Fastcall, a renowned developer of CTI solutions that are exclusively dedicated to Salesforce, recently announced the release of its Intercall solution. Intercall helps teams to communicate and interact internally from within Salesforce. The app allows phone and video communication. Using Intercall, an employee can call coworkers via their Salesforce user profile instead of using a particular phone number, making it unnecessary to know the current location of the coworker or to perform repeat calls due to unavailability.
It is a first-of-its-kind Salesforce app and offers video and screen sharing within an integrated Salesforce phone application by leveraging Salesforce and Twilio.
Intercall is the latest addition to Fastcall’s suite of applications and is designed to enhance work-from-home productivity for Salesforce users.
Phone applications found in the Salesforce AppExchange today, including Fastcall’s namesake application, enable companies to increase productivity by empowering sales and service team members to communicate quickly and effectively with clients and prospects via phone. Intercall allows companies to streamline their internal telephone and video conversations whether within or between departments, therefore complementing Fastcall’s capabilities.
Main benefits of Intercall include:
Screen sharing and video conferencing in virtual meetings while working within Salesforce instead of an external application. Intercall also creates Salesforce activities for every Intercall call.
Replacement of phone directories that are more often than not outdated while enabling a centralized phone directory with data that is already in Salesforce.
Calling coworkers via multiple endpoints at the same time with ringing the softphone, mobile phone, and desk phone all at the same time, Intercall prevents wasting time by dialing multiple numbers until you connect to a teammate and the hassle of leaving, listening to, and deleting numerous voicemails.
Building transparency and accountability via automated call logging within Salesforce. Just like an external dialer automatically records external communications with customers in Salesforce, Intercall enables greater accountability, tracking, and transparency in the work-at-home environment and empowers managers to get a comprehensive view of team interactions and collaboration.
Call recording for future reference, training or to share directly with team members for easy information sharing.
Easy and efficient one-click information distribution of voicemail messages to team members or the whole company via voicemail drop.
Richard Rosen, CEO of Fastcall says “Success doesn’t depend solely on interactions with clients. A business is only as strong as how its teammates interact with each other. Intercall makes it easier for colleagues to collaborate and communicate. Imagine a work environment where you could reach a teammate on the very first try, without having to dial their office and mobile phone, with the click of one button. I am excited about the efficiencies Intercall creates and what we have planned. Intercall transparently extends the range of products that are offered by Fastcall by offering an intra team facility in addition to the outbound and inbound services that are already available”.
The Bigger Picture
With growing office campuses and team members working more and more from home it becomes increasingly important to provide employees with an easy and efficient way to collaborate with each other and to communicate and share information with their customers.
Businesses are looking for solutions that fix their problem fast. This can be seen by the revenues of Zoom nearly quadrupling or the usage of Microsoft Teams skyrocketing from 13 million daily active users in July 2019 to 75 million daily active users in April 2020. At the same time Slack grew its paying customers between February and July 2020 by more than 20 percent, too.
Because of this, vendors of CRM solutions have increasingly been strengthening their built-in collaboration suites or forming partnerships with these companies or specialists like Fastcall, which usually is the faster way of achieving this objective.
My Analysis and PoV
The Corona crisis has increased the demand for online meeting solutions, which has caused a growth spurt for companies like Zoom, Webex and co, but also for collaboration services like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or telephony solutions like simplii that integrate with various applications.
With the exception of Microsoft Teams, none of these solutions are services that are natively embedded into business applications, but are either standalone or integrated via APIs. At minimum, this causes some additional integration labor and often leads to double maintenance of valuable information, with the corresponding risk of information loss or ambiguity and a reduction of user satisfaction. In addition, the user interface of the collaboration solution normally differs, which further deteriorates the user experience as the communication software does not follow the UI style guidelines of the surrounding software.
Then there are a few solutions that are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. They specialize in optimally supporting this single platform and are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. One example for these is service providers is Fastcall.
Most businesses are already sold on one CRM solution or another, or have even committed to a platform. Especially for these businesses, solutions that integrate directly with them are the first consideration.
In the case of a business committed to using Salesforce, it should have a deep and hard look at what is available via AppExchange.
Intercall certainly fits the bill here; although it is still a young product and might miss some sought-after features, like virtual backgrounds, or scrapbooks etc., the combination of features is already giving considerable value to corporate users.
Comments
Post a Comment