Virtual Office Resource

The growth of telephony and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) tools has allowed the virtual office concept to exist, and produce value for all those who use it. Seeing telephony systems added to other tools lends a little extra impact to these tools, and recently, we saw Natterbox put telephony systems to work directly in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and help provide still more power to one of the most powerful virtual office tools there is.

The new telephony additions were brought to Salesforce, allowing Natterbox's Cloud PBX (News - Alert) management tools directly to the well-known CRM tool. With these tools in place, CRM managers and the like can put an entire global telephony system to work directly within the CRM itself. That's everything, of course, including landline and mobile systems, contact center options, voice recording and reporting, and more.

This works extremely well for some key purposes that can now be streamlined; for instance, calls coming into the organization from out-of-service customers can now be routed accordingly using information currently contained in the Sales or Service Cloud functions. New interactive voice response (IVR) systems can be established using similar data from the CRM tool to better route customers immediately to where customers need to be to get the best chance of a satisfactory response.

Neil Hammerton, who serves as Natterbox's CEO, commented “Natterbox is both a full global telephony provider and Salesforce integration supplier. We are a single source and integrator of all domestic and global telephony services which we deliver as a cloud service, from the PBX, numbers, lines and phones through to complete Salesforce integration which extends to contact center functionality, enterprise call recording and logging from mobile or landline phones”

Adding what amounts to a phone function directly to a CRM tool is a great idea, mainly because it accomplishes so many purposes at once. While most of the examples noted feature inbound calls, there's also a possibility it could be turned around for outbound calls too. Some use CRM as a means to keep abreast of customer contact, like with follow-up calling and after-sales service. Having all the information a CRM can bring on hand is great, having it immediately connected to the same tools that would be used to make contact with the person the information is about is even better. Both inbound and outbound calling needs information to get the most out of it, and here, we're seeing firsthand what kind of effect it can have.

The new connection between Natterbox and Salesforce should be worth considering, and may well get a lot of interested Salesforce users' attention. Information goes a long way in customer contact, and here, we're hooking a big source of information right to the process.