce app.
Interestingly a simple addition is a browser extension that allows the user to click to dial on any standard web page phone number, automatically cross-checking Salesforce if this already exists and popping that record to the agent, whilst invoking the call via the Salesforce CTI!
5. Screen pop
Whether your employees are making or receiving a call, the relevant customer record will pop onto the screen as the call is being made. This gives the agent time to review customer history, including any issues, concerns or live opportunities.
Where multiple cases or opportunities exist, these can be presented to the user in the CTI allowing them to engage with the customer quickly to ask which one the call is regarding, clicking through to the relevant required record efficiently.
Bonus – Full reporting on voice
Who doesn’t like a report? By integrating telephony into Salesforce, managers and team leaders now have data direct from the CRM they can report on and analyse. No more relying on busy agents and on-the-road client managers to capture accurate notes and record calls correctly – now everything relating to voice is capture automatically, from calls made to notes completed and processes followed. This can all be fed into dashboards to aid reporting and future decision-making.
From theory to reality
These are just some of the features integrating telephony into Salesforce can bring. However, in this setting they are just theoretical. Next time, we’re going to look at a couple of different businesses that have integrated their voice into their CRM with winning effect.
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