Fonality (News - Alert), a provider of cloud-based business phone systems, announced partnership with SugarCRM (News - Alert), a provider of open source CRM solutions, to deliver open cloud-based solution for sales and support.

The solution provides two levels of integration for customers, according to the companies. A Basic Connector enables core capabilities such as screen pops and click-to-call using Fonality phone system from customer's SugarCRM Web interface.

The two companies also offer an Advanced Connector, based on Fonality's PBXtra Unified Agent Edition, which provides a wealth of capabilities for contact centers, company officials added.

"The partnership combines two of the most mission critical sales and support tools into one solution," said Clint Oram, co-founder and vice president of products at SugarCRM. "Sugar and Fonality's integration is delivered in the cloud, which means that businesses do not need to dedicate significant internal resources toward the implementation or deployment of this powerful technology."

SugarCRM also announced that Fonality has joined the SugarExchange Program as the Preferred Telephony partner.

Oram says that the addition of Fonality as SugarCRM's Preferred Telephony partner benefits their customers to quickly and easily add powerful, cloud-based telephony capabilities to their CRM deployments.

"Today, contact center managers are often faced with inaccurate or missing data and agents struggle with cumbersome CTI (News - Alert) applications, resulting in a poor customer experience," Dean Mansfield, CEO of Fonality, said. "Our connectors solve these problems by creating a unified solution that helps managers and agents use SugarCRM more effectively."

The Advanced Connector allows managers to easily measure, test, and improve sales and support processes, view the effectiveness of human resources and salvage opportunities or identify lapses in service level agreements.

With this tool, managers can track and record all call data in SugarCRM automatically. They can view customer call histories and understand how call follow-up times impact profitability.

Managers are also provided with the ability to find out the number of calls it takes to convert a lead to a sale and determine which agents are the most responsive. They can visually rank agent calling frequency and duration. With this tool, they can instantly report all leads not called within a specified period, company officials said.

Fonality's Connector, according to company sources, enables agents to eliminate the need to enter call information or attach recorded calls to SugarCRM. The solution can be customized to view desktop alerts with inbound caller name, number, even deal size.

Further, advanced screen pops instantly provide all caller records and history. Note-taking window launches automatically for immediate data entry. Inbound calls are automatically directed to the contact or opportunity owner.

In January Fonality announced it has served up its 1 billionth cloud call on their hosted VoIP platform called UNBOUND, according to a TMCnet blog.