What is Salesforce CTI Integration? How to Set it up

In the past decade, businesses have shifted their focus from business centric processes to customer centric processes. The reason behind this shift is clear competition is getting way too fierce, profit margins are declining, and customers are more aware of their rights and options. Along with implementing the right processes, the companies also need to focus on adopting the right technology and tools to manage customer relationships and data.

The customer relationship management (CRM) solution is one of the most widely used tools to manage customer records in businesses. It is widely used because it lets businesses store extensive information about customers, including invoices, payroll, sales receipts, and other details. This software also helps in automating customer care, marketing, sales, and similar business operations.

There are multiple CRM systems available in the market. Salesforce is one of the top CRM systems available in the market. It is a cloud based solution, which adds flexibility and convenience of using the system remotely with exceptional functionalities and features.

Even if Salesforce is a powerful customer relationship management tool, it is not complete until it has CTI features in it.

What is CTI for Salesforce?

CTI is an acronym for Computer Telephony Integration. Technically, CTI is a phenomenon of integrating telephony features into the software. When we talk about CTI for Salesforce, it indicates the integration of telephony features into the Salesforce CRM system. Companies that have expertise in CTI Salesforce integration can integrate these features.

Once telephony integration with Salesforce is completed, it will give major telephony features access to the agents such as:

• Call mute and un-mute
• Call park and pickup
• Call forwarding
• Call transfer
• And more

To let Salesforce users use the telephony mechanism within this CRM, it becomes vital to integrate a call center solution with it. VICIDial CTI integration with Salesforce is quite common and popular. This integration will provide the dialer of VICIDial to executives using the CRM system. It also provides added features such as click to call within Salesforce after VICIDial Salesforce integration. Thus, with a single click, the executive can make a call from Salesforce and the call controls aka telephony features are provided by VICIDial.

The whole process will be very subtle and the executives using the Salesforce telephone integration based system will never get to know this whole mechanism. In fact, they would not even realize that they are using a Salesforce CTI integration based solution if they are not told.

In a nutshell, CTI Salesforce integration will provide telephony features to the users of this CRM system to connect with clients.

What are the key features made available with Salesforce CTI integration?

• Click to call to initiate the call and outbound calling features to let agents make calls to customers or prospects through the CRM system.
• Embed a dialer widget to provide access to telephony features made available with CTI integration Salesforce.
• Call recording feature to record all calls for quality and training purposes. These call recording files will be made available in the VICIDial solution or the predefined storage system.
• Disposition details to provide call wrap up information to other agents who would handle the next call.
• Reports to let supervisors explore the details of major key performance indicators.
• Data push feature along with phone integration with Salesforce to let executives push imported data from Salesforce to VICIDial and vice versa.

VICIDial is just an example to give clarity on CTI integration Salesforce and its features. The best company offering Salesforce CTI integration can integrate CTI features with Salesforce with any other call center solution or telephony system.

How to set up CTI integration in Salesforce?

First of all, you need to understand that Salesforce telephone integration is a technical job. Thus, if you would take the help of an expert company offering premium CTI Salesforce integration services, then it would be a more trouble-free job. If you have technical expertise, then you can follow the below mentioned steps to set up CTI integration in Salesforce:

• You need to have access to the code of your call center software for CTI integration Salesforce.
• Use AppExchange of Salesforce, which lets you integrate third party API with Salesforce. You need to get the dialer API of your call center solution and integrate it with the Salesforce solution for effective phone integration with Salesforce.
• Enable open computer telephony integration features for your Salesforce apps.
• Give access to the Salesforce telephone integration based solution to all agents or executives that need to use telephony features during their day to day operations.

It may sound easy, but without technical expertise or knowledge, it is not possible to initiate and complete the process of Salesforce CTI integration. You must know how to use both call center and CRM systems; how to extract APIs and how to integrate them.

The best CTI integration Salesforce provider companies also design the GUI for click to call feature implementation, dialer popup, etc. You will need to make those designs or implementations as well for seamless use of the software made available with CTI integration in Salesforce.

Key benefits of Salesforce CTI integration:

There are multiple advantages of using telephony integration with Salesforce solution:

1. Make business operations seamless

Usually, CRM systems are used only to manage customer records. However, to make calls, agents need to use another system. CTI integration Salesforce provides features of both Salesforce and call center solutions within a single system and makes it easily accessible in a single window. This helps in reducing manual efforts and the hassle of managing and using two systems. This is indeed a great boon for businesses in which customer relationship management is the real focus.

2. Help in delivering personalized customer experience

To deliver satisfactory responses over a call, it is necessary to have the required details in front of the sight of an agent. With the CTI integration in Salesforce, the agents can review all customer information on their screen and also have the call center dialer features. This makes their lives easier and jobs more efficient. This is not possible without CTI integration in Salesforce.

3. Increase productivity

The integration of CTI features within the Salesforce CRM software makes sure that agents don’t need to switch between CRM and call center or telephony dialer. This reduces the time otherwise wasted in moving back and forth between two systems. Moreover, multiple jobs get automated with this integration. This helps in increasing the productivity of agents as now they concentrate only on efficient operations.

Wrap up

In a nutshell, CTI integration Salesforce is the most preferable technical bridge you must create between Salesforce and telephony solution to make your agents more productive and performance driven. It can save a lot of time and effort with automation. It can also boost their morale by providing the required features and information to agents, so they can have more context driven conversations.

Setting up this integrated solution needs technical expertise in telephony dial pad or platform along with the Salesforce CRM system. If you don’t have those technical skills, it is recommended to take the help of the company that offers CTI Salesforce integration services. We provide this integration. Contact us for more details and to book a demo Now!