Katrina Oko-Odoi
Sr. Content Marketing Manager
If you’ve never heard of voice over internet protocol (VoIP), it’s technology that allows people to make and receive telephone calls over a broadband internet connection. Usually the caller connects headphone equipment to their computer to place a call. Calls can typically be exchanged between the VoIP user and any regular cell phone or landline.
VoIP calling has been around since the 1990s, but it didn’t really become popular until 2003 when Skype was first released. Now, nearly twenty years later, people use VoIP technology all the time — sometimes without even knowing it — via popular apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Google Voice.
For businesses, one of VoIP’s greatest strengths is its ability to integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Copper. This opens up a world of possibilities for better navigating and monitoring your business relationships, which helps improve customer satisfaction.
4 top benefits of a VoIP integration with CRM
Here are the four top benefits of using a VoIP/CRM integration:
(1) Seamlessly track your sales team leads
One of the greatest benefits of a VoIP/CRM integration is the ability to seamlessly track your sales leads. For example, once you integrate a VoIP like RingCentral with a CRM like Copper, the CRM will make a record of incoming calls made through the phone system.
What this means in the real world is that your sales team no longer has to manually record each telephone touch with a lead or a client. Every time a call is made using the VoIP connection, that call is automatically tracked by the CRM. It also logs details like the number of times the sales staff attempted to call, whether anyone answered, and how long the phone call lasted.
A VoIP/CRM integrated system will also track when a lead or customer reaches out to your team. SMS text messages, for example, are automatically logged to the CRM and become part of the customer record without requiring any additional effort by the sales staff.
Ultimately, VoIP/CRM integration simply means that your phone and your CRM work together to relieve sales people from the tedious and time-consuming process of manually processing communication efforts.
(2) Crush customer service by integrating VoIP
There’s no doubt that customer service is critical to repeat sales. In 2018, Microsoft reported that 95% of the 5,000 consumers it surveyed believed that customer service influenced their brand loyalty. Of course, customer service depends heavily on effective business communication.
At its core, VoIP/CRM integration is focused on just that. While engaging with a customer on a call made using VoIP, the CRM can tell account management and other staff everything they need to know to provide excellent customer service. All from one screen, a user can access records of prior calls, past email and text exchanges and prior client concerns.
In other words, integrating CRM with VoIP only serves to enhance your team’s relationship with the client and thus helps to build brand loyalty.
(3) Help your internal team collaborate effectively
Another benefit of integrating your CRM software with VoIP is the effective collaboration that happens within your team. With an integration between Copper CRM and JustCall (a cloud phone system for sales and support teams), for instance, customer service personnel can easily make warm transfers if a customer issue needs to be escalated or handed off in some other manner. This VoIP/CRM integration also allows for team members and sales reps to instantly share contacts and customer history information.
Of course, this entire VoIP CRM integration process happens quickly and behind the scenes without your customer knowing.
(4) Increase overall efficiency and customer satisfaction with a VoIP phone system
Migrating to a VoIP/CRM integration for customer interactions will also increase your team’s overall efficiency. Without integration, users have to switch back and forth between contact lists and their CRM to make and track phone calls. With VoIP integration, team members can quickly access the customer’s file in the CRM, click to make a phone call, and then the details will automatically be recorded all on the same screen.
Additionally, VoIP/CRM integration can come in handy when all of your customers need to be notified of an event at one time. Imagine, for example, that a natural disaster near your manufacturing facility is going to delay shipment of company orders by two weeks. Rather than having your sales reps spend the time to call or text every single customer in their region, they could send out an automated SMS to notify all customers of the delay at once. This way, customers with particular requests regarding the delay can contact customer service directly. This sort of functionality can improve the customer experience, and divert critical hours of work away from administrative tasks and toward more important business communication and relationship building efforts.
Get started integrating VoIP with CRM
When it comes to integrating your VoIP with your CRM, there are a number of benefits. Copper’s proud to offer native VoIP CRM integrations with two of the top providers on the market. And if your VoIP provider isn’t among them, Copper syncs with Zapier to enable connections to more than 4,000 additional apps.
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