7 Essential Salesforce CTI Deployment Best Practices for Remote Teams
5 min
With the boom of remote work and increasing customer demands, in 2021, as never before, the integration between your communications infrastructure and Salesforce needs to be managed appropriately.
Here you’ll find 7 key tips to help you propel customer experience and optimize your call center’s performance while working from home.
1. Choose a pure cloud telephony platform:
As cloud telephony requires no hardware infrastructure, it provides a swift setup with seamless scalability. When choosing your vendor, ensure they provide a multi-tenant telephony platform. This enables vendors to provide fast-paced updating and upgrading, keeping your call center platform future-proofed. Also, ensure that they have a global VoIP network that supports low latency architecture, ensuring call quality is great across the world. This is especially important for globally distributed teams.
Cloud platforms also deliver great scalability, allowing you to purchase the number of licenses you need as you grow. This means that within minutes, anyone in your team with a laptop and an internet connection will be able to access a Salesforce CTI solution.
2. Outbound & Inbound Capabilities:
A Salesforce CTI solution can be much more than just a softphone sitting in your utility bar. The best-in-class solutions on the AppExchange provide a complete suite of capabilities ranging from Salesforce IVR, ACD Queues, Power Dialing, Voicemail Drop, Local Caller ID, Mobility, and much more, delivering capabilities to manage both inbound and outbound conversations by deploying a fully integrated phone system and contact center platform that leverages customer data in Salesforce to deliver amazing customer experiences.
For further detail, look into the inbound and outbound feature checklist your next Salesforce CTI vendor should meet.
3. Ensure that your end-users network is ready to handle VoIP:
VoIP or Voice over internet protocol has become paramount because of the bandwidth efficiency and low costs it provides. We suggest defaulting to fiber connections when available since they usually offer the most consistent connectivity in terms of bandwidth, latency, and packet loss. Also, make sure latency is below a 150 milliseconds threshold.
Another critical factor in the equation for successful remote work is the router or firewall your team members are using. Most residential routers come with SIP ALG enabled by default. This tends to break VoIP and causes inbound calls to fail. We suggest disabling SIP ALG and also enabling QoS to ensure at least 100-200 kbps of symmetric bandwidth for phone calls. QoS will ensure voice traffic is prioritized over other types of traffic like multimedia that can cause voice to deteriorate.
Although Wifi has become the de facto connectivity method for almost every residential network, an ethernet connection on your workstation can make a big difference in upgrading your VoIP quality. Wired connections have faster ping times to your router and much lower jitter (or variation in the ping time).
4. Professional headset:
Often overlooked, once you find a fitting Salesforce CTI solution and ensure good network connectivity to your users, investing in professional headsets designed for VoIP (E.g.: Jabra) is key to maximize call quality and clarity, preventing agents from sounding muffled, unclear, or from afar. We suggest wired over Bluetooth headsets because of reliability and because they work better with Chrome and other browsers. Bluetooth headsets sometimes cause issues with your computer’s input & output audio devices and also require to be charged.
5. Salesforce-based real-time reporting:
A crucial requirement to make the most out of your Salesforce investment is leveraging data to track KPIs and provide deep insight into agent and team performance in real-time. Having a phone system that automatically and efficiently logs user activity and customer interactions into our CRM without undermining the quality or performance of your remote workforce is paramount.
This means that the Salesforce CTI will ensure managers have full visibility of individual and team performance in real-time while working remotely.
Displaying data in custom Salesforce dashboards can provide managers with comprehensive sales and customer service performance metrics at a glance as well as a quick view of queue and agent activity.
6. Call monitoring and coaching:
Coaching agents and reps remotely has become a major challenge for every manager. When choosing a Salesforce CTI, pay special attention to call monitoring and coaching capabilities. Call monitoring allows managers to silently listen in to live calls to coach agents and ensure reps are adhering to scripts, brand tone, and more. Call whispering is a great way to help agents through complex or important calls that require guidance. Finally, having managers barge in at any time can help deliver a seamless customer experience.
7. Support for mobile workers:
Many workers need to stay connected while on the go. Having a Salesforce CTI solution that works on mobile devices and enables your workforce to work from anywhere is key for every modern company. Look for features like automated call and activity logging, Salesforce call recording, the ability to access Salesforce contacts on mobile, and the ability to add comments, tags, and disposition codes from mobile.
