Telephony and CRM

How to enhance your CRM with telephony functions?

Method #1: CTI - Computer Telephony Integration

Knowing exactly which client is calling at any given moment makes a customer service agent's job significantly easier. A CRM system can serve as the source for mapping phone numbers to client names. But how can this information be displayed?

Advanced softphones (VoIP applications running on a computer) usually support CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) features. These enable incoming calls to trigger another application, such as a web browser or the CRM system itself. This trigger can include the caller's phone number. Upon receiving the signal, the CRM system can display the client's contact record before the agent even answers the call.

Combining CTI with click-to-call functionality is the simplest and most cost-effective way to integrate CRM systems with telephony.

Method #2: Click-to-call

This issue is of interest to companies with telephone customer service. The lack of a proper telephony connection to the CRM translates into additional employee workload:  manual searching the database to understand, who is calling, entering call-summary notes as well as manual pressing phone numbers to be dialled on the telephone keyboard. All of this means extra time spent, and frequent mistakes.

If our workstation is equipped with an appropriate VoIP softphone, and our CRM provides  a web browser interface, then the first (and available) stage of phone integration with CRM would be the "click to call" function.  After installation of the free browser plugin "telephone number detection", all phone numbers on CRM app webpage are automatically highlighted. Clicking such a number triggers your VoIP softphone to place an outbound call. It is also worth knowing that Microsoft Teams application equipped with a Teams Phone license can become such a softphone as well.

Surely, there are more advanced ways of linking VoIP telephony to the CRM application, so we will take it on separately!

The end of CRM era ? ...or maybe not yet!

Many companies have realized that CRM applications, treated as a database of customer contacts, no longer meet business expectations.

Advanced CRM systems are evolving towards ERP functions. When choosing a new CRM, it is worth taking into account the company's business processes. It can no longer be just an independent contact database, it should be part of an integrated workflow. This also means that CRM is no longer the domain of the sales department, but becomes a common working tool of the company.

If your favorite CRM can be a single interface to all your applications, business information, workflows and at the same time a tool for communicating with customers, then go for it!

MORE NEWS