We upgraded the work of the call center and achieved +15% SL in six months through the integration of CRM and telephony

More half consumers regularly contact call centers, and the majority prefer to communicate with operators. People expect immediate responses to their requests, and delay can be costly. Therefore, ineffective call center operations can negatively impact the entire business.

In this article I will tell you how we optimized the work of the call center through the integration of CRM and telephony, Asterisk IP-PBX and Beeline business cloud PBX.

Call center employees worked in different programs, and managers understood the real situation by department only at the end of the month, when they prepared reports

This story continues the material about the automation of business processes at a manufacturer of building materials, where we have already simplified the development of new parts and interaction with suppliers.

After the departure of foreign competitors, the company further strengthened its position in the Russian market. The main processes seem to have been established: more than ten factories operate in different parts of the country, goods are quickly supplied to retail chains and branded stores. But things weren't so smooth at the call center.

With each incoming call, operators talked to the client and at the same time looked for information in 1C. Because of this, the processing of requests was delayed. It’s logical that people didn’t particularly like the repeated “wait just a minute.”

Employees also spent time understanding who was on the line and for what purpose. This made it difficult to quickly serve clients, as well as to calculate salaries correctly – internal communications are not included in the KPI of a call center operator. And managers had to manually prepare reports in Excel at the end of the month.

Combined calls and customer data in one solution

I didn’t have to think long about choosing a solution. For the current task, we set up the integration of a CRM system based on First Form with telephony, Asterisk IP-PBX and Beeline business cloud PBX.

• Asterisk IP-PBX provides communication via IP phones for sales managers and call center operators. Calls are accepted during specified business hours. The rest of the time, clients will hear a voice message with a promise to call back at the appropriate time, and the system will record the missed call and schedule a call back.

  Asterisk tracks calls and automatically transmits information about them in JSON format: caller and receiver numbers, call start and end times, call status and other details. The CRM system receives this JSON data, processes it and stores it in the database.

• Cloud PBX Beeline business used on work mobile phones of sales managers. It helps you stay connected outside of the office.

  Data exchange occurs in xml format. If within 4 seconds the Beeline Business PBX does not receive a successful response (standard code 200 for HTTP requests), subscription to the event is terminated. This means that the company's server stops receiving information about new calls, although the calls themselves continue to proceed normally. To resume receiving data, you must re-subscribe.

  The solution is asynchronous collection and processing of information. The server receives the data and immediately sends a 200 code, and the information is processed later. This allowed us to solve the problem of subscription interruption.

During a call, the call card is automatically displayed

The CRM system automatically pulls in all available information about the client if the number is already known. This helps you see the history of interactions, past orders and customer preferences at a glance.

For new clients, the system also creates a call card, which the operator can fill out during the conversation and immediately send the data to 1C.

The call center operator makes it clear whether he is ready to receive calls now

Call center employees now have a status system. Now everyone can indicate whether they are ready to receive calls or busy. This allows you to evenly distribute incoming calls and avoid situations where one operator is overloaded and the other is idle.

If the employee still does not have time to answer, a call back task is automatically created. As soon as the specialist calls the client, the task is considered completed.

During a conversation, the operator can look into the knowledge base. Everything is there: product characteristics, promotions, frequently asked questions.

Managers now always have up-to-date statistics on the work of the call center at their fingertips

All conversations are recorded on the Asterisk side. Once a day, all records for the day are downloaded from Asterisk to the CRM system. If the recording is needed urgently, immediately after the end of the conversation it can be uploaded by clicking.

Each entry is attached to a client card in the CRM system. A separate file database has been created to store files. With the help of these records, management conducts random checks or uses them in conflict situations.

Each time an operator contacts a client, the system automatically records the duration of the conversation, its result and other relevant indicators. Internal communications are not included in these statistics.

The collected data is visualized on special dashboards. For each operator, the number of calls processed and the time spent in the ready to receive call status are displayed. These metrics are used to evaluate the performance of individual employee KPIs.

The KPIs of the call center and sales department include only conversations with clients, without internal communications. Here's how it's implemented – when processing a publication from Asterisk, the system recognizes whether it was a call with a client or between colleagues. This is possible due to the fact that all employee work numbers have already been entered into an additional table in the system database – this was done to optimize the search for employee phone numbers. When processing data on such calls, the system does not create a task; therefore, statistics are not collected on these calls.

The call center now processes 1.5 times more calls with the same staff

Six months later, the team of operators began to process one and a half times more calls. The SL level has increased by 15%, which means that clients receive answers to queries faster. Operators were freed from routine tasks and were able to focus on quality of service, and managers stopped wasting time creating reports in Excel.

PS And if you also want to work on large business automation projects, we invite you to First Form for the position of business analyst. You can leave a response here.