9 benefits of integrating telephony into your CRM software

Integrating your CRM and telephony enables you to track calls made by sales teams, and analyse data that you have managed to accumulate to increase efficiency.

Telephony and CRM are two technological tools that every company should adopt in order to thrive today. Large-scale organizations and multinational corporations use such tools. But startups and small- and medium-scale enterprises avoid using them because they are an investment that they don’t want to make.

Telephony service is a software interface that integrates with a physical telephone device to perform actions like dialling phone numbers and logging calls. It enables you to keep track of your company’s efficiency regarding interactions with customers, vendors and suppliers.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a tool that manages your company’s interactions with potential and existing customers. It provides data that you can use to improve relations with customers which, in turn, contributes to your organisation’s bottom line.

Using both these tools makes your business efficient. But integrating them makes your business efficient and effective.

Here are nine benefits of integrating telephony into your CRM software:

Reaching more prospects

Prospecting is a priority for any sales team. The more they prospect, the more opportunities they create. Technology enables your team to do just this.

An integrated CRM and telephony system dials out numbers automatically. This means your sales team can make faster outbound calls and connect with more prospects.

Research shows that happy customers are prepared to share referrals, but salespeople don’t ask. An integrated system can prompt your team to do this and increase your prospect base.

Customer engagement

Your CRM enables you to categorise customers based on various metrics and enables you to define the frequency with which your sales team should connect with each customer.

Integrating your CRM and telephony enables you to track whether the sales team contacted customers at predefined times, and what the outcome for the same was. You don’t have to put up with excuses like “forgot to log” or “called but no one responded.”

Everything is right there in front of you in black and white.

Information about callers

With an integrated system, your team members can get all relevant customer details from the CRM on their screen when the telephony service dials out to the customer’s number.

This means your team spends more time interacting with customers and addressing their queries and less time searching for information from different places.

Call recording

Today, your people can work from various locations and take care of customer needs on the go. But this presents a challenge of keeping track of call recordings.

Integrating your CRM and telephony eliminates all these hassles for you. It provides a unified platform to manage the recording of calls and also the quality of service delivery.

These recordings are also useful if your customer drags your business into litigations. Recordings protect your company’s interest if you’ve done the right thing.

Scalability

Have you ever purchased more infrastructure and devices thinking it’ll be useful for when your team becomes bigger? Sometimes the team grows, sometimes it doesn’t. But for now, your investment is a dead investment.

Not so if you integrate these services. You can add new users, departments and options in the system on the go and get it working within minutes.

Improved employee productivity

A telephony service identifies and routes calls accurately, saving customer support agents the time of having to transfer calls between departments.

Such integration also gives you access to dashboards on important KPIs like handling time, pipeline leads, opportunities, and so on. You can monitor calls and provide feedback to agents to help them reduce call duration and improve quality at the same time.

Improved conversion rates

Research states that 92 percent leads convert by the sixth attempt. A CRM provides your sales team with relevant information about customer needs and interactions, while the telephony logs the number of follow-ups.

This enables you to keep your sales team accountable and also increase business.

Enhanced customer satisfaction

Integrated telephony and CRM presents your customers with various options to save their time. One, it routes call to the right department at the first attempt. Two, it presents callers in some cases with the option of self-service.

For instance, banks provide customers with options like knowing their bank balance, resetting their PIN, updating personal details, and so on without speaking to a customer care representative.

All this enhances customer satisfaction which presents opportunities to generate revenue for your business.

Increased use of your CRM

Many times, salespeople don’t log calls because they complain about lack of time. But lack of this data limits your view on how they engaged your prospects and customers.

Integrating CRM and telephony will enable you to conduct more in-depth sales reviews. Plus, you can monitor these calls for improvement in quality and use them for training purposes.

 Summing up

The future belongs to companies that maintain strong customer relations and improve efficiency at serving them. Technology is an effective way to help your business achieve both these goals.

By integrating your CRM and telephony services, you can make your business stand out even in a hyper-competitive market.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)