Phone + CRM: The Benefits of Collaboration

The modern world is a world of communications. They are at every turn. In business, in order to make correct management decisions, it is necessary to analyze communications (primarily client) in detail - by frequency, by sources, by the effectiveness of their development on the side of the company 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 which integrations are implemented for the virtual MANGO OFFICE PBX, what exactly our clients get from being able to integrate telephony into various business applications, and how we work in this direction.

Why do we need integration?

How does telephony and, say, CRM “interact” without integration? Spoiler: not very good. After (or even in progress) a telephone conversation with a client, the manager needs to manually enter information about the actual fact of the call and the agreements reached. The recording of the conversation is stored separately, and, before turning to it, if you need to restore some details, you must first find it in the archive. Call analysis is also separate.

What does the integration of virtual PBX with CRM? 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 the recording of the conversation are stored in the card.
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If the system “recognized” the client by phone number, then the manager automatically sees the entire communication history on the monitor screen that immediately appears on the monitor and can form the strongest proposal on the fly, taking into account all the previous orders of this client, his preferences, some unresolved issues with him and other circumstances. In addition, the system can generate statistics for a specific 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 customer’s call directly to the employee responsible for that customer. Directly means bypassing all voice menus. That is, you can make it so that the regular customer never had to listen to all these “Good afternoon! Thank you for calling us. To connect with the sales department, press 1 "and at the end -" Wait for the operator to answer or dial the employee's short number. " Integration allows the system to immediately connect the caller with the specialist he needs.

A few examples

Work on the integration of "Mango Telecom" began in 2016. The first integration that we implemented for the virtual PBX MANGO OFFICE is integration with amoCRM . At the start of the project, all possible situations of interaction between telephony and CRM 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 such an employee, the system recorded this event. By the way, the execution of even this functionality was not quite obvious in practice. The problem is this. For example, a customer calls the general number of your company and then presses a key to contact, say, the sales department. If the integration is written incorrectly, then each “transfer” of the call (from a common number to a specific department or from one department to another) will be recorded in CRM as a new call. That is, one client called, but while his call was “walking” around the office, the system recorded it four or five times.

During the year after the release of integration with amoCRM, we collected user feedback 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. Working on amoCRM, we focused on our own strength. Even the analysis of various protocols that differ from the description in the technical documentation or presented in the publicly available documentation is incomplete, we carried out ourselves. With Bitrix24, everything was exactly the opposite: from the very beginning, we were in close contact with the head of Bitriksovskoy development. The implementation took 3 weeks. They very much wanted to have time for a large conference at which there was an opportunity to present new opportunities, so practically we lived in the office. Despite the fact that amoCRM and Bitriks24 are different in many respects, the experience from the first one really helped to do everything well and quickly.

What else is important to consider in the design of integrations? Subscriber equipment. Companies can use softphones, landlines and mobile phones to receive calls. For mobile it is enough to 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 a cellular phone, customer cards still have to come up, but this is not the most important point. More importantly - that the call must be stored in the CRM-system automatically. That is, so that the manager does not press any buttons on his computer at all. This is useful when an employee is somewhere in the fields or a customer calls, and the manager is at home on the weekends. The call should still be recorded.

Another useful feature, which is in our development and which is not in many others, is integration with dynamic call tracking . Call tracking allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising and in detail to find out how many and what kind of customers you have attracted with the help of one or another marketing activity. Call Tracking makes it clear how a new client learned about your company, what city it was from, what it was looking for on the web, what pages of your site it was, what it looked at. Using standard CRM-system tools, you can create reports on certain attributes, filter data, make selections, look at sales statistics and count how much one or another campaign brought in money. If sales are low for some advertising request, it makes sense to switch to customer cards and listen to conversations. Maybe these customers are untargeted. Or something wrong with the ad campaign itself. Integration gives a great advantage - to trace how the advertising literally works before the deal!

Of course, the integration of virtual PBX is interesting not only with CRM, but also with services for technical support and customer support services. We, for example, have integration with Zendesk, one of the largest service desks in Europe. In Russia, he is also well known.

Third-party integration

Our clients use hundreds, if not thousands of different business applications with which you can integrate a virtual PBX. Of course, we cannot do so many integrations at once taking into account all the features of each system. Therefore, we focus primarily on products with a large audience.

But to the satisfaction of customers, there are integrations made by our partners. Such, for example, as the company “Simple calls”. The guys are doing "universal" telephony integration with dozens of different applications, but universality, as is usually the case, affects functionality. In such integrations, scenarios have been implemented that cover far from all the possibilities of CRM systems connected to virtual PBXs.

Finally, if a client company, Mango Telecom, uses some completely unique or even its own IT system, for which neither we nor our partners have written and, most likely, do not write integration, then this can be done independently. 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 have to understand: support lies on the shoulders of the developer himself.

Today for virtual PBX MANGO OFFICE implemented integration with more than 80 business applications. 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 conversation - about the products of the company "1C". There are simultaneously several opportunities to integrate them with telephony. One of these - for the application "1C: Management of our company." Integration implemented by colleagues from "1C". We actively helped them.

The second option was written by Rarus, it also lies in the 1C perimeter. In CRM "Rarus" there is a module "1C-Rarus: Softphone", for it integration with MANGO OFFICE was done.

The third option for the client is to force MANGO OFFICE and 1C to interact — the Simple Call service already described above.

But these examples are a drop in the ocean. There are many configurations of "1C", 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 that specialize in writing individual integrations with 1C products - simplit.io and Miko.

Of course, we welcome everyone who wants to integrate with us. And we cooperate with integration developers - we participate not only in consultations, but also sometimes financially. Contact us!

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More than half of Mango Telecom customers use the integration of our own development. If for some reason the client lacks the capabilities of the module we offer or needs to add some special functions, then this can be done through our API constructor. This does not require a huge staff of programmers. Let's reveal the 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 for your specific tasks. Almost a thousand of our clients followed this path.