Comparing Phone Systems for Salesforce: Dialpad, Five9, and PhoneIQ
5 min
If you want to centralize all your customer information and interactions in a single place, it’s likely you have considered (or are already) using Salesforce CRM. Across companies and industries, interoperability has become a crucial need for businesses - and a challenge you will need to overcome if you want to avoid working in siloed environments.
One of the best ways to provide your reps with the correct tools to handle communications while reducing workload and boosting productivity is to turn clicks into calls using computer-technology integration or CTI.
When you have a phone system in place, you can know who is calling before they even say a word because you will be able to see the customer profile and all account records on the screen. Not just that, but you can also back hours of lost productivity by turning phone numbers into clickable links, log all calls automatically, put them on hold, or transfer them to another agent without leaving the platform.
There are several options for integrating telephony with Salesforce. In this article, we will review and compare three of the most popular ones: Dialpad, Five9, and PhoneIQ, so you can see which one suits your business the best.
What Makes a Salesforce CTI Good?
Regardless of what specific program you use to integrate your telephony, there are several advantages most CTI platforms have in common. For instance, you can ease the collection of customer data because these systems can remember who has made a call and attach information to a profile. You also tend to save costs in hardware because all telephony is handled from the same digital platform - and usually on the cloud. Lastly, agents and reps tend to report higher job satisfaction because their routine tasks are simplified (in many cases, they can even customize their work interfaces to fit their work style).
Integrating telephony with your Salesforce CRM can help you work more flexibly and increase the productivity of all your agents. However, there are several options to do this, as Salesforce works with a number of third-party plugins and programs. That’s why we have decided to explore three different telephony solutions (Dialpad, Five9, and PhoneIQ) and compare their specific features.
Choosing the Best Salesforce CTI Solution
We have used seven criteria for picking the best Salesforce CTI solution.
- We believe that a good CTI system should be able to:
- Softphone: The possibility of managing voicemail, taking and making phone calls through the internet, providing advanced controls, assigning calls to cases, and tagging them with custom definitions.
- Call Routing: The ability of the system to reroute callers to the lead owner of each department.
- Automation: The possibility of triggering Salesforce events depending on specific telephony events and creating rules to cater to different teams’ needs.
- Multi-Channel Capability: Unifying communications by letting agents use various channels - for example, text messages, phone, online meetings, etc., and switch between them more easily.
- Advanced Telephony: Support advanced functionality that goes beyond a dialer. For example, automatic call recording, extension dialing, business hours, call controls, etc.
- Analytics and Reporting: The ability to use advanced analytics to help track performance, KPIs, and effectiveness.
- Security and Compliance: Including custom permissions and security levels to give different users access to certain tools and functions.
Comparing Dialpad, Five9, and PhoneIQ Salesforce CTIs
Five9 for Salesforce
Five9 is a contact center software solution focused on customer experience. This CTI platform allows your organization to streamline operations using AI, automation, and cloud technology.
The company has a digital-first approach, meaning all your communications take place online. Five9 integrates with Salesforce to provide better contact experiences in the CRM environment. Some of the features supported include click-to-call, screen pop, intelligent routing, campaign integration, and agent interaction control - or the ability to provide reps with cold and warm transfers, chats, and recording and parking calls from a single desktop.
Five9 provides a rather complete package that includes an integrated dialer, lead management, and some good reporting tools. However, customers have reported getting blocked out of the system and having to wait a long time for troubleshooting issues. Sometimes there is also a two or three-second delay between a customer answering their phone and them getting connected to an agent, which can result in lost leads. There are also not as many advanced telephony capabilities as with other solutions.
Dialpad for Salesforce
Dialpad is a business phone system with a reliable 100% ENT uptime SLA and a powerful AI integration that uses natural language processing and speech recognition to suggest recommendations and next best actions. For example, you can use Dialpad to measure customer sentiment and intent signals and help them resolve issues faster. And because all of this is done in real-time, you can also provide agents with instant insights that can help them improve customer satisfaction.
One of Dialpad's most significant advantages is the platform's ability to automate customer touchpoints and provide support with the assistance of AI tools. Like most CTIs, you can also see an entire conversation's history and highlight past events from the same place.
All of Dialpad's calls can be done from mobile phones, too. However, although the app's interface is good, customers have reported support is not responsible, and porting can take a long time. Dialpad is more inexpensive when compared to other providers, but its features are also more limited. This is a good solution if you're looking for a way to handle calls automatically - but not necessarily in the most responsive or effective way.
PhoneIQ for Salesforce
PhoneIQ is an all-in-one CTI cloud solution built for Salesforce and capable of performing a large variety of tasks. For example, the program can log all voicemails, calls, and text messages automatically, and information about all customers directly to the reps.
With PhoneIQ, you can capture all your client interactions automatically, use the click-to-dial feature to quickly connect to numbers, get contextual information for all calls, and manage your entire system from any device, anywhere. PhoneIQ can also route calls and data to case owners and leads across your organization. Other features include multi-level IVR, automatic call recording, advanced call queueing, monitoring, online meetings, and voicemail. The solution also offers powerful dashboards and analytics to keep track of your KPIs, comments, disposition codes, tags, etc.
PhoneIQ uses native Salesforce dashboards to generate service and sales reports. The program is exclusively built for it, so the company can help you set up your platform easily and is also able to provide certified expert support. You can deploy PhoneIQ in the cloud or keep your existing PBX and telecom provider.
If you want to manage your entire contact center from one easy-to-use location, you can sign up for a 7-day trial and get started in minutes.
