Back in 2002 while running my last company, I was trying to evaluate my sales team’s effectiveness. As part of this exercise, I figured it would be easy to get some stats out of the phone system hanging on our wall to ensure that the sales calls were being made. What I found was that it was pretty much impossible to get stats out of the system in any usable way – for all intents and purposes the phone system was an island and rescue was 10 years away.
A couple of years ago we introduced call statistics, our first foray into bringing the phone system into the 20th century. We didn’t want to just dump out meaningless statistics that nobody could understand, so we took the time to ensure that the stats were in an Excel format that could be sliced and diced as necessary. At the same time, our first integration with industry leader Salesforce was coming together. That product has really matured and allowed sales teams to receive inbound caller information and to track outbound calling detail. A boon for sales teams using Versature’s Hosted PBX.
Today, I’m pleased to announce that we are releasing a number of new integrations that will positively impact our customers by allowing them to receive stats and caller information in a number of different applications that they already know and use every day.
Social Caller ID
Built into the Chrome browser, this application can be installed from the Chrome App Store and allows you to receive real-time information on who is calling you. This isn’t your grandfather’s phone system so we’re not just providing name and phone number. We do a social look-up on the phone number and provide rich context (including recent tweets and Facebook posts) so that you can have substantive conversations with your customers and prospects.
Chrome Click to Dial
This is related to Social Caller ID, above, because it’s the same install but here you get click to dial functionality across the entire web. This tool works on websites, within your Gmail or Outlook Web application, as well as any web-based CRM or ERP tool you are currently using. Any telephone number the plug-in finds becomes instantly clickable.
Slack Integration
Slack is slowly replacing the need for email within a lot of advanced teams. We use Slack internally and felt it would be amazing to combine our Social Caller ID data into Slack, so that’s what we’ve done. You can subscribe to your own extension (or the sales or support queue, depending on your business and job function) and see rich social data on all incoming calls.
Klipfolio
Now that you know how valuable call data can be, imagine mashing it up with other operational data like support tickets, marketing Campaign ROI, and CRM data. We’ve created pre-aut ... d “clips” using Versature call data to be used in your Klipfolio dashboards. We even use them here in the office to keep everyone up to speed on our call stats.
Open API
Finally, the piece that holds everything I’ve mentioned together and enables developers to customize integrations into other operational systems or homegrown applications. The Versature API opens up our platform to a world of integration opportunities where the possibilities are limited only by our customer’s imaginations.
I’m very excited about the integrations of Versature Business VoIP offers. We’re glad that the castaway on a deserted island (your telephony data) is slowly being rescued and brought back to the mainland. It’s hard to believe it survived that way for so long.