Telephone System Integration – Boost the power of your CRM

Telephone System Integration

Modern VoIP Telephone Systems with CRM product integration boost the power of both platforms. Weekly calls analysis through telephone system integration with reporting tools also benefit businesses looking to improve customer experience. We discuss this subject in another post called “Calls History Analysis – Never miss a Business Opportunity“. Both types of integration help a business focus on the what. What is happening in the business, on a day-to-day basis so that business opportunities are identified. By creating links between complimentary applications, and your telephone system, sales conversion is improved, boosting profits.

Basic Integration

In the blog “Working from Anywhere” we highlighted a shift to remote working. Driven largely by the COVID-19 pandemic. In that piece, we identified a shift to using desktop apps and the benefits they can bring to a business telephone service. A basic integration many apps come with is the ability to link to Outlook. The Microsoft client for email, tasks and calendar management. This integration allows the telephone service access to a contacts database saved in it. Enabling the ‘click-to-dial’ feature and potentially avoiding duplication of customer contact information elsewhere.

Off the Shelf Integrations

A number of telephony solutions providers see the future of telecoms in software as a service (SaaS) technology. Vendors taking this path have committed to developing application based telephone solutions. Moving their focus away from the desk phone as the primary means of making calls. Taking this route, these software businesses have developed strategic partnerships with complimentary service providers. One example of this is the close integration of cloud CRM tools, such Hubspot. Another the linking of a telephone application to Xero accounting software via an application programmable interface (API).

Microsoft Teams Integration

The Microsoft Teams blog provides an overview of how this collaboration tool works as a business communications solution. Teams is a SaaS product with new complimentary application plug-ins arriving all the time. It naturally integrates with Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s CRM solution. In addition, wider solutions options are available including Zoho.

Add a SIP trunk based, telco grade, telephone service to this package and you have a powerful telecoms solution for a range of businesses.

Larger Systems Integration & Bespoke Software

More established business VoIP telephone systems also integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) applications. The larger telecoms service providers have developed a strategic partnership with one, or only a few, key application service providers. Taking this route, they rely on the partner business to develop the API with multiple CRM providers.

As restrictive as this seems at first glance it actually opens up a wider range of telephone system integration options for the customer. The telephone system provider can concentrate their efforts on building an extremely robust service. Whilst the software partner can develop their API for an extremely broad market. Key software houses have integration solutions that work with some of the most widely adopted sales tools such as Salesforce and recruitment tools such as Bullhorn.