Earlier today at the Cloudforce conference, I saw a demonstration by New Voice Media integrating their SaaS call centre technology with Salesforce‘s Service Cloud 2. Its been three years since I looked at New Voice Media’s product range but given their leadership in SaaS phone systems, there is a sensible and natural strategic fit with their Salesforce integration.
Overall, the demo was impressive – calls can be routed and queues can be dynamically prioritized based on any data in Salesforce. The screen pop – the phone system triggering the relevant record to appear before a consultant as they answer the phone – happened seamlessly. Even better, the demo worked on my phone number for a customer record I created in Salesforce. No pre-canned magic.
Inevitably, some features are still lacking. User management would be my first concern with this solution. Users need to be set up separately on Salesforce and New Voice Media. Given most businesses with a call centre probably also have a windows domain, an link to Active Directory would be a required feature to seriously challenge the current dominant players in the call centre technology space. Doing user management well isn’t sexy but it makes administering your product significantly easier. This would be a feature worth the investment.
It was a brief demonstration at a large conference but sufficient to show how enterprise-class call centre functionality might be accessible without an eye-watering upfront investment.
