Angel.com Integrates CRM with Interactive Voice Response

Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, used to keep tabs on interactions with clients, have one major limitation: they don’t integrate very well with communications tools, such as IVR-based phone systems, in the call center.

 

Take the example of how calls are handled in a traditional call center setting: A customer calls about a pending support issue, and the agent who answers must look him or her up in the CRM database to see what the problem is and what progress has been made so far. This process of finding the matching CRM records happens while the customer hangs on the phone, waiting.

 

What if, instead, when the customer called his or her information automatically showed up on the screen, and basic information about the interaction — such as length of call — was automatically recorded by the system? In other words, what if information was automatically pushed and pulled from multiple sources (CRM and interactive voice response/IVR) to make customer interactions more efficient?

 

Phone-enabling a call center’s CRM is now possible. This means call centers can provide seamless access to CRM apps, integrated with phone calls routed through the IVR. The result is optimized prospecting, lead capturing and customer support.

 

Angel.com has successfully achieved IVR/phone integrations with a variety of CRM applications, and now offers this benefit for products from NetSuite, SugarCRM (News - Alert), Siebel and other vendors. Two specific examples worth noting are Salesforce.com and Parature.

 

 

In the case of Salesforce.com, Angel.com created a solution called SalesforceByFone, which seamlessly integrates the CRM system with the phone system. Sales reps, call center agents, marketing staff and other personnel gain access to Web-based information during each phone call about the customer being served.

 

SalesforceByFone is made up of a suite of different components, useful for various segments of a company’s personnel. For sales staff, SalesByFone makes it possible to access salesforce.com while on the road, simply by speaking. ReachByFone automatically places and tracks outbound sales calls with click-to-call integration.

 

For marketing staff, caller information is automatically entered into salesforce.com by converting prospects into leads. LeadByFone enhances this functionality even more by tracking phone volume and routing data to help improve return on investment (ROI) for marketing programs.

 

Finally, support staff can use the SupportByFone (for screen pops with caller info), SurveyByFone (for customer feedback information reporting into salesforce.com), and SupportByFone (for proactively managing cases) components to more efficiently help clients with problems.

 

 

In a similar manner, Angel.com has partnered with Parature, a provider of on-demand customer service and support software, to integrate CRM and IVR for more powerful, efficient systems.

 

This integration enables organization using the joint solution to streamline operations: the opening and closing of tickets is automated (no need for callers to speak to agents), service level agreements (SLAs) are managed before transferring customers to support agents, IVR tasks are automatically fed into the Parature portal for account management, and customer voice messages are instantly transcribed for logging as phone tickets. Best of all, the integration advances information to the agent who can then proactively greet the caller by name and provide him/her with appropriate information.

 

To learn more about the efficiency of integrating CRM and phone systems please visit the IVR channel on TMCnet.com, brought to you by Angel.com.

 

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