This post is going to give you some information about the Salesforce call center: what does it do and why might your business want it?
First and foremost though, what is a call center? The Salesforce call center is basically a softphone within Salesforce. It typically appears on the left-hand side of the Salesforce window, like this:
You can also pop out the softphone to move it somewhere that fits your workflows better.
The cool part about integrating a softphone into the Salesforce Call Center is all of the options for information tracking and capturing.
For example, you can quickly see what records are associated with a call. Incoming calls will pop a screen that shows the caller ID, call history, and opportunities linked to the caller:
Phone numbers in Salesforce will become clickable so that you can click-to-call rather than manually dialing. Whew, because punching in numbers over and over gets pretty tedious:
Salesforce keeps track of calls made, along with any of the information entered by representatives. So you can start tracking the number of calls you make or your team makes, the call duration, and call result, without manually creating new records:
That’s all pretty great for sales and service teams who are trying to share information and records with each other. Each team member can immediately see the activity history, including calls, for all leads, contacts and opportunities. If a team member is off sick or otherwise busy, their teammates can make sure nothing is missed.
“I’m sold! Now, how do I set up a call center in Salesforce?”
To set up a call center in Salesforce you need a CTI adapter. CTI stands for computer telephony integration. It’s the piece of the puzzle that allows Salesforce to interact with incoming and outgoing calls. Not all CTIs have all the features mentioned above, and some CTI adapters have other features too.
There are a few CTI adapters out there which can be found on the Salesforce AppExchange. You’ll have to do some research to figure out what works for your phone system and offers the features you’re interested in. This can be daunting if you aren’t familiar with telephony, but it doesn’t need to be.
To get started, check out this post on Basic Telephony Terms, and have a look at the phone systems you’re using. Then spend a bit of time on the Salesforce AppExchange looking at the CTI Adapters.
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