Rebecca Gibson |
When the Covid-19 pandemic gathered pace around the world in early 2020, companies in multiple industry sectors rapidly transformed their business models to allow their employees to work remotely. To recreate the office experience and enable employees to continue to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues, many organisations implemented Microsoft Teams. However, while Teams is a vital tool for every remote worker, it does have its limitations, particularly for those who are required to regularly interact with customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to complete their daily tasks.
“We’ve spoken with numerous customers and they’ve all told us their biggest pain point is that they have to frequently switch between Teams and their CRM system throughout the day, which is time-consuming, inefficient and increases the risk of incorrect data entry,” says Paul Clark, chief technology officer at communications solutions provider CloudCall.
“For businesses to operate successfully, employees must be able to chat freely with their colleagues – often, the little conversations we have as we pass by our colleagues’ desks are the ones where we come up with our best ideas and or solve critical problems,” he explains. “In organisations where employees are trying to develop meaningful relationships with existing customers and prospective clients, these conversations are actually the ‘magic oil’ that keeps the office engine running smoothly and seamlessly. However, if they have to keep leaving the Teams environment to go and find information in the CRM, these conversations become difficult and disjointed, which will discourage employees from using the systems.”
After extensive research and development, CloudCall’s team devised the ideal solution: CloudCall for Teams.
“We’ve integrated our powerful communications tools into Teams so that users no longer have to switch between the communication platform and the CRM system,” says Clark. “Instead, they simply start the CloudCall app from within Teams and then can easily search the CRM for information about existing or prospective customers. In addition, they can share it with colleagues and initiate a meeting to discuss it further, or they can immediately start a conversation with a customer or prospect via phone, video or SMS chat. Once the conversation is finished, everything including the call recording, SMS or video chat is automatically synchronised with the CRM.”
CloudCall for Teams has been developed as a standard software-as-a-service solution with an initial set of functionalities that will be beneficial to a broad range of companies and industry sectors. However, says Clark, the company will continue to refine the product and already has a long, customer-led roadmap of other potential features that could be added in future.
“Our solution already alleviates the issues our customers highlighted and empowers them to work more efficiently and productively, but we’ve put together a team of highly skilled experts who are dedicated to continually enhancing its capabilities,” he explains. “We’re currently trialling the beta version with 13 of our customers and we will use their feedback to help us determine which new functionalities to add before making it widely available. Ultimately, our aim is to create a mechanism whereby our customers can easily configure the standard solution to fit their individual business.”
Clark believes solutions like CloudCall for Teams will become increasingly important as companies adapt to the new way of working. “I don’t think we’ll ever go back to working how we were before the pandemic,” he says. “But companies can use our solution to seamlessly recreate the office experience and empower their employees to communicate intuitively with their colleagues, while accessing all of the information they need to work efficiently and provide an exceptional service to their clients.”
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2020 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.