Guide to telephony for Salesforce® and Desk.comImprove sales & service using Salesforce® to place and receive calls

By Mark Dunn for NewVoiceMedia

It’s not easy for small businesses; recession, stingy banks and growing competition.

Small businesses have to work harder than ever to achieve growth, attract customers, cut costs and find enough management time. At the same time, they face competition from their peers and larger rivals and this puts pressure on margins and spurs the need for improved sales and better customer service.

Forget the doom and gloom, there is a huge opportunity for forward-thinking businesses to outfox their competitors: cloud computing. Already, half of all small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) agree that it is going to become more important for businesses like theirs, according to research by Microsoft1.

1. http://www.microsoft.com/global/en-us/news/publishingimages/images/press/2011/infographic_SMBCloud_lg_Page.jpg2. http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/

Cloud computing gives you the ability to outsource IT services to companies who deliver them over the internet. For example, five million companies already use Google Apps for Business2 for their corporate email, online collaboration and office applications. Instead of buying packaged software, users access cloud applications through a web browser.

There are many applications of cloud computing, including customer relationship management, project planning and team collaboration. In this whitepaper we’re looking at cloud communications platforms, such as NewVoiceMedia’s ContactWorld, as used in sales, marketing, customer support and contact centres.

Every silver lining has a cloud

Communications are an essential part of every business. Inbound and outbound phone calls are an essential part of sales, marketing and customer support but a new phone system is a major investment.

A traditional on-premise system is not easily scalable: there is a risk of overspecifying and paying too much now for capabilities you may need in the future or underspecifying and outgrowing what you bought too soon. Also, advanced systems, even for small sales teams or contact centres, can be difficult to program and, as a result, unresponsive to the changing needs of your business.

Even flexible systems can be user-unfriendly with promised features remaining inaccessible behind a wall of menu options. When so much depends on efficient, flexible phone communications, these problems are more than challenges, they are business-killers, or if you make the right decision, winning business solutions.

Communications challenges

NewVoiceMedia’s ContactWorld QuickStart provides a cloud-based communications platform which integrates with Salesforce® and Desk.com® giving you incredible insight and management.It takes care of all the call routing, recording, interactive menus and technology using an internet-based system.

Staff can use it from any phone, even a mobile or a home landline. They just log in via a web interface and incoming communications are routed directly to the right person. This allows it to act as a company switchboard, call routing system for customer support, smart PBX for inbound and outbound sales calls and even a fully-fledged contact centre system, regardless of the size of your business.

The NewVoiceMedia solution

Switching to NewVoiceMedia’s cloud communications platform brings immediate business benefits, including:

More flexible, more productive employees.

Because ContactWorld enables more flexible working patterns, it gives you an opportunity to hire staff from a wider talent pool and offer them more productive, happier working conditions. For example, it makes it easy to let staff work from home, which many people prefer, or work in

multiple offices so you can recruit in different areas.

Improved marketing.

Companies using ContactWorld can be more responsive to leads and opportunities. It lets them set up dedicated phone numbers for marketing campaigns, prioritise incoming calls based on lead scoring software and route leads to the best-qualified staff or to people who speak the caller’s language. By integrating NewVoiceMedia with Salesforce® or Desk.com®, you can even give top customers VIP treatment, such as jumping them to the head of the call queue.

More flexible, more productive employees.

ContactWorld also helps turn effective marketing into actual sales, maximising revenue from each inbound call. Interactive menus ensure that the right calls go to the right people. For example, insurance companies can send renewal customers to one team of agents and new business to another team. This kind of sophisticated call routing is more efficient and profitable than leaving incoming calls to chance and whoever happens to pick up the ringing phone. ContactWorld is equally helpful for outbound sales calls with click-to-dial straight from the user’s computer with Salesforce® integration.

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The easy way to manage your telephony

Simplified secure payment.

When it comes to actually taking payment, ContactWorld PCI lets companies take credit card payments on the phone in a secure, PCI- compliant way using an automated mid-call system. This ensures that customers get a consistent, high-quality experience with much less risk of sales falling through because of mistakes in card processing. Because it doesn’t require employee training or vetting, it’s quick and easy to set up.

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Happier customers.

Small companies find it easy to give customers the personal touch but as they grow, it gets more difficult. ContactWorld can automate many aspects of good customer service, especially in conjunction with Salesforce®. It ensures customers are routed efficiently to people who can help them, get personalised recognition and their interactions with the company are recorded.

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Because ContactWorld uses cloud computing technology, it delivers huge advantages compared to a traditional on-premise system.

Less need for IT support. Because there is less hardware and software to buy, install and manage, backup and fix, ContactWorld costs less to set up and support. There’s no need to hire expensive phone system consultants or external IT support either.

Align costs to headcount. You pay for ContactWorld on a per-user, per-month basis. So if your headcount increases, you can easily support more people.

Reduced capital expenses. Because there is no on-premise hardware or software to buy, you pay for ContactWorld out of operating costs, not the capital budget. This makes it more affordable, especially when budgets are tight. It also reduces the barriers to switching because there isn’t a huge up-front cost.

Increase productivity and support new working patterns. Calls can be routed to employees in any location, providing they have a working phone and a computer with an internet connection. This makes it very easy to support home working and flexible working patterns. There is strong evidence that this increases employee

productivity and loyalty3.

Support multiple sites. ContactWorld’s flexibility also makes it much easier to work from multiple locations or move office without interruption to customer service.

In-built disaster recovery and business continuity. Quickly and effortlessly switch between locations, phones and devices whilst staying online, available and in-business.

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Communications in the cloud

3. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/freakonomics-radio/can-working-home-increase-productivity

Improved security If you take credit cards over the phone, for example when customers place orders, it’s reassuring to know that NewVoiceMedia is PCI-DSS Tier 1 accredited, which means it has the highest possible level of security accreditation. ContactWorld has the option of in-call credit card processing so you can outsource that as well.

Improved reliability. On-premise systems are vulnerable to power cuts, hardware and software problems as well as natural disasters, theft and accident. However, ContactWorld uses three separate data centres to ensure a high level of reliability and availability, backed by a 99.999% availability guarantee.

Increase productivity and support new working patterns. Businesses change and you need a phone system that can keep up. For example, if you run an advertising campaign you might want to publish a special number or prioritise incoming calls for a new product. ContactWorld lets you update call plans easily and messages from a web interface without any specialist knowledge.

In addition, there are all the benefits of outsourcing anything to outside specialists. They can achieve efficiencies of scale that are impossible for individual companies. For example, they can afford to hire technical experts and invest in the latest technology. This levels the playing field for small companies when they go up against their larger rivals because they can now have access to the kind of advanced IT that was previously only available to the big boys. And it leaves you free to concentrate on building the business.

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Record time for changing and IVR: 90 seconds

Unlike most on-premise communications technology, companies can be up and running with ContactWorld in anything from a few hours to a couple of weeks. There’s no hardware to install and no software to integrate.

Our professional services team can set the system up so that it works for your business and train your staff to update it and tailor it. The result is a fast and decisive improvement in the way a business communicates with its customers and prospects as well as a huge increase in the level of insight and management data, for those with tough reporting schedules.

You shouldn’t have to spend a fortune on your phone system and you shouldn’t have to become a contact centre technology expert to improve marketing, sales and support. Thanks to advanced cloud technology, NewVoiceMedia’s ContactWorld gives smaller and growing businesses access to big-company communications technology, with all the benefits of cloud computing.

It’s time to focus on building a better business and let someone else worry about building a better communications platform!

Quick and easy

NewVoiceMedia powers customer connections that transform businesses globally. The leading vendor’s award-winning cloud customer contact platform revolutionises the way organisations connect with their customers worldwide, enabling them to deliver a personalised and unique customer service experience and drive a more effective sales and marketing team.

For more information visit www.newvoicemedia.com

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