For a business, how a sales rep interacts with customers is pivotal for customer retention, revenue realization, and overall growth. If representatives fumble over the phone with a customer, it can be detrimental to business in more ways than one. For one, they would switch to another service provider and bad-mouth your customer service, killing potential customers for your business. Cisco Salesforce CTI integration can help overcome this challenge.
Computer Telephony Integration or CTI is a technology that enables a computer to control a telephone, i.e., the user can easily make calls without even touching an actual telephone. Connecting your phone systems to computer programs, such as CRM or a ticketing application enables agents to receive telephony information and control telephony functions within a single screen.
Cisco CTI Connectors connect the Cisco telephony call controls and functionalities with the CRM, allowing agents to receive and place calls from within the CRM. The call variables, contacts, and other relevant data from the Cisco database are seamlessly integrated within the CTI interface to equip agents with all call controls and actions from an embedded CTI interface.
Let’s explore how this CTI integration can be beneficial to your business.
Revenue and efficiency are two primary concerns for businesses today. Both these parameters are tied to call center interactions. If a customer gets a satisfactory resolution to a query in the first call, it becomes a critical driver of customer satisfaction. With an effective CTI integration, agents do not have to waste time hunting for critical customer information. Instant access to customer information enhances agent productivity and ensures customer loyalty and trust. Here are some key benefits of a Cisco CTI integration:
For Sales
Engaging with more prospects means creating more opportunities and generating more revenue. Hence, reaching more customers is the topmost priority for any sales team. To expand reach, sales reps should be able to reach those prospects quickly and efficiently over the phone.
⦿ Ability to Reach More Prospects
CTI mitigates the need for manual dialing, which is slow and cumbersome. Phone numbers associated with any Salesforce object, including leads, contacts, and cases, turn into clickable links, which the team can use to place outbound calls. Automated dialers can be used to place calls for sales reps using lead lists created and stored within Salesforce, helping the team to place more calls. Salesforce CTI integration brings down call drops by providing a voicemail drop for pre-recorded messages. With local caller IDs to match phone numbers with the geographic region, pickup rates can be improved even for those users who don’t answer unknown numbers.
⦿ Improved Lead Conversion
The more agents know about the customer, the better they can tailor the conversation to suit their needs. It is a straightforward formula to convert more conversations into sales opportunities. By integrating salesforce with Cisco, agents can preview all the information they have about a customer before they place a call. For inbound calls, any information collected through the IVR can be used to pull up valuable information about the customer. Through a Screen pop within Salesforce, all this information is displayed to the sales team.
⦿ Increased Use of Your CRM
Within your Cisco contact center, integration of Salesforce CTI can enhance CRM usage, giving the sales rep a holistic view of the sales activity. Sales calls cannot be logged, recorded, or tracked when sales reps place calls from cell phones or desktop phones not integrated with CRM. Those calls are automatically logged and tracked when the telephony system is integrated with Salesforce.
⦿ Improved Sales Team Performance
An effective sales team is engaged and highly motivated. Cisco Contact Center software integrated with Salesforce can help you record and track sales activities and sales processes. Tracking KPIs through Salesforce dashboards like the number of calls made, average call duration, meetings booked, and opportunities created can help measure the team’s performance and determine if the reps need training.
| Also Read: How Integrating Salesforce with Cisco CTI Empower Contact Centers Agents |
For Service
CTI integration helps contact centers gain a competitive edge by enabling them to take a more data-driven approach while interacting with customers. Below are some of the benefits of a Salesforce CTI integration from a customer service perspective:
⦿ Offer Callers Simple Self-Service or the Option to Connect to a Live Agent
Not all customer services require an agent. Some services are best provided with a zero-agent touch enabling the customers to serve themselves. The integration of IVR with Salesforce enables you to connect the rich customer data to a communication platform, providing self-service options and the ability for a caller to be connected to a live agent.
⦿ Reduce Your Call Handle Times
The CTI display offers all the relevant information even before the call is connected, so the agent can provide a quick resolution. The agent can wrap the call quickly and will be able to take more calls in a short amount of time.
⦿ Monitor, Measure and Maximize
Standard Contact Center metrics like average handle time, time in queue, dropped calls, and talk time can be viewed from within Salesforce. By combining your data about your calls with the information you have in Salesforce, you can also dig deeper to see how many calls it took to resolve an open case. And by reviewing detailed reporting on your agent and team performance, you can improve training.
⦿ Optimized Contact Center Performance
Salesforce Cisco integration optimizes contact center performance. How?
⦾ It simplifies call handling, enhances caller experiences, and improves team efficiency.
⦾ Advanced features like CRM screen transfer help streamline workflows, provide the proper context for each conversation, and help agents maintain call quality at the optimum level.
⦾ Cisco CTI integration provides seamless, interruption-free call connectivity, improving agent experiences and boosting employee retention.
⦾ All calls are captured with duration and related records through the automatic call logging function, providing a rich dataset that supports supervisors in managing and optimizing agent performance and organizational ROI.
⦾ Salesforce Cisco integration provides a proven means to improve call resolutions, lower handling time, and deliver personalized experiences to each caller.
⦾ In the long term, the contact center can reduce costs, decrease customer churn, build trust essential to retaining existing customers, and convert new customers into returning ones.
Key Features of Cisco CTI Salesforce
Many businesses have hopped on the Salesforce Cisco Integration for Omnichannel solution bandwagon recently, voice or phone calls remain the most preferred communication channel.
A study by North Ridge Group found that 56% of respondents still prefer a phone to reach out to the customer service desk because it’s effortless.
CTI integration allows connecting phones to a computer system to deliver a smooth experience for all types of communication. Cisco CTI integration with Salesforce can be used to leverage this to get the maximum potential from sales and service teams.
1. CRM Screen Transfer
This feature allows calls to be transferred without losing call context, enabling extraordinary customer service and agent productivity.
2. Skills-Based Routing
Effortlessly transfer calls to the agent best suited to handle a particular agent query without making the customer wait for long.
3. Click-to-dial
Reduce average call handling time with click-to-dial from within the CRM feature. This capability eliminates manual dialing every time the representative needs to call a lead.
4. Automatic Dialing
This feature allows you to create a lead list within Salesforce. Leads can be dialed for one or more sales agents, increasing the number of calls and connections made.
5. Automatic Call Logging and Recording
Automatically log and record every call in Salesforce, ensuring you get a complete view of activity while saving your sales team valuable time.
6. Screen Pop
Deliver your customer records and the inbound call to your employee’s screen, so your agents get an advanced warning of who is calling and why.
7. Interactive Voice Response
Give callers options to route themselves to the proper departments or provide them with self-service options.
8. Centralized and Simplified Call Reporting
Creating detailed reports for more significant insights becomes more accessible with all the essential telephone data within Salesforce.
Cisco CTI Salesforce Integration – Enhancing Contact Center Efficiency
1. Increase the number of sales prospects you connect with over the phone
2. Improve the level of service you deliver to customers by screen-popping customer contact and case details to your service team
3. Resolve customer issues more quickly by using Salesforce data to route calls to the most appropriate agent
4. Improve call quality and agent performance by making it easier to listen in and support staff on or after (via recording) calls
5. Improve your overall service and support levels with improved reporting on agent and team productivity
Wrap up
Cisco Salesforce CTI connector presents an excellent opportunity for businesses to revolutionize how they engage with customers. Sales representatives are empowered to achieve more leads while minimizing manual workflow. By combining your telephony with Salesforce and customer data, your company can sell more and serve better. Save agents time from toggling between multiple screens to fetch relevant information, improve agents’ efficiency and enhance CX.
