The Top 3 Benefits of Integrating Telephony with Salesforce

Companies are increasingly integrating telephony with Salesforce. Voice is consistently the number one (or two depending on the industry) channel by volume. Despite the rise the online custom portals, mobile apps, and self-service options in recent years call volume has not only held steady, but is increasing. Out of the box, Salesforce provides businesses the ability to email, chat, and have video sessions with their customers. Salesforce supports telephony integration through its partners, who have built integrations into the platform with Open CTI. In addition, Salesforce recently released a new product called Voice for Lightning Sales Cloud.

For Salesforce customers there are a number of benefits of choosing to integrate telephony into Salesforce, including:

More Efficient Workflow

The ability to click-to-dial save both sales and service reps time. Instead of manually keying a phone number in on the desk phone clicking-to-call allows for an accurate, speedy call. In the world of sales more calls means more meaningful conversations, and also less time prospecting, and more time focusing on the deals that really matter. For service, this means less time completing customer call backs and follow ups, and more time focusing on customer's core issues.

Efficiency doesn't stop at click-to-call though. The rep's entire workflow becomes more productive with a multitude of call controls. This includes the ability to leave a pre-recorded voicemail for your prospect while moving to the next call. It also includes basic call control function such as ending the call, automatically dialing extensions, and automatically information about the call such as the duration, and outcome.

Happier Customers

Today customers expect you to know who they are. When a customer calls in you can identify them by their caller ID (a.k.a. ANI), and provide the agent a screen pop with the customer's information. By giving the agent a 360 degree view of the customer time will not be spent finding out who the customer is. In addition, the agent will be able to review all previously logged issues, including if they sent an email or had a chat session right before calling. In addition, you can leverage data in Salesforce to route calls to the right person. That way, the customer doesn't have to be endless transferred until they finally reach the right person. This enables the agent to stay one step ahead of your customer to deliver optimal service!

Greater Visibility

Call center and sales managers can receive a better picture of their sales or service team efforts with telephony integration. Support managers are able to report on how many calls each inbound agent is handling per shift, and who are their top performers. Sales managers can see how many cold calls their business development reps (BDRs) make per day. Additional metrics can be run to see how successful each of those calls are. For support, CSAT is paramount. The agent who is most efficient while maintaining a high level of CSAT is the most effective. For sales, this would be how many qualified appointments are set. In addition, talk time is a good metric to monitor. The Salesforce report and dashboard out-of-box features can be leveraged to run reports on all of your call data.