Zoho’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an award-winning omnichannel platform that helps businesses convert more leads, engage effectively with customers, and much more.

Zoho CRM brings together all of a business’s customer service, communications, and information in one place. To easily access and refer to customer data on the go, you can integrate your hosted phone system with Zoho CRM seamlessly.

With the Zoho CRM integration, you can enjoy your feature-rich phone system with a wealth of data, analytics, and more on one user-friendly screen.

This article will explore how Zoho CRM integration can benefit your business and elevate your customer service to the next level. 

Read on to find out the top features of a Zoho CRM you can integrate with your hosted phone system. 

Enhanced mobility for your employees

These systems are highly mobile, making it easier for your employees to access the CRM on the go. When integrated with your hosted phone system, employees can pull up customer data anywhere they have an Internet connection.

In recent times, it has become essential for employees to be able to work remotely or on the move. Without the right technology, this can cause major operational issues. However, with the Zoho CRM integration, your staff has everything they need to connect with customers wherever they are.

Agents can also add new contacts to your CRM system, along with detailed notes, while they are out in the field. Thus, you will always be armed with relevant information requisite for successful lead conversion.  

Increases productivity

Features of Zoho CRM allow your agents to increase their productivity in everyday operations. 

You can make sure every conversation with customers is a productive one with Zoho business cards. With each inbound call, Zoho generates a business card with client information like the lead owner, lead status and displays it on the screen. 

The information provided on this business card acts as a cheat sheet and gives your agents a chance to quickly brush up on the customer’s history and see the lead status, so they can efficiently steer the conversation.

Zoho CRM also comes with a ‘Click to Call’ function allowing employees to place a call to customers directly from the CRM system. Not only does this make it more convenient for employees, but it also saves them time, increasing their productivity.

With this function, your staff has access to customer data while placing the call on the CRM platform. Armed with this information, they are more likely to have a productive and engaging conversation with the customer. 

Omnichannel engagement

Integrated with a hosted phone system, Zoho CRM provides businesses with a centralised communication platform. You can combine social media, live chat, voice calls, text messages, etc. and yet, enjoy consistent communication. 

You can also keep track of all inbound and outbound communications and record them directly into your CRM system. This eliminates the mundane task of recording calls manually into your CRM. 

Despite their location, employees can quickly see the latest updates and have contextual conversations. This way, they can also ensure that all interactions with a customer are consistent, no matter the channel they use to get in touch.

Remember, audiences interact with business over different touchpoints. So, having a system that records all interactions in one place allows you to stay on top of your game and develop a strong strategy. 

Insights into performance 

Zoho’s CRM integration provides detailed insights into the performance of your agents and even your strategies and campaigns. These insights can tell you how calls are dealt with, the number of calls received and much more.

Hosted phone systems on their own provide a range of in-depth insights. These include statistics about how long each employee has spent on a call, call costs, waiting times, and more. Combining these with the analytics of a Zoho CRM, you’re able to leverage even deeper insights. 

With this data, you can see exactly what works and what doesn’t. Thus, you’re able to make informed decisions for your business, investing your money and time more effectively.

Not just that, Zoho CRM systems make it easy to create detailed reports on calls. You can also create customised reports and pull the data you need in a few clicks, ready to present at your next board meeting.

Sales IQ

Another way you can enhance your communications is with Zoho’s Sales IQ. The engagement platform identifies your website visitors, interacts with them at different stages of the sales process via automated tools and enables you to interact with them via messages, voice calls, emails, and more. 

Thus, your support team can communicate with customers in real time, proactively reaching out to them using your website. 

These customers are warm leads and once you’ve connected with them, you can see exactly what they’ve been looking for and provide personalised service. This way, they get a taste of your service quality even before a purchase has been made.

All of this can be managed directly from your phone system, ultimately negating the need to re-record customer conversations in your CRM. All you have to do is provide quality service, the rest is taken care of by Zoho CRM’s integration.

Internal communications

Internal communications are a key element of good customer service, and in turn, customer satisfaction. If internal communication lines are weak, it affects the team’s ability to create a strong external communications strategy. 

This is where Zoho CRM comes into the picture—it helps foster team collaboration. 

Employees can work together by sharing updates through feeds, instant messaging, or on conference calls using their hosted phone system.

What’s more—remote staff can even connect to your phone system and work with office-based employees to contribute to the processes and operations. 

Whatever your collaboration needs may be, integrating Zoho CRM with your hosted phone system is the perfect place to start.

Integrate Zoho CRM with your hosted phone system

The simple process of connecting Zoho CRM to your hosted phone system opens up a range of possibilities to better your business communications. 

If you’d like to save on administration time, provide better service to customers and enjoy feature-rich telephony, this integration is the way to go. However, you must make sure that your hosted phone provider is able to support this integration. 

To find out more about Zoho CRM integration, call us today on 1888-859-0450 or drop an email at [email protected] to discuss your options with our experts.

Let’s say, you are in a long meeting and don’t want to be disturbed. But you’re also expecting an important call from a client that you just can’t afford to miss. What do you do?

Simple—you redirect the incoming call to an alternate number that belongs to a colleague or a supervisor and let them handle it while you get done with your ongoing meeting.

The call forwarding feature lets you stay connected at all times, no matter your circumstances, location or time zone.

Thus, whether your company is an enterprise or a start-up waiting to spread its wings, the call forwarding feature can improve the customer experience your business delivers by leaps and bounds.

Why is call forwarding a must-have feature?

According to Microsoft, about 36% of customers agree that the most frustrating aspect of a bad customer service interaction is their inability to resolve issues quickly.

Call forwarding ensures your customers get quick and reliable customer service without any delays. It can be enabled in both traditional and cloud-powered phone systems and help you stay connected with your customers round the clock.

Furthermore, with constant advancements in technology, you can also enable call forwarding on a single smartphone and avail its benefits anywhere, anytime.

Call forwarding also comes with additional benefits like call recording and call routing, which help you track and analyze data and route calls accordingly.

It’s not surprising then that different industries have embraced call forwarding as a standard feature.

So, how does call forwarding work?

In the beginning, call forwarding only meant redirecting incoming calls to another number. But ever-evolving technology now offers advanced settings that have redesigned the entire support experience.

When a customer tries to reach your business phone service provider, you receive an incoming call. This call then gets transferred to the destination number with the help of the call forwarding feature. Consequently, you can answer the call from anywhere, anytime, without making your customer wait.

The added perk?

You can set up call forwarding within minutes and get started instantly!

This feature comes with several options that allow you to customize how, when and to whom the calls are forwarded.

The call forwarding feature can be used in different ways and each brings its own benefits:

1. Call forwarding: You can forward all your incoming calls when you are away from your device or on an official break from work.

2. Call forwarding when busy: This call forwarding feature is useful when you’re expecting an important call. It forwards all incoming calls when you are speaking to someone else on the line.

3. Forwarding unanswered calls: You can enable this setting when you are in a meeting or in an arrangement where you may not be able to answer your phone.

4. Forwarding calls when you are unreachable: You can redirect calls when you’re in a low reception zone, have no phone signals or even if your phone’s battery is dead. This setting prevents you from missing any important calls.

How can call forwarding benefit your business?

Needless to say, call forwarding can enhance the customer experiences you offer.

Here are some additional advantages of call forwarding:

1. Improved customer service

The experience every caller has with your company’s customer service team has a huge impact on their overall journey.

According to Microsoft’s 2018’s State of Global Customer Service Report, 61% of customers say they’d stop doing business with a company after a poor customer service experience.

Though communication can be facilitated over a range of channels such as emails and chatbots, having an organised and effective support system on call is integral for every business.

When a call is being forwarded, some essential things to keep in mind are:

• Make sure the caller is connected to a relevant agent who can answer their queries
• In case of an international customer base, employ agents who are well versed with different languages and can offer support accordingly

2. No missed calls 

Unlike earlier days when landlines were the only means of receiving and making calls, the advent of smartphones and fast-paced global Internet connections has transformed the current work scenario.

From missing important calls to receiving every call on your preferred device and location, the technology has come a long way. In fact, you can even forward business calls from office phones to home phones, providing employees flexibility and comfort levels like never before.

3. Cost-effectiveness

Enabling the call forwarding feature eliminates the need to invest in extra hardware. You can set up multiple phone lines at minimal expenditure using cloud technology and begin to use the feature soon after.

Another way call forwarding encourages cost-effectiveness in a business is by reducing the need for a special team that redirects calls based on callers’ needs.

All of this can be turned into an automated process that does not demand human intervention.

4. Dynamic work-life balance

If your employees are expecting a call post working hours, they can use the call forwarding feature to forward the call to a phone that is accessible to them off-premise

Similarly, call forwarding can be restricted to function only until a few hours after work so as to make sure employees don’t receive too many calls at odd times after they have left the workplace.

However, the call can be rerouted to the IVR system (self-service menu) so that your customers are not left with unsolved queries.

Advanced call forwarding features also include on-hold music, voicemail facilities and the ability to forward calls to multiple phone numbers at the same time.

5. Increased professionalism for the company

Customers highly appreciate companies that go the extra mile to cater to their needs and make them feel valued.

You can use call forwarding to extend support to your customers whenever they need it.

The added bonus?

You can look professional and enhance your credibility while doing so!

Call forwarding allows your customers to reach out to you via a business number on their end, even if you answer the call on your personal phone.

This not only makes you look professional but also adds convenience to your customers as they need not search for different numbers to contact you at any given point in time.

Moreover, your agents no longer need to give out their phone numbers to keep track of customer support services when away from the office.

Therefore, call forwarding helps you maintain professionalism during all your interactions even if they happen post working hours.

How to choose the right call forwarding service?

Each call forwarding service varies from another. While some may allow you to forward calls to unlimited phone numbers, others may come with an upper limit of the same.

Some other features to consider when choosing a call forwarding service include:

• The price of the service
• The ability to export calls
• Availability of advanced features such as call recording and call routing
• The system’s ability to maintain call history, etc.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, call forwarding ensures greater flexibility of business operations and improved communication for all organizations. It eliminates the need to work directly from the office and enables you to cater to your customer’s needs from anywhere.

With a turbulent increase in hybrid working trends, more and more companies are opting for call forwarding as it allows their employees to stay productive from anywhere around the globe.

No matter how large the scale of a business is, always being present to attend to your customer’s problems and demands is a must.

Try Acefone’s cloud telephony solutions today. Contact now.

Although there are many contenders for the top position among modern call centre solutions, skill-based call routing has to be one of the main ones. With skill-based call routing, the future of call routing is here.

Skill-based routing is a cloud telephony feature that analyses customer data when a call comes in and automatically routes the caller to the agent equipped with the best skills to address the issue.

The feature prevents the unnecessary transferring of calls between agents and improves customer satisfaction rates.

Imagine for a moment a typical day at the call centre of a bank or financial services company.

A customer needs to speak with the loan department and is only comfortable conversing in Hindi. However, an English-speaking call agent from the credit card department picks up the call.

It’ll take a while for both to understand each other and even longer for the call to be routed to the appropriate agent. The customer finally gets a resolution but only after several transfers and going round in circles.

This is definitely not the kind of customer service you want to be known for.

With skill-based routing, the scenario is quite different. After the customer calls, the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system determines the caller’s requirements based on voice or keypad inputs. Then it directs the call to the most suitable agent.

 Skill-based routing versus more conventional routing methods

Skill-based routing is all about intelligent call redirection. It determines the skills a customer requires and matches them to an agent who possesses the said skills. Of course, agents can have multiple skills and be cross-trained in many areas. This information can be fed into the customer relations management (CRM) and IVR systems for effective routing.

While call centre analytics can help you predict the volume of calls to a certain extent, there will be times—say during the festive season—when the call centre is overwhelmed, and callers have to wait a bit before they are attended to.

In such a situation, the automated call distribution (ACD) system will route calls so that they are answered at the earliest. The priority of call centres is always to answer calls as fast as possible.

However, this may not always be the best strategy.

 Queue-based routing

The most basic call routing system is queue-based routing. In this system, the caller will hear some version of this message: “All our executives are currently busy. Your call will be answered shortly. Thank you for your patience.”

Basically, your call is queued up behind customers who dialled the call centre before you. In queue-based routing, customer calls are queued up one after another. This could be based on language preferences or the service requested, and so on. But, essentially, calls get assigned only to one queue.

Skill-based routing, on the other hand, takes a more intuitive approach. It makes an assessment of the skills required to address a particular call and sends the call to an agent who has the right skill sets and is free to take the call. In skill-based routing, various parameters can be set up to route the customer to the best possible agent.

 ACD routing

An ACD system uses the power of automation to enable quick service support to the caller, without taking the agent’s skills into account. In the case of an ACD, there is always a possibility that the agent will not be able to resolve the query, and the call will have to be transferred to a more suitable agent leading to more waiting time.

This is not what you as a business want. In fact, you should be looking to improve the first call resolution (FCR) rate.

An ACD system, first introduced way back in 1973, works well when large numbers of calls have to be handled and distributed in a call centre. ACD has its typical call distribution rules like caller ID, call traffic, etc.

The technology is really at the heart of a call centre’s operations. It works in tandem with a cloud telephony system and IVR to route calls appropriately.

In skill-based routing, which takes the customer’s requirements and the skills of available agents into account, there might be a bit of waiting, but the issue is likely to be resolved once the call goes live.

Skill-based routing, in essence, is a more evolved version of ACD.

The pros and cons of different call routing systems are well worth considering when shopping around for call routing systems for your call centre.

With skill-based routing, the customer doesn’t have to figure out who the best agent or department to talk to would be. The IVR system does that for the customer.

 How skill-based routing benefits your call centre

The improvement in communication technology has only enhanced customer expectations. Over time, services and offerings have also matured and become more complex. This calls for more specialised call centre staff to handle customer issues and requests.

The size of call centres needs to go up as well, which is why cloud telephony is such a great solution, where team sizes can be scaled up or down as required at highly competitive rates.

In skill-based routing, the system takes several factors into account to decide who is best placed to service an incoming call. These include the caller’s identity and profile, their IVR inputs, and so on.

A good skill-based routing system will be able to route the call to the best agent possible. If you offer omnichannel support, this may not necessarily be restricted to call representatives. In fact, you’ll be tapping into a larger talent pool. This avoids multiple transfers and enhances the customer experience.

The measurable benefits of skill-based routing

At this point, you may be wondering: does skill-based routing really make such a big difference?

Here are a few ways in which it is hugely beneficial:

1. Skill-based routing improves the first-call resolution rate, reduces the first response time and average handling time (AHT), and enhances agent productivity. It also frees up executive-level managers to focus on more critical tasks.
2. With skill-based routing, call centre agents can more effectively support customers since they will only receive calls they are skilled in resolving. This is great for agent morale. They can also deepen their skills in the process.
3. Since skill-based routing is customisable, it can be updated as requirements change to help streamline your workflows.
4. Skill-based routing does not benefit the call centre alone. The customer gets a better experience too, increasing customer retention and enhancing loyalty.

 The growing importance of omnichannel support

Nowadays, customers communicate with a company in a variety of ways. Gone are the days when the only way they would reach out was by picking up the phone and dialling a number.

They still do that, of course, but they also email, chat and connect through social media channels (where they can be very vocal and your damage control skills have to be on full and effective display).

With omnichannel routing, you can communicate with your customers constantly and consistently. You’ll be able to respond to their issues in a quicker and best possible manner. Customer needs can be met in an agile fashion, and interactions can be warmer and more personalised.

An excellent cloud-based system will have omnichannel capabilities, letting you address your customers’ needs on any device or channel in a proactive manner.

 Some call centre solutions to keep in mind when choosing an IVR

Choosing the right kind of IVR system for skill-based routing is of the utmost importance.

It must have functionalities like queue notifications, queue opt-out option, CRM integration, automatic call-backs, option for SMS updates, IVR command optimisation which offers the most popular options to new callers, and context preservation.

A few things which would be nice to have are personalised messaging based on past interactions, voice activation, a variety of hold messages to prevent boredom, and reporting tools to get a quick sense of the customer experience, including the IVR experience.

 Empowering agents with skill-based routing

Thanks to skill-based routing, support representatives are now experts in their niches, and not just agents who handle customer queries mechanically. In this redefined role, they can take pride in their work and in the enhanced sense of responsibility.

Not only is their role more interesting, but they also learn new things on the job and get to sharpen their skills. Skill-based routing, therefore, creates a balanced approach, where the quality of the experience of both customers and agents is in focus.

The division of labour created by skill-based routing is helpful for call centres too. No longer do all the agents have to be trained in a broad-based, minimal skills manner. With skill-based training and specialisation, a better staff is created, enhancing productivity, customer experience and, ultimately, business results.

The future of skill-based routing

As with all modern call centre solutions, skill-based routing is also evolving rapidly in an effort to become future-ready. Newer call-routing techniques like intelligent routing and contextual routing are emerging at the forefront of the innovation as a direct offshoot of skill-based routing.

In contextual routing, any information that the call centre may have at its disposal is used to route the calls in a relevant manner. The caller may have a simple query but a long record of negative feedback, for instance. In such a case, it will route the call to a more experienced agent.

Intelligent routing harnesses the power of AI to route callers and comes with a range of benefits. It provides real-time customer insights to support representatives, improving the quality of follow-up conversations.

If the caller is lax with payments, it could point to financial insolvency. Equipped with this information, a call centre agent can handle the call more sensitively.

The importance of CRM integrations cannot be emphasised enough.

Businesses can personalise customer experience further by integrating skill-based routing with their CRM. This way, not only are customers directed to the most suitable agents but representatives also have immediate access to customer profiles, including a history of previous interactions.

Such data is invaluable for the call centre agent. It enables them to offer better and more personalised services.

A robust CRM coupled with skill-based routing is a win-win situation. Going forward, skill-based routing is definitely going to be the most important way of routing calls.