10 reasons to implement Asterisk integration for your SugarCRM

Combination of the two can bring endless benefits to your business, and let us show you how.

Basing on our 7 years of experience in CRM implementation, we have prepared a list of 10 benefits or reasons that may help you make decision towards adopting such integration for your business, or at least seriously consider SugarCRM Asterisk integration for your business  or separate departments in the future.

CRM is a great tool for a business, however, let’s admit – we all hate manual data entry. And this is one of the biggest issues that prevent CRM implementations from being successful. At the same time, the more data is in the CRM – the better reporting and analysis it can provide you with.

With Asterisk integration, your sales team finally will not have to put in the calls data manually, the plugin will automatically create records for all the incoming and outgoing calls in the system.

You can also set workflows on existing processes. For example: send follow up email automatically after a phone call, or create reminders for your team to call back if there was no contact during certain time period after the call was made.

With SugarCRM Asterisk integration your sales team will be able to do more and faster with no additional effort. Now they can create a lead, contact or account right from the pop-up if your customer is calling for the first time, and of course this initial call will be saved to the record created.

Additionally, all the basic functionality included with any integration add-on – pop-up window, click to dial, calls recording, calls distribution, etc – are designed to make your team more productive and efficient, and your business – more profitable.

One of the issues you may experience is not knowing who makes more calls and what was the total time an employee spends on the phone – daily, weekly or monthly.

However, with Sugar Asterisk integration you will have all your data displayed in the reports, and you will also be able to set up dashboards on your Sugar home page. These can be either individual or team dashboards for the team to overview how productive they are, or for management purposes.

Now it is easy to see precisely how many calls each employee has made over a time period and the time spent on phone with the customers.

When we think about corporate telephony, we all get the same picture in our heads: tons of expensive equipment and endless bills from your telephony provider.

With Asterisk installed at your server, all these expenses will be reduced to the smallest amount possible. Since you will be using VOIP CRM Integration, all you need is a SIP line from a VOIP provider (possibly more than one, as this depends on your business requirements and team size), phone numbers and a server to install Asterisk.

Having a full history of interaction with a customer is onе of the key success factors, and the more people you have on the team – the more this matters. We all have experienced the trouble when a teammate simply forgot to enter the data in the system.

With Asterisk integration all the calls are logged automatically and attached to the corresponding record – be it lead, contact or account. And the notes to the calls will be right where they are supposed to – in the corresponding calls module, and not in someone’s notebook.

Now there will be no issue finding out when a client was contacted previously and what they said. All you need to do is open their record in your SugarCRM, find the history and listen to the corresponding call recording.

Are you happy when your Internet provider is asking your name or account ID every time you call in? Of course not. And sure you would prefer to hear “Hello, John!” rather than “What’s your name please? Can you spell your last name?”

The same goes with your customers.

Every time there’s an incoming call, your employee will see a pop-up window with information on who’s calling right in their CRM window open. The pop-up will have the details on the person who is calling, starting with their full name (and link to instantly open a corresponding contact) and the account name as well, ending with latest interactions – cases, calls, emails, notes.

Have you encountered a situation when a question was escalated to a manager who could not see who was wrong – either your employee or the customer – simply because there was no call record?

Calls quality control is not going to be an issue once you install Asterisk integration for your Sugar. All the calls are recorded by Asterisk and stored on your server, and you can access them anytime and listen to the call records right from your SugarCRM.

Also now you can make sure that your team is following the calls scripts.

With such automation, your employees will spend less time and effort on each call, thus they will be able to make and accept more calls, which makes better revenue for the business.

Additionally, with predictive dialer functionality, you can drastically increase productivity by creating call queues, where a new phone number will be dialled automatically as soon as the current conversation is finished.

Asterisk SugarCRM integration, and specifically predictive dialer, will be a perfect match for any business making make outgoing calls, and that are willing to automate the calls process. We have successful experience of implementing Sugar and Asterisk for insurance companies, retail business, online stores and many others.

Now your sales team will not need to dial a phone number every time they need to make a call. All they need to do is just click a dial button inside your Sugar (next to a contact or a lead), and the call will be started automatically by the system.

This is tremendous time saving, and you will see it from the very first weeks of using telephony solution.

Since you will have all the calls recorded, there will be no issue with educating new employees. You will have a pool of real calls, and you will simply need to choose the best ones, and use these as examples for real case education.

Thus you will share the best practices and improve quality of the calls your team is making with no additional cost and effort.

Any integration plugin that automates work will bring your company a lot of benefits and will take your business to a new level.

Asterisk and SugarCRM integration is one of the cornerstone integrations which are essential to almost every business, and can help automate work, make your employees more productive and customers happier.