Jabber Integration within Salesforce.com Boosts Productivity

From Lance: It’s as easy as dialing a phone … no, wait it’s even easier

I dial the phone so often I don’t even think about it anymore: looking up someone’s phone number, and dialing their number into the phone – it’s second nature by now. But do it often enough in one day – or spend too much time looking up the number or dial the wrong number – and it gets to be a real pain.

And if it gets to be a pain for me, think about some of our sales people. As for our Global Virtual Sales team they have long lists of customers to call every day. They go to the next customer on the list, look up their phone number and dial up the customer, and then track their customer calls on their computer as they talk. (We use Salesforce.com to track all of our customer contacts.). They used to spend a lot of time every day looking up numbers, and dialing – and sometimes dialing the wrong number — and typing the customer call information of who called who and when. The team estimated our Virtual Sales agents spent almost 100,000 hours last year on all this number look-up, dialing and customer call records keeping. That’s why a team of Cisco and Salesforce engineers got together and integrated Cisco Jabber Click-to-Call into the Salesforce tool, and automated the whole process. One click, and done.

Luca Felli, in the Global Virtual Sales team, led the Jabber for Salesforce initiative. I’ll let him tell the rest of the story.

From Luca: Jabber Integration within Salesforce.com Boosts Productivity

Collaboration technology is a powerful business tool. Our recent integration of Cisco Jabber within Salesforce.com demonstrates the value collaboration technology can bring to sales enablement and productivity.

With the new Jabber Click-to-Call capability, Cisco Global Virtual Sales teams can now instantly make, receive, transfer, and initiate conference calls with anyone on their contact lists and account pages without leaving the Salesforce.com browser, simply by clicking a “call customer” button. When the call is terminated, they have the ability to tie the conversation to an account, opportunity or lead within Salesforce directly from the Jabber Phone.

Removing an administrative layer and simplifying the conversation process helps bring salespeople closer to their customers in real time — to answer questions sooner, resolve issues quicker, connect with the right people at the right time, and close deals faster.

Cisco’s heaviest users of Salesforce.com in terms of call volume, the Global Virtual Sales teams conduct approximately 1 million customer conversations every quarter. The Jabber feature will return about 24,000 hours of productivity to the sales teams, freeing them up to generate an estimated 40,000 additional conversations per quarter.

Since the phone call is automatically connected to the customer records in Salesforce, our sales people don’t have to worry about customer record lookup or typing in the facts about who called who, and when. They can focus on talking with the customer and capitalize on time saved to generate incremental sales for Cisco.

Additionally, data collected from the Jabber system enables the Global Virtual Sales organization to tie customer and partner conversations to measurable business outcomes. The sales teams are analyzing activity such as call durations, opportunities followed, and territories and customers targeted to fine-tune the effectiveness of their conversations. We are using all this information to provide new insights into new customer opportunities, and driving incremental revenue bringing us one step closer to selling as a science.

In the long term, the Global Virtual Sales organization will explore integrating Cisco collaboration technologies, such as WebEx, IM, and video, with Jabber to further enhance the customer and partner experience and accelerate the profitability of the virtual selling model.

So far the Jabber Click-to-Call feature alone is proving to be a powerful collaboration tool, giving time back to the sales teams, making their life easier, enhancing the customer experience, and helping drive more revenue.

For a quick demo, see the video: Salesforce.com integration with Cisco Collaboration Demonstration, and check out the Jabber SDK website.