CRM Application Development With CTI Integration
CRM application development has become crucial for businesses as it plays an important role in handling customer interactions as well as sales activities. The sales team is responsible for handling customer queries via phone, messages, emails, and other means like social media. However, if the conversation goes awry with a potential client or a valuable customer, the repercussions can be detrimental.
A majority of businesses use CRM modules to manage their sales operations. However, a very limited number of companies have integrated their CRM modules with computer telephony systems. CTI integration as part of CRM application development renders a complete customer success platform by facilitating real-time communications within the CRM ecosystem. Not only does it improve CRM efficiency, but also empowers your sales team to perform better. Let us explore what CTI is and how it strengthens CRM application development.
What is Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)?
It is the practice of tying your phone system together with your computer systems. It is widely used by customer service teams to improve call center interactions. The technology unifies a computer with a telephone system and can be configured at two levels –
Call Routing: It enables the identification of the caller and routes the call to the right department or sales executives. Moreover, the sales team can transfer calls to relevant departments or agents, put the call on hold, or transfer it to other sales reps.
Desktop: CTI integration with desktop showcases rich data in the form of screen pop-ups. It allows sales reps to view complete customer information even before a call is connected with the customer.
Summing it up, CTI enables you to perform a wide range of tasks that will improve sales and services including:
- Identifying and routing incoming calls to the right department or person
- Recording, logging, and storing calls for quality assurance and compliance
- Showcasing screen pop-ups to sales reps with information about callers, their account, open cases, or call history
- Incorporating a softphone dial pad into your CRM software interface so that calls can be made using VoIP or traditional PSTN
- Enabling agents to click-to-dial or auto-dial contacts
- Monitoring and measuring KPIs such as average handle time, first-call resolution, dropped call percentages, and more
Benefits of CRM Application Development With CTI Integration
Reach more prospects
For a sales team, engaging with more prospects is always the top priority. Reaching out to a wider audience creates new opportunities and generates more revenue. If you use a dedicated CRM module for lead management, you should seek an effective way to reach those prospects over the phone call.
CTI eliminates the need for manual dialing which might be a tedious and time-consuming process. A telephone number associated with any CRM object, including leads, contacts, and cases provides several clickable links. Your sales team can use these links to place outbound calls. Additionally, automated dialers can be used to place these calls using lead lists that you can create and store within the CRM app.
Most of the leads do not answer the first time and routine voicemails take time away from your team’s call downs. CRM application development with CTI integration can solve this by providing a voicemail drop for pre-recorded messages. Also, most people refuse to answer calls from unknown phone numbers. With CTI integration, sales reps can use local caller IDs to ensure that the phone number matches the geographic region you are calling. As a result, it improves the call pickup rates.
Improved Sales Team Performance
With a CTI integration in place, sales managers can monitor team performance on CRM dashboards in accordance with essential business KPIs. The KPIs include the number of calls made, average call duration, meetings booked, and opportunities created. In doing so, they can measure team performance to identify sales reps that might need training. An engaged and motivated sales team is effective at establishing smooth customer interaction processes. CRM application development with CTI integration not only enables sales managers to track sales activities but also gamifies sales processes. Gamification can make them understand the behavior of their best-performing agents and offer incentives to other team members.
Improved Service and Support
With CTI in place, callers can use self-service, or access routing tools like IVR to reach the most appropriate agent/department. The system can assign calls to agents based on a variety of options including “next available agent”, or to an agent with the specific skills required to resolve a customer’s problem. Most advanced systems now offer dynamic call routing, which enables the platform to place calls based on the information stored in CRMs. CTI enables service teams to reduce call handling times and increase call resolution rates by providing screen pops to agents. It contains the information they need to resolve customer problems.
Improved Lead Conversion
Sales representatives must have all information about a lead so that they can tailor a conversation with the prospect. It ultimately enables them to drive more conversations and sales. CRM-CTI integration enables sales reps to preview all the information about a prospect before initiating a call. It includes information on the job title, geographic location, past purchases of products, and even their LinkedIn profile can be quickly reviewed.
Integration using open CTI tools
Open CTI is a tool developed by Salesforce that enables enterprises to integrate third-party systems. The CTI-specific apps need not be downloaded and get deprived of the cloud structure. Open CTI is browser-based, thus provides developers an opportunity to use the cloud architecture. To implement this process, you need a basic familiarity with JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Visualforce APIs, and CTI adapters. A component used during this process is the Open CTI API from Salesforce. Asynchronous JavaScript Asterisk Manager (AJAM) connector is another feature that has been custom-built and deployed on the server.
The moment a call is initiated through the CRM module, the AJAM connector dials to the Asterisk component of the CTI service provider. It, in turn, links up a call to the end-user and then instructs AJAM to establish an official call. The AJAM connector then performs additional tasks like recording, transferring, monitoring, and the likes. Additionally, the AJAM connector enables you to fetch the Caller IDs along with the related data. The process is then mapped onto multiple servers.
Telephony Service Provider APIs
Integration using the APIs of a telephony service provider incorporates many components to establish calls. It includes Visualforce classes, CTI adapters, custom Apex classes, and the telephony service provider’s integration adapters.
Whenever a call is initiated from the softphone of the CRM console using the telephone service provider’s adapter, it hits the server of the telephone service provider. Afterward, the control of the call is transferred to AGI (Asterisk Gateway Interface) adapter which is the JAVA gateway interface adapter usually built using Asterisk technology. The adapter, in turn, calls the CRM app’s CTI adapter and ensures that a call has been established. Then the other details like call duration, number, etc. are displayed by the CRM module.
Conclusion
CRM application development has become a staple element for businesses to manage their sales and customer service operations. It enables them to efficiently manage their sales pipeline, improve marketing strategies, and deliver maximum customer satisfaction. Besides, it is imperative to build long-term customer relationships and gain customer loyalty. Therefore, businesses must invest in CRM application development to ensure streamlined sales, marketing, and customer service operations. Nevertheless, the aforementioned benefits of computer telephony indicate that CTI integration must be a part of your CRM application. At the same time, it is critical to seek assistance from a trusted technology partner to extract maximum CRM benefits.
We, at Oodles ERP, provide end-to-end CRM software development services tailored to match the diverse business needs of our clients. Our development team specializes in using the latest tools, frameworks, and SDKs to build custom CRM solutions for industry-specific business use cases. We use open-source software platforms like Odoo, ERPNext, Opentaps, and OFBiz to build CRM solutions with custom features and a series of integrations. To learn more about our custom CRM application development services, drop us a line at erp@oodles.io.
