Senior Writer: Supriya Bajaj
Date: October 9, 2023Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is a technology that enables a computer to interact with telephone systems. This means that a user can actually call directly from their desktop sans a PBX or key system telephone. This cloud telephony integration gives a centralized control system over all the means of communication such as phone, computer, fax, voicemail, mobile, etc allowing communication among these devices through a single interface.
CTI opens doors to a more flexible and scalable communication system for companies, especially those that need to place a large number of calls every day but suffer mainly because of costly communication infrastructures. Owing to this reason, CTI was introduced to provide a smooth platform for communication between the customers and agents without incurring huge calling charges. Moreover, representatives can also track the history of the customer with your business in order to reduce the time of providing solutions to them.
Efficiency in working is just one of the benefits that CTI provides to a business, however, there are plenty more. Let us take a look below at some of them:
Importance of CTI for businesses:
Cost-effective
Adopting CTI for your call center is less costly, more flexible and scales more than the traditional methods system of a key telephone system, which used to be costly to purchase, and required constant maintenance. Moreover, those conventional systems could not be operated from remote locations.
Whereas in the case of CTI, the executive’s only tool is a computer through which he can even work from any remote location, liberating them to work for longer hours, in different time zones without delocalizing. Such flexibility in the working system is only possible with CTI since all it takes to run is installing a program on the computer, thereby making the entire process pocket-friendly.
Quick and Easy Installation
Unlike conventional methods of a telephone system, Computer Telephony Integration is a much flexible system, which is run through the simple installation of the program on the computer. This enables the representatives to operate and answer from remote locations. As easy as is the installation of these integrated programs taking just a few minutes, there are various other benefits associated with it like transferring the calls to other departments and conferencing.
Complete Customer Information Available at Once
CTI systems allow an executive to fetch all the detailed information about the routed client in one place. For this, contact and client base are all imported into the computer of the executive, synced up with client profiles. This unified dashboard displays the complete synced up information on his system when the client rings up. Thus, eliminating the logistics of juggling forth and back with different programs and helping the representative to concentrate on the task-at-hand. In fact, this log keeps a detailed account of every call including the issues raised by the customer in past, representative’s information and their recorded audio of previous calls. In essence, CTI Connectors streamline call operations and enhance customer experiences by providing agents with unified customer information, simplifying customer journeys.
Easily Make and Receive Calls
Computer Telephony Integration allows the representatives to instantly answer or call on the number flashing on the screen with just a single click instead of engaging in the meticulous task of tapping the buttons each time to place a call. Also, as the complete detail gets flashed on the screen, the agents can talk with utmost confidence and respond fittingly to the queries as per the past experiences of other executives.
Enhanced Collaboration with Departments
One of the crucial features of CTI is that the calls are transferable to other departments also. In fact, managers can join the call in case the representative is unable to solve the issue. Moreover, with other features including call forwarding, call recording, status reports, and real-time analytics, a better understanding can be established among the departments as they can easily find out to which department it was earlier transferred and solutions provided by the representative for the same.
Increased Productivity
Through this integration, Managers can evaluate the productivity of the agents using this real-time data. For instance, the number of calls answered, barred, put on-hold, or were on waiting, they can analyze where to channelize the calls in order to improve their response rate. They can also join the call, track or listen to the call recordings between agents and customers with which they can understand his productivity and satisfaction level of the client.
Data Monitoring
By now you must have already understood how beneficial Computer Telephony Integration is for customers and representatives. But do you know that this integration is of utmost importance for the supervisor as it provides call monitoring, call recording, and real-time analytics, which make their jobs easier?
In fact, Managers can also:
a) Analyze the agent’s performance during an ongoing call.
b) Monitor the team’s performance over a variable span of time.
c) Survey customer satisfaction through user habits.
d) Find the areas that need improvement by tracking the number of dropped or missed calls, waiting time, etc.
e) Offer real-time assistance in case the representatives are struggling.
f) Assign the tasks as per the capability of the executive.
Features that enhance caller experience
Due to a large number of features offered by Cloud phone systems that are otherwise difficult to implement using the traditional system, this system has caught momentum and ensures increased productivity. But its other aspect is that it boosts caller experience in a lot of ways such as:
a) With On hold music, the customers don’t have to listen to monotonous beeps, instead, they can enjoy the peppy numbers or listen to the company’s messages, depending on the business. This reduces the chances of call-drops and makes call waiting bearable.
b) Using the IVR system, you can give access to your customers to choose the relevant department they want to reach for their specific queries.
c) Features like click to call save time in dialing the number every time as you can place the call by simply clicking on the screen.
d)As the complete information is displayed in front of the executive’s screen, they can greet the customer with their name, giving a personalized touch to their conversation.
e)Fetching the details of the customers has another benefit that it saves the caller’s time in answering and explaining about the previous conversations with other representatives.
All these points clearly justify the fact that Computer Telephony Integration is the need of the hour for every business irrespective of its size and industry. It is beneficial for not just the business but also its agents, customers, and Managers by establishing a communication system that strengthens their relationship with each other.
Now, that you have understood the importance of CTI, before summing up, let us also get you acquainted with the types of Computer Telephony Integrations so that you are left with just one thing to do, that is, decide the most suitable integration services as per your business.
Pipedrive Integration
Using CallHippo’s extension for Pipedrive integration, you can easily make and receive calls, record the call and listen to each conversation and access the call logs from Pipedrive CRM. Other features of Pipedrive Integrations include tracking about the deals, planning the activities, easily managing the deals and working smarter through organized sales. This managed integration prevents the businesses from engaging in any cumbersome tasks that hamper or mislead the sales in any case, thus, boosting the performance and building the brand’s credibility.
Zoho Integration
Integrating with Zoho CRM improves your competence and productivity with easy collaboration while working with sales leads, prospects, and customers. CallHippo and Zoho integration benefits the overall communication system with clients and brings efficiency in the work of sales executives, give a personalized user interface to the customers, and allows automatic synchronization between Zoho and CallHippo.
Freshdesk Integration
One of the easiest support systems that let you make and receive calls instantly from Freshdesk Panel along with the number of other features that are provided to boost the performance of your sales executives.
This integration of CallHippo and Freshdesk helps you to:
a) View the ticket reports on the dashboard.
b) Listen to the call recording and analyze them. It is one of the ways to also keep a tab on the performance of the agent.
c) This Freshdesk integration enables you to add comments or status notes with each call in order to avoid later confusion regarding the status of the generated ticket.
Zendesk Integration
When you collectively see the features of Zendesk integration, you realize that it liberates you from the meticulous task of handling the details of each call. It is particularly beneficial for businesses that handle a large number of calls and is required to maintain complete data of their customers for future use. In this integration, you can easily make and receive calls from your desktop by simply dialing the number in the opened ticket from Zendesk. All the calls also get recorded, which can be listened to any time from Zendesk itself.
Intercom Integration
Upon integrating your system with Intercom support services, you can readily make use of features such as live chat for sales, send targeted messages to onboard users and most importantly, solve customer problems faster by knowing about who you’re talking to and see their location, activity and so much more. You can even get real-time updates to see what’s going on at the current moment, or loop in your teammates using notes and mentions to get the solution to a difficult question put up by the client or even see the latest conversations with the users.
Conclusion:
Computer Telephony Integration is one of the most efficient technologies to use these days. As a tech-savvy business, you must integrate your calling services with cloud telephony system to move to a system where you incur minimal calling costs and provide a free-flow of communication between the agent and customers while also helping the supervisor to monitor the productivity of the business. This real-time data based integration must become a part of every business today for it to fetch the prospective clients’ towards you, thus expanding your business scope!
Supriya is a highly skilled content writer with over 8 years of experience in the SaaS domain. She believes in curating engaging, informative, and SEO-friendly content to simplify highly technical concepts. With an expansive portfolio of long-format blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, and case studies, Supriya is dedicated to staying in touch with emerging SaaS trends to produce relevant and reliable content.
