In today’s world, where technologies like WebRTC and high speed internet have become mainstream and every business had to go remote overnight, cloud VoIP became an essential technology for business continuity worldwide. 

If your company runs on Salesforce, you already understood the benefits of the cloud vs on premise technology. Pairing a cloud based dialer with your CRM can not only unlock great productivity gains and enable your team to deliver an outstanding customer experience, but it can also extend the benefits of the cloud to your entire business communications stack. 

When shopping for a Salesforce Dialer & CTI, we suggest you check on these four key criteria to select the right solution for your business.

1. Outbound capabilities:

A dialer is a piece of software that helps automate the outbound dialing process, eliminating the need to sort through a list of contacts and manually dial out to them. Most dialers on the Salesforce AppExchange provide some sort of preview or power dialing capabilities, paired with features like local presence, click to call, screen pop and voicemail drop.

Feature	Lightning Dialer	PhoneIQ
Power Dialer
Preview Dialer
List Imports
Voicemail Drop
Local Presence
Click to Dial
Screen Pop
Caller ID Selection
Unlimited Calling
International Calling

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2. Inbound capabilities:

Giving your prospects and customers a way to call you back is key, even if you are conducting outbound campaigns. When selecting a Salesforce dialer, you should check that it offers robust inbound capabilities and not just a Direct Inward Dial number (DID) or call forwarding. Ideally you’d want an IVR system integrated with Salesforce to automate call routing, ACD Queueing or Ring Groups to distribute inbound call traffic among multiple agents and voicemail in case no agent is available to take the call.

Feature	Lightning Dialer	PhoneIQ
Direct Inward Dialing
Phone Numbers in 50+ countries
IVR
Salesforce Call Routing
ACD Queuing
Ring Groups
Voicemail

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3. Advanced Telephony Features: 

Since most dialers & CTI’s on the AppExchange do not offer fully featured telephony backends, they lack traditional PBX features your agents and managers might expect when using VoIP, like: Hold, Call Transfer and Automatic Call Recording. When sourcing for a Salesforce dialer & CTI, we suggest you shortlist vendors by selecting those that provide a full stack telephony solution that can better scale with your business.

Feature	Lightning Dialer	PhoneIQ
Automatic Call Recording
Supervisor Dashboard
Call Coaching
Hold
Cold Transfer
Attended Transfer
Parallel Calls
Extension Dialing
PBX Integration
Bring your own carrier

4. Mobility:

The COVID-19 pandemic has proved the importance of attributes like agility, flexibility and business continuity over robustness in every technology stack. Every business tool that doesn’t check these boxes will become obsolete over the next 12 months. When choosing a dialer & VoIP solution to pair with Salesforce Lightning, you should choose a vendor that can enable your team to work from anywhere: at the office or on the go; from their laptop or smartphone and even with Salesforce open through the browser or using an always on desktop app.

The best vendors will enable your users to make and take calls from their device of choice, using find me & follow me features to ensure call are always connected and automatically logging all activity in Salesforce.

Feature	Lightning Dialer	PhoneIQ
Web (browser)
Desktop App
Mobile App
Desk Phone

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