October 4, 2015 at 22:12Unite and conquer. Cloud IP PBX, CRM, and Mobile Integration
The time elapsed since the last post was posted on our blog on Megamind, we tried not to waste. After honestly taking the holidays off and comprehending the project again, the development team came up with the only right decision: to try to become the leader in the cloud IP-PBX market right now is a dream from the category of “Flights to the Moon” both in terms of labor costs and in terms of budgets. The SaaS-telephony market has become as competitive and dense as it was once the market of conventional IP-telephony. All analytics made by us and our partners clearly indicate: there is room for growth, but striving for it in standard ways, mastering huge marketing budgets, is not a good strategy. We will inevitably lag behind the top three or five unconditional leaders. In fact, what is happening now in the cloud segment is more a war of PR and marketing, and only secondarily a war of technology. Technologically, many platforms are identical and, at times, it is difficult to understand how one solution is functionally different from another.
For ourselves, we have chosen a different path - we will develop niche solutions, namely to beat, to wager various integrations of cloud telephony with CRM systems and mobile communications. And in this area, according to the sensations, the new player breathes much more freely. Offhand, after sitting a couple of hours in Google, we almost did not find direct and indirect competitors.
Clients helped us to finally establish ourselves in the correctness of the chosen strategy - any attempt to sell a typical set of services of a telephone operator of the sample of the year 2015 to the “new caller” met with quite tangible resistance - “you need to think, I’ll call you back and why are you better than competitors”. But, it was worth starting to talk about the benefits of ZEON PBX integrations.with CRM-systems, help-desks and other time-lapse reviews, the client immediately had a lot of questions and, as a rule, such communication ended with an agreement to send a commercial offer. That's nice, that's where the dog rummaged. We are moving towards integrations. Moreover, we have something to offer tasty - an extremely interesting convergent solution at the junction of mobile communications and Internet telephony. These are our ZEON IP SIM cards that can communicate with the PBX via SIP.
One of the mobile operators, in collaboration with our partners, produces special SIM cards that work like regular IP phones and do not have a federal number. Sim cards can be controlled directly from the interface of our ZEON, assign short numbers to them, assign caller IDs, attach SIM cards to voice scripts, that is, use them in the same way as regular office phones with all “VoIP stuffing” - recording conversations, statistics, online monitoring, IVR.
The interaction of ZEON and IP SIM cards looks like this:
Sim cards work in a single number space with ordinary office phones and are completely identical in functionality: all calls from SIM cards go to the PBX, processed by scripts, recorded and managed. An employee on a mobile phone, having dialed the short number of his colleague, will get directly to his work phone in the best traditions of corporate communications. When an incoming short number is displayed, the call can be transferred, held, put on HOLD or switched to a voice script.
A similar, somewhat unusual, corporate cellular workflow allows you to significantly optimize business processes and increase control over calls in the company. Now all employees, including those who are constantly on the run and constantly on the mobile, are part of a single corporate telephone network. A great, promising, start for a curious, niche, service. Now we need to add intrigue and make the product even more attractive - and not to integrate all this beauty with the most popular CRM systems, so that our dear customers get access to digital happiness with three easy clicks of the mouse.
The chief developer, guru and sannyasin of the asterisk and VoIP, technical director Oleg, literally in a couple of nights developed the necessary roadmap, thought over the details and took on the impossible - to turn our ZEON into a platform that can interact simultaneously with CRM systems and with corporate cellular communications and not just interact, but interact so that all this multi-level integration allows you to implement scenarios with the participation of several departments of the client, his courier service on mobile and from ate logistics, accounting control, which hovers over all this and controls and distributes.
Now we look like this:
On the one hand, landline and fixed phones of the company, on the other hand, a couple of the most popular cloud-based CRMs and a carefully developed API, which allows, if necessary, to screw even the Pentagon ERP system. By the way, we have not sent the CP to them yet.
We didn’t add anything special to the ZEON interface, since integration with CRM is hidden somewhere very deep inside Zeon, and integration with mobile communications, in essence, also does not require extra buttons, since the SIM, from the point of view of the PBX, is a regular IP -phone and an internal line for a SIM card is created in the same way as the most ordinary internal line for an ordinary softphone.
The only thing that had to be added was a special section in the settings, where mobile employees were allocated in a separate group exclusively for ease of management. A couple of nights of intense coding and new star checkmarks are ready too. Tested, pressed and working as they should. Before conquering the snow-capped peaks of integration, just a couple of small passes remained.
It is clear that even a specialist cannot immediately understand all the charm, irresistibility and beauty of the invented solution. The first attempts to sell the integration miracle gave a clear understanding of the fact that there is no way to get rid of the three lines in the email and customers often do not understand how close the state of the digital nirvana is and what advantages they get by introducing our ZEON. You need to sit down and draw, draw, draw.
If you explain “on the fingers”, then we have got this solution:
Now, with a couple of short examples, we will show how you can apply our Zeon along with mobile communications and CRM.
Example one. Real estate agency
One of the main tasks of any real estate agency is as many rental and purchase and sale transactions as possible. The main combat unit in any Academy of Sciences is a realtor executor traveling around the city for views, shows, deals. A realtor is only a member of the staff of the Academy of Sciences, but in fact strives to conduct a deal himself, without the participation of the Academy of Sciences itself. In this case, he will receive not half the commission, but the entire commission. Our task is not to give him a chance to be smart. To do this, deploy Zeon, give SIM cards to the agents and integrate all this with the CRM. Now all calls of a realtor from a mobile phone, without options, are visible in the statistics of the PBX, recorded and in addition displayed in the CRM in the transaction card. Calls from customers arrive at a single advertising number, and then are forwarded to mobile agents in the same way as to regular internal phones, they are recorded and attached to the card in CRM. Now everything is visible and audible. With an outgoing call from a cellular agent, it is not the cellular number that is determined, but, again, the single advertising number of the company.
It’s enough for the head of the Academy of Sciences to go into CRM, filter out transactions for the right employee and see what happens there. “What is it” - this means not only the planned budget and status, but also the complete statistics of all conversations of the realtor and the owner, the recording of their conversations from mobile, the complete tracking of what is happening. With a simple click of the mouse you can change the person responsible for the transaction and then all incoming from the client’s phone will begin to go to another, more honest, agent, and the client will not even feel it. It was simply routed.
We already have experience of such an implementation and we plan to talk about it in more detail in one of the following publications.
An example of the second. Delivery service
The situation is largely identical to the situation with realtors. Exactly the same mobile employees travel around the city a lot and actively call customers, and customers call them. The difference is that there is no particular need to hide the numbers of the courier client from each other, except for convenience. The key point in this story is the recording of conversations and monitoring, in case the refrigerator was not brought in at the right time or if the refrigerator was not brought, but the washing machine. Some customers, in such cases, like to roll out claims, demand a refund, and get very nervous. Having at hand a record of all conversations from mobile couriers, many slippery moments can be avoided: it will become clear what, who brought it to whom, and when. Moreover, all this is fixed in CRM and is easily located. If you wish, the owner of the delivery service,
Since SIMs are completely controlled by ZEON, there is nothing impossible - you need to compare the order number in CRM and the real customer number, and then we will act: at the right stage, we will translate the order number into a real phone number and send the call as directed. We have experience and similar implementation.
The given examples are only a drop in the ocean of possibilities of integration of IP-PBX ZEON, CRM and mobile communications. We plan to split case descriptions into several parts and gradually put them here on the ZEON PBX blog on Megamind.
Having finished this publication, we almost immediately sit down for a new one, which means that CONTINUED SHOULD BE ...
For ourselves, we have chosen a different path - we will develop niche solutions, namely to beat, to wager various integrations of cloud telephony with CRM systems and mobile communications. And in this area, according to the sensations, the new player breathes much more freely. Offhand, after sitting a couple of hours in Google, we almost did not find direct and indirect competitors.
Clients helped us to finally establish ourselves in the correctness of the chosen strategy - any attempt to sell a typical set of services of a telephone operator of the sample of the year 2015 to the “new caller” met with quite tangible resistance - “you need to think, I’ll call you back and why are you better than competitors”. But, it was worth starting to talk about the benefits of ZEON PBX integrations.with CRM-systems, help-desks and other time-lapse reviews, the client immediately had a lot of questions and, as a rule, such communication ended with an agreement to send a commercial offer. That's nice, that's where the dog rummaged. We are moving towards integrations. Moreover, we have something to offer tasty - an extremely interesting convergent solution at the junction of mobile communications and Internet telephony. These are our ZEON IP SIM cards that can communicate with the PBX via SIP.
One of the mobile operators, in collaboration with our partners, produces special SIM cards that work like regular IP phones and do not have a federal number. Sim cards can be controlled directly from the interface of our ZEON, assign short numbers to them, assign caller IDs, attach SIM cards to voice scripts, that is, use them in the same way as regular office phones with all “VoIP stuffing” - recording conversations, statistics, online monitoring, IVR.
The interaction of ZEON and IP SIM cards looks like this:
Sim cards work in a single number space with ordinary office phones and are completely identical in functionality: all calls from SIM cards go to the PBX, processed by scripts, recorded and managed. An employee on a mobile phone, having dialed the short number of his colleague, will get directly to his work phone in the best traditions of corporate communications. When an incoming short number is displayed, the call can be transferred, held, put on HOLD or switched to a voice script.
A similar, somewhat unusual, corporate cellular workflow allows you to significantly optimize business processes and increase control over calls in the company. Now all employees, including those who are constantly on the run and constantly on the mobile, are part of a single corporate telephone network. A great, promising, start for a curious, niche, service. Now we need to add intrigue and make the product even more attractive - and not to integrate all this beauty with the most popular CRM systems, so that our dear customers get access to digital happiness with three easy clicks of the mouse.
The chief developer, guru and sannyasin of the asterisk and VoIP, technical director Oleg, literally in a couple of nights developed the necessary roadmap, thought over the details and took on the impossible - to turn our ZEON into a platform that can interact simultaneously with CRM systems and with corporate cellular communications and not just interact, but interact so that all this multi-level integration allows you to implement scenarios with the participation of several departments of the client, his courier service on mobile and from ate logistics, accounting control, which hovers over all this and controls and distributes.
Now we look like this:
On the one hand, landline and fixed phones of the company, on the other hand, a couple of the most popular cloud-based CRMs and a carefully developed API, which allows, if necessary, to screw even the Pentagon ERP system. By the way, we have not sent the CP to them yet.
We didn’t add anything special to the ZEON interface, since integration with CRM is hidden somewhere very deep inside Zeon, and integration with mobile communications, in essence, also does not require extra buttons, since the SIM, from the point of view of the PBX, is a regular IP -phone and an internal line for a SIM card is created in the same way as the most ordinary internal line for an ordinary softphone.
The only thing that had to be added was a special section in the settings, where mobile employees were allocated in a separate group exclusively for ease of management. A couple of nights of intense coding and new star checkmarks are ready too. Tested, pressed and working as they should. Before conquering the snow-capped peaks of integration, just a couple of small passes remained.
It is clear that even a specialist cannot immediately understand all the charm, irresistibility and beauty of the invented solution. The first attempts to sell the integration miracle gave a clear understanding of the fact that there is no way to get rid of the three lines in the email and customers often do not understand how close the state of the digital nirvana is and what advantages they get by introducing our ZEON. You need to sit down and draw, draw, draw.
If you explain “on the fingers”, then we have got this solution:
Now, with a couple of short examples, we will show how you can apply our Zeon along with mobile communications and CRM.
Example one. Real estate agency
One of the main tasks of any real estate agency is as many rental and purchase and sale transactions as possible. The main combat unit in any Academy of Sciences is a realtor executor traveling around the city for views, shows, deals. A realtor is only a member of the staff of the Academy of Sciences, but in fact strives to conduct a deal himself, without the participation of the Academy of Sciences itself. In this case, he will receive not half the commission, but the entire commission. Our task is not to give him a chance to be smart. To do this, deploy Zeon, give SIM cards to the agents and integrate all this with the CRM. Now all calls of a realtor from a mobile phone, without options, are visible in the statistics of the PBX, recorded and in addition displayed in the CRM in the transaction card. Calls from customers arrive at a single advertising number, and then are forwarded to mobile agents in the same way as to regular internal phones, they are recorded and attached to the card in CRM. Now everything is visible and audible. With an outgoing call from a cellular agent, it is not the cellular number that is determined, but, again, the single advertising number of the company.
It’s enough for the head of the Academy of Sciences to go into CRM, filter out transactions for the right employee and see what happens there. “What is it” - this means not only the planned budget and status, but also the complete statistics of all conversations of the realtor and the owner, the recording of their conversations from mobile, the complete tracking of what is happening. With a simple click of the mouse you can change the person responsible for the transaction and then all incoming from the client’s phone will begin to go to another, more honest, agent, and the client will not even feel it. It was simply routed.
We already have experience of such an implementation and we plan to talk about it in more detail in one of the following publications.
An example of the second. Delivery service
The situation is largely identical to the situation with realtors. Exactly the same mobile employees travel around the city a lot and actively call customers, and customers call them. The difference is that there is no particular need to hide the numbers of the courier client from each other, except for convenience. The key point in this story is the recording of conversations and monitoring, in case the refrigerator was not brought in at the right time or if the refrigerator was not brought, but the washing machine. Some customers, in such cases, like to roll out claims, demand a refund, and get very nervous. Having at hand a record of all conversations from mobile couriers, many slippery moments can be avoided: it will become clear what, who brought it to whom, and when. Moreover, all this is fixed in CRM and is easily located. If you wish, the owner of the delivery service,
Since SIMs are completely controlled by ZEON, there is nothing impossible - you need to compare the order number in CRM and the real customer number, and then we will act: at the right stage, we will translate the order number into a real phone number and send the call as directed. We have experience and similar implementation.
The given examples are only a drop in the ocean of possibilities of integration of IP-PBX ZEON, CRM and mobile communications. We plan to split case descriptions into several parts and gradually put them here on the ZEON PBX blog on Megamind.
Having finished this publication, we almost immediately sit down for a new one, which means that CONTINUED SHOULD BE ...