Phone + CRM: Collaboration Benefits
The modern world is a world of communications. They are at every turn. In business, in order to make the right managerial decisions, it is necessary to analyze communications (first of all, client ones) in detail - by frequency, by sources, by the efficiency of their development on the company side and other parameters. Therefore, the isolation of the communication system from the accounting system is almost equivalent to lagging behind the market. Today we will talk about what integrations are implemented for the virtual PBX MANGO OFFICE, what exactly do our customers get from the ability to integrate telephony into various business applications, and how we work in this direction.
What are integrations for?
How telephony and, say, CRM “interact” without integration? Spoiler: not very good. After (or even during) a telephone conversation with a client, the manager needs to manually enter information about the fact of the call and the agreements reached. The conversation record is stored separately, and before you turn to it, if you need to restore any details, you must first find it in the archive. Call analytics is also separate.
What does the integration of a virtual PBX with CRM give? We consider: 1) it is automatically checked whether there is a client in the database calling the company; 2) if not, a card is automatically created for the client; 3) the phone number, call data and a link to record the conversation are saved on the card.
If the system “recognized” the client by phone number, then in the automatically pop-up card on the monitor screen the manager immediately sees the entire history of communication and can form the most powerful offer on the fly, taking into account all previous orders of this client, his preferences, some unresolved issues with him and other circumstances. In addition, the system can generate statistics for a particular client with various filters. That is, the integration of telephony and CRM is an obvious increase in efficiency.
Another integration task is to teach telephony to route the client’s call directly to the employee responsible for that client. Directly means bypassing all voice menus. That is, you can make sure that a regular customer never has to listen to all these “Good afternoon! Thank you for calling us. To connect to the sales department, press 1 "and at the end -" Wait for the response of the operator or dial the employee short number ". Integration allows the system to immediately connect the caller to the specialist he needs.
A few examples
Work on integrations at Mango Telecom began in 2016. The first integration that we implemented for the MANGO OFFICE virtual telephone exchange was integration with amoCRM. At the start of the project, all possible situations of telephony and CRM interaction were described. Based on this description, a test version appeared after 2 weeks. They made the simplest option - in fact, MVP: a call came to a certain employee, the system recorded this event. By the way, the performance of even this functionality was not quite obvious in practice. The problem is this. For example, a client calls the general number of your company, and then presses a key to contact, say, the sales department. If the integration is not written correctly, then each “transfer” of a call (from a general number to a specific department or from one unit to another) will be recorded in CRM as a new call. That is, one client called, and while his call “walked” around the office, the system recorded it four or five times.
Within a year after the release of integration with amoCRM, we collected user reviews and made improvements. This integration is still the most popular with us, it is used by several thousand customers.
Another common CRM among Russian entrepreneurs is Bitrix24. While working on amoCRM, we focused on our own strengths. Even the analysis of various protocols that differ from the description in the technical documentation or presented in the public documentation is incomplete, we carried out ourselves. With Bitrix24everything was exactly the opposite: from the very beginning they were in close contact with the head of Bitrix development. Implementation took 3 weeks. We really wanted to catch the big conference, at which there was an opportunity to present new opportunities, so we practically lived in the office. Despite the fact that amoCRM and Bitrix24 are largely different, the experience with the first one really helped to do everything well and quickly.
What else is important to consider when developing integrations? Subscriber equipment. To receive calls, companies can use softphones, landlines and mobile phones. For mobiles, just connect FMC - then all incoming and outgoing calls will go through the virtual PBX and recorded in the statistics. On the manager’s computer, even if he speaks from his cell phone, client cards should still pop up, but this is not the most important point. More importantly, the call must be saved automatically in the CRM system. That is, so that the manager does not press any buttons on his computer at all. This is useful when the employee is somewhere in the fields or the client calls and the manager is at home on the weekend. The call should still be fixed.
Another useful feature that is in our designs and which is not found in many others is integration with dynamic call tracking . Call tracking allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising and to understand in detail how many and which customers you attracted with the help of one or another marketing activity. Call tracking makes it clear how the new client found out about your company, what city it is from, what it searched on the network, what pages of your site it was, what it looked at. Using standardmeans of a CRM system, you can create reports on certain attributes, filter data, make selections, look at sales statistics on them and calculate how much a particular campaign brought in money. If sales for some advertising request are low, it makes sense to go to customer cards and listen to conversations. Maybe these customers are not targeted. Or something is wrong with the ad campaign itself. Integration gives a great advantage - to trace how advertising works literally before the deal!
Of course, the integration of a virtual PBX is interesting not only with CRM, but also with services for technical support and customer support services. For example, we have integration with Zendesk, one of the largest service desks in Europe. He is also well known in Russia.
Third Party Integrations
Our customers use hundreds, if not thousands, of various business applications with which you can integrate a virtual PBX. Of course, we can’t afford to do so many integrations immediately, taking into account all the features of each system, alone. Therefore, we focus primarily on products with an extensive audience.
But to the delight of customers there are integrations made by our partners. Such, for example, as the company "Simple Calls". The guys make “universal” telephony integrations with dozens of different applications, but universality, as it usually happens, affects functionality. In such integrations, scenarios are implemented that cover far from all the capabilities of CRM systems connected to virtual PBXs.
Finally, if the Mango Telecom client company uses some completely unique or even its own IT system, for which neither we nor our partners have written and, most likely, will not write integration, then you can do it yourself. We have an open API - just download it from our website and use it, and we are ready to advise and answer all questions. But you need to understand: support lies on the shoulders of the developer himself.
Today, integrations with more than 80 business applications are implemented for the MANGO OFFICE virtual telephone exchange. And more than a thousand integrations - for a specific customer system. This is not only CRM and service desks, but also all kinds of specialized software - for medical centers, car services, beauty salons, real estate agencies, construction companies, etc. Integration with telephony is useful wherever there is direct communication with customers and it is important to store data about these communications.
A separate discussion is about 1C products. There are several possibilities to integrate them with telephony at the same time. One of them is for the application “1C: Management of our company”. Integrated by colleagues from 1C. We actively helped them.
The second option was written by the Rarus company, it also lies in the perimeter of 1C. In CRM “Rarus” there is a module “1C-Rarus: SoftFon”, for which integration with MANGO OFFICE was done.
The third option for the client is to make MANGO OFFICE and 1C interact — the Simple Calls service already described above.
But these examples are a drop in the bucket. There are many “1C” configurations, users of these products often modify the platform for themselves, and typical integration modules are not always suitable for custom configurations. In addition, different businesses need different functionality. And we know at least two companies specializing in writing individual integrations with 1C products - simplit.io and Miko.
Of course, we welcome everyone who wants to integrate with us. And we work with integration developers - we participate not only in consultations, but also sometimes financially. Contact!
More than half of Mango Telecom customers use integrations of our own design. If for some reason the client does not have enough features of the module we offer or needs to be supplemented with some special functions, then this can be done through our API constructor. This does not require a huge staff of programmers. Let’s reveal a secret: all our integrations are written from scratch by two developers . On average, each such task took them a maximum of one and a half months. So, if you wish, you can take one of the ready-made integration modules and quickly modify it to fit your specific tasks. Almost a thousand of our customers have taken this path.