7 Features your Salesforce Telephony Integration should Provide for Best Call Management

Can you limit your business communication to a single channel?

Obviously, not.

Different prospects and customers in various countries and regions have different preferences for communication channels. 

And it is essential for firms to equip themselves to deliver a consistent experience across all channels, no matter which channel a customer chooses to contact a brand. 

The delivery of the best customer experience is possible only when you're geared up to meet the demands of the customers and value their interests. This is why a multi-channel approach for communication is business top of mind. 

If we talk about the different business communication channels, a call is the most preferred channel for prospects and customers. They choose calls to have one-on-one humanized conversations and quick voice communications where they do not have to wait for responses. 

Therefore, brands should be able to manage calls best whenever someone approaches a brand through a call. This makes Salesforce telephony integration vital for firms. 

Here are some best features you should consider before you opt for CTI for your business to transform your call operations. 

Must-Have Features You Should Get with Salesforce Telephony Integration

Call Transfer

Don't you think it would be frustrating when a caller has to call several times to get a resolution for an inquiry or concern?

Yes, it is. Apart from ruining a customer experience with your brand, it can also lead to a loss of business opportunities. 

This is because customers must take time out of their busy schedules to speak to the right representative, which causes inconvenience, and they might have to wait for days. 

Also, if a customer is impatient, there are chances that one can switch to some other brand hoping for a quick resolution. 

So, your Salesforce telephony integration should allow you to transfer calls. This way, depending on their concern, you can connect the caller to the relevant department over the first call. Your CTI should support warm transfer so that the call doesn't get auto-disconnected as you transfer the call to another person or department. 

You will have time to introduce yourself before you disconnect a call.

Call Conferencing

It is necessary to satisfy your callers to deliver the best experiences over calls. 

To do so, you sometimes need to have detailed and deep knowledge of topics and concerns a caller raises. And this is not possible for every lower-level executive to know everything. 

Therefore, sometimes you have to bring in higher authorities over a call to provide satisfactory answers to callers and resolve their concerns in the best manner. 

This is where comes the need for call conferencing. So, when you opt for Salesforce CTI integration, make sure it supports call conferencing. 

This would help you to add the relevant person to the call and provide better support through group calls.

Call Routing

Have you ever noticed that it ruins your brand reputation when callers don't get correct and satisfactory resolutions?

Yes, it does.

Call routing is an essential feature that lets you decide the entire journey of the call. Hence, you should expect a call routing feature when you choose Salesforce CTI integration. 

The more advanced call routing capability you have, the better you can route calls. With call routing, you predetermine the criteria based on which you want to send calls to a specific queue. 

With advanced call routing, you can even distribute calls based on days. If you want to route calls to a specific person on weekends, Mondays, Tuesdays, etc., you can do that. 

Apart from this, you can define a certain time after which a call will be routed to the next available agent if the first agent doesn't pick up a call. This will help you reduce wait time for callers and improve their experiences. 

You can route calls based on the caller's location and time zone so that every call is answered by the teams working in the same time zone. 

Auto-Forwarding of Calls

You never know which caller is calling for what purpose. Sometimes, missing a call can cause you to lose an opportunity that is knocking on your door. Hence, you should ensure that you and your teams answer every call, no matter what. The call-forwarding feature can help you get around missed calls. 

With an ideal Salesforce CTI integration, you can forward calls to many other numbers. 

It could be nine or ten also. With this feature, the phone rings for all the numbers you've added in the auto-forward option when someone calls a firm. 

And when any one number owner added to the auto-forward list receives a call, the call is disconnected for other numbers in the list. 

This capability of CTI helps you eliminate every possibility of missed calls and missed opportunities.

Availability Management for Agents

Availability management for agents is crucial to maintain caller satisfaction and reducing wait times. 

Say a customer-facing agent is unavailable to take calls or is on leave; a caller must wait longer before the call is routed to another executive. 

This will hamper customer satisfaction and the quality of service a brand provides. 

With availability management, agents can set their status as Online, Offline, or Away. If they are on a break or feeling exhausted due to the high volume of calls, they can set their status as 'Offline.' 

This will help them control incoming call flow and give them time to relax and prepare themselves to take calls. Thus, Salesforce CTI integration should provide you feature for availability management.

This feature also helps with call routing. Based on the availability status of agents, it can be identified which agent is available to take calls. So the calls are routed only to the available agents.

Easy IVR Set up

Customer-facing agents are often overloaded with calls. Too many calls from customers often inflate the call pipeline. 

Consequently, sometimes, despite all other features like call routing and availability management to reduce the caller's time, callers don't get a chance to interact with a customer service representative. 

For enhanced caller experiences, Salesforce CTI integration must support easy IVR configurability.

This will help you provide self-help options to your callers so that they can get assistance by just pressing the desired numbers based on their query. 

Configuring IVR, you can reduce call queues and allow your callers to resolve inquiries without depending on agents. 

So, you should be able to configure IVR conveniently without investing much time. 

For example, if you have text-to-speech configurability, you can configure interactive voice responses in a male and female voice by simply writing texts.

Programmable Voicemails on Call Rejection

Disconnecting callers call and leaving them clueless about the reason may annoy them. 

Your Salesforce CTI should enable you to inform your customers when you're busy and disconnect their call. 

You can program a voicemail to go out as soon as you disconnect any call. 

This will help you keep your callers posted about the reason and prevent your callers from getting annoyed.

Conclusion

An ideal Salesforce CTI integration provides you with numerous capabilities that help you reduce caller anxiety and maximize caller satisfaction whenever they interact with you over calls. Besides, by providing superior call experiences, you can retain your customers, resolve their queries faster, and improve your brand reputation. You can handle calls like never before, improving First call resolution. In the bigger picture, you can create a positive brand image by eliminating every cause of inconvenience when they interact with you through calls.