Your Salesforce CRM is not perfect and is lacking in helping you provide the ultimate customer service. And the reason is that your CRM, despite touting as the be-all end-all of customer service, is not entirely connected with your contact center.
Your telephony system and your CRM are two of the most used tools in the contact center. And many significant KPIs of your contact center depend on the usability and practicality of these two systems working together.
In this blog, we will discuss the idea of bringing your telephony system with your Salesforce CRM with the help of a CTI connector and the empirical advantages it could serve you.
But before we get into it, let’s first understand what a CTI connector is and how it works.
What is a CTI Connector and How Does it Work?
It was the other day that I had to explain the workings of a CTI connector to one of my agents. I had suggested to him Salesforce CTI Integration and he came off quite confused, saying “Salesforce is a complete customer management solution on its own.”
The example I gave him was that of a bridge. Just as a bridge helps connect two separate pieces of land together, allowing people to move from one place to another. A CTI connector connects your telephony system with your CRM, allowing for the information to pass between these two systems.
Let me get into more details about the Salesforce CTI integration:
A CTI connector is a piece of technology that helps create a connection between your contact center telephony system and your customer management application. Essentially, a CTI is your contact center telephony system working as an application on your CRM.
So, if you integrate a CTI connector with your Salesforce CRM, you will have the entire telephony system of your contact center right on your screen. You can make and receive calls from your Salesforce CRM without having to jump through different windows.
When you integrate Salesforce CRM with a CTI connector, you get a dialer right on your CRM screen using which you can connect with your customers seamlessly.
A CTI connector works by turning your CRM into an extension of your telephony system. The telephony system works alongside the functionalities of your CRM, creating a cohesive customer service experience for the agents.
Besides bringing calling functions including call routing and call forwarding to your CRM, a CTI connector also enables a few features such as Click to Dial and ScreenPop.
The Click to Dial feature, as the name suggests, allows you to make calls to your customers with a single click.
The ScreenPop is where a CTI integration starts to add more value to your CRM. A CTI connector talks with your CRM and acquires meaningful data to display on the screen during a call and help agents lead a more contextual and personalized interaction.
7 Reasons Why You Need CTI Integration for Salesforce
Alright, now that we have understood what a CTI connector is and how it can help streamline contact center operations, it’s time to jump into the real-life advantages of Salesforce CTI integration solutions.
In this section, we will primarily explore how integrating a CTI connector with your Salesforce CRM can improve the CRM’s performance and ultimately improve major contact center KPIs.
Let’s take a look:
Save Time and Improve Productivity
First and foremost, Salesforce CTI integration helps you save time. Imagine a contact center without a CTI connector in order to understand this better.
Your agent receives a call, they pick up and immediately start asking questions to understand the situation.
Now, you don’t have the context so far about whether the customer has already filed a complaint with you. If they have, it would be a frustrating experience for them to repeat their issue.
Once the agent has gotten all the information from the customer, they match it with the CRM in order to get the right context. This whole process adds more time to the interaction and leaves both the customer and the agent frustrated.
With a CTI connector in place, Salesforce automatically ScreenPops all the relevant information as soon a customer makes a call. Agents can simply look at their CRM screen, understand the context, and then lead a personalized conversation with the customer.
Not to mention, agents also save time that they would otherwise spend securing the right information. So, a CTI connector not only helps save time but also improves productivity.
Improve Customer Engagement
Following up on the previous point, Salesforce CTI integration can do wonders for customer engagement. It goes without saying that when your agents have all the context before receiving or making calls to customers, they are more likely to be confident and effective in their conversation. And it reflects on the customer’s side as well.
Customers love being greeted with their names and they show a sense of trust when the agent on the other side is already familiar with the issues they have been facing.
Think of yourself in the customers’ shoes and it will all make sense. As a customer, you wouldn’t want to repeat your issue again and again. If you have filed a complaint with a company and you are following up with them, you would naturally want them to stay updated and at the very least empathetic.
With Salesforce CTI integration, this is entirely possible.
The agents have the context and the confidence to lead an empathetic and effective conversation.
Improve Agent Experience
The better your agents experience the more enhanced your customer service. This is a fact. As contact center managers or supervisors, we often put much effort in trying to improve customer experience and don’t give much heed to agents’ experience. This is a terrible mistake and should be avoided at all costs.
If you are running a contact center, your primary goals should include improving agents’ experience as much as possible.
Salesforce CTI integration helps streamline a lot of operations for your agents, taking away much manual drudgery and giving them time to focus on more important things.
Increased Collaboration
Since the Salesforce CTI connector offers complete call controls, including call routing, call transferring, hold, mute, etc, it is easier for agents to collaborate over calls. Not to mention, you also get supervisor access to the calls, allowing for more robust monitoring and teamwork.
So, in case agents are having difficulty resolving an issue, they can simply transfer the call to a more suitable colleague or ask the supervisor to intervene and take the conversation forward.
(Ref: NovelVox)
CTI connector offers features the following features to the supervisors:
- Barge-in
- Silent Monitoring
- Agent State Change
- Whisper-in
All of these features are aimed at improving agent productivity and encouraging collaboration among teams. As a supervisor, you can barge-in in any of the on-going conversations and take over, if you feel like the agent is having a hard time managing customer queries. Supervisors can also silently monitor calls and stay up-to-date with how the calls are being handled across the floor.
Whisper-in is another great feature that allows supervisors to silently suggest things to the agents without letting the customer know. And lastly, supervisors have the control to change an agents’ state from ready to not ready and otherwise.
Greater Control on Calls
Salesforce CTI connector not only brings the telephony system to the CRM, it also enhances the overall call control. Firstly, since the telephony system is digitalized and integrated, it is much easier to make and receive calls and perform basic calling functions like hold, mute, transfer, and initiate a conference call.
Automated Call Logs and Superior Monitoring
Manual data entry is prone to errors and a pain in the neck. This is a no-brainer. Imagine having to log the data after every call. It’s a cumbersome task which can be counterproductive at best and frustrating at worst.
With CTI integration, you get automated call logs conveniently created for you after every call. So, you can get back to the logs and get detailed insights on what could be improved upon and what is working out well.
Moreover, CTI integration also gives you the advantage of powerful reporting.
FCR and AHT Improvements
Last but not least, Salesforce CTI integration will dramatically improve your primary contact center metrics like Average Handling Time and First Call Resolution.
When agents are informed about a customers’ issue beforehand, they are more likely to deliver a faster resolution. Since CTI integration takes away the need for information hunting, agents can focus on the task at hand i.e, making sure the customer query is resolved as soon as possible.
This helps improve First Call Resolution as well as the Average Handling Time, in turn, helping you scale your contact center performance many folds.
Wrapping it Up!
There you have it: a brief guide on why you need CTI integration for Salesforce. As stated above, Salesforce (or any CRM, ITMS, or third-party customer management application) is not perfect until it has integrated calling features. In this day and age, having two disparate systems in a contact center is an obsolete way to approach customer service. In a world that is pacing towards faster and more efficient communication, it makes sense to unify your approach to customer service.
So, if you are using Salesforce or any other CRM for your business, consider implementing a CTI connector and streamlining your contact center operations.
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