InGenius Connector, and its cousin Mitel’s Unified Communicator Express can use TAPI in two ways.

1. InGenius Connector can appear as a TAPI telephony provider to CRM systems,
2. InGenius Connector can make use of TAPI to control your desktop phone (Connector as a TAPI consumer).

InGenius Connector as a TAPI provider for connecting to CRM systems

This is also called the TAPI Plug-in, and is an optional component of InGenius Connector and Unified Communicator Express. This feature is enabled for an existing installation of our product by simply entering a license key. When you’ve done this, InGenius Connector will now appear in the list of TAPI devices that are available on your computer, when you use a TAPI enabled CRM.

This mode is commonly used with CRMs such as Act, Maximizer, and Outlook and many custom CRM systems. From within your CRM, select the InGenius Connector from the list of TAPI devices on your computer, and your CRM will now be able to place calls using the telephone connected to InGenius Connector. You’ll also be able to see the caller ID for incoming calls, and the CRM will be able to pop the appropriate CRM contact automatically. Note that the functionality provided varies between CRM’s. Some CRM’s may not provide the screen-pop functionality, for instance.

On the telephone side of things, the TAPI Plugin is commonly used with Mitel phone systems (using Unified Communicator Express or Unified Communicator Advanced, with the appropriate InGenius plugin), as well as users of Polycom phones, Aastra Phones, Asterisk PBX’s, and Broadsoft PBX’s – systems which are generally quite difficult to control via TAPI.

Using InGenius Connector with a TAPI-enabled phone system

The other way to use TAPI with InGenius Connector is to set up a phone profile within InGenius using the TAPI phone profile (which will be available within InGenius Connector in the first Quarter of 2012). In this case, the customer has a phone system that provides a TAPI interface, and want to use the features of InGenius Connector to control their phone system, or they want to use an InGenius Connector CRM integration with their phone system.

Users will have to install InGenius Connector, as well as the TAPI service provider which is provided by the telephone system manufacturer. In the case of Cisco, this is available for free, and can be downloaded by the Cisco Call Manager administrator.

We are currently developing TAPI support for Cisco phone systems, and will be certifying other phone systems soon.

Our customers generally use this option to connect their TAPI-enabled phone system to Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Sugar CRM.

First and foremost though, what is a call center?   The Salesforce call center is basically a softphone within Salesforce.  It typically appears in the upper left hand side of the Salesforce window, like this:

“No big deal,” you might say, “Softphones are old news, I already have Skype and Google Talk!”.

Ok, but the cool part about integrating a softphone into the Salesforce Call Center is all of the options for information tracking and capturing.

For example, you can quickly see what records are associated with a call.  Incoming calls will pop a screen that shows the caller ID, call history, and opportunities linked to the caller:

Phone numbers in Salesforce will become clickable so that you can click-to-call rather than manually dialing.  Whew, because that was getting pretty physically strenuous:

Salesforce keeps track of calls made, along with any of the information entered by salespeople.  So you can start tracking the number of calls you make or your team makes, the call duration, and call result, without manually creating new records:

That’s all pretty great for sales teams who are trying to share information and records with each other.  Each team member can immediately see the activity history, including calls, for all leads, opportunities and contacts.  If a team member is off sick or otherwise busy, her team mates can make sure nothing is missed.

“I’m sold! Now, how do I set up a call center in Salesforce? “

You need a CTI adapter.  A CTI is a Computer-Telephony Integration.  It the piece of the puzzle that allows Salesforce to interact with incoming and outgoing calls.  Not all CTIs have all the features mentioned above, and some CTI adapters have other features like power-dialing.

There are a few CTI adapters out there which can be found on the Salesforce AppExchange.  You’ll have to do some research to figure out what works for your phone system and offers the features you’re interested in.  This can be daunting if you aren’t familiar with telephony, but it doesn’t need to be.

To get started, check out this post on Basic Telephony Terms, and have a look at the phone systems you are using.  Then spend a bit of time on the Salesforce AppExchange looking at the CTI Adapters.  At InGenius, we’re very proud of all our positive reviews and we are always happy to answer questions about our products or your system.

Check back soon for more information on softphones vs. hardphones, business telephone systems, customizing Salesforce reports, and more!

The Basics

CRMs: Customer Relationship Management programs
These help document, monitor, and track a company’s interactions, primarily with its customers.  The most popular CRMs right now seem to be the web-based programs.  There are lots of great CRM programs out there, and we’ll get to those in a later post.

Telephony
A word for a phone system or a bunch of phones networked together.  If your office has a phone system with extensions, or if you need to do something like “press 9 for an outside line” then you something about telephony.

A few important terms and features:

VoIP:  Voice over Internet Protocol
This means speaking through the internet rather than through phone lines.  The most well known VoIP provider is probably Skype, which allows users to download it’s software for free, make calls between web-based Skype users for free, and make calls from web-based Skype users to landlines for reduced prices.

SIP: Session Initiation Protocol
This is a standard internet language for calling via voice and video.  I don’t really think it is important for the lay person to understand.  It might be important to know whether you are connected to a SIP based service provider.

IP: Internet Protocal
Internet language – or – how information is sent and received over the internet.  You may need to know something called your IP Address, which is a string of numbers separated by dots.  This is the location of your machine on the internet, just like your home address is the location of your house in the world.

T1
This is a kind of phone line.

Call waiting
The ability of the phone to signal that another call is trying to access your line while you are on a call.

Conference call
A call involving more than two parties.

Screen Pops
This is like caller ID for computers, except that instead of just the number showing up on your phone’s screen, the contact information for the incoming caller “pops” up onto your computer screen.  InGenius Connector Plugins can help your CRM “pop” screen identify additional information such as your history of calls with that phone number and notes made about that phone number, in addition to the number itself

Toast Pops
Ha!  No really, this is a thing.  Actually, it’s the same thing as above, except maybe the ‘pop’ isn’t the whole screen but rather a smaller window that appears from another application.  Like toast.  Coming out of a toaster.  Get it?

CLID or CID:  Caller ID
Why don’t we just call this  ‘Caller ID,’ which everyone understands?  I don’t know. Caller ID means that you can see who is ringing your phone before picking up.

Call Logs
These are records of inbound and outbound calls, or, all of the calls made from your phone.  InGenius Connector Plugins will help your CRM log calls and attach records or notes to those calls.  This is helpful for remembering each step of the sale or interaction and making sure that tasks do not fall through the cracks.

Cloud Based
When a program is based in the ‘cloud’ it means that there is nothing stored on your hard drive or local server.  People appreciate that they do not need to download or install anything onto their computers, and that their data can be accessed from anywhere.  Salesforce is known for being a cloud based CRM.

-  —  -

Things are evolving fast and different stuff is appearing all the time.  Are there any other terms that you think are important for beginners? Are there other important features that you use currently, or would like to see in the future?

It’s been a few months since we’ve updated the InGenius blog. That’s because we’ve been busy developing and perfecting some really great, easy to use telephony-CRM integrations.

What are telephony-CRM integrations you say? So glad you asked!  It’s a way to make hard and soft phones connect to  contact managers, (like Microsoft Outlook), and CRMs, (like Sugar and Salesforce).  Your contact managers and CRMs are programs and software pieces you already know and use everyday.  We just want to make it easier to put all these pieces together, saving you time and keeping you from losing track of important calls.

Our InGenius integrations are really smart applications.  Over the next few posts, I’m going to show you the smartest ways to use these smart applications.  If there is anything in particular you’d like to see, let me know.

What a great way to start 2012!

We’ll be at HIMMS from Tuesday to Thursday – but taking off Thursday afternoon to head over to Titusville for the launch of STS-133 at 4:50pm. You can get in contact with me at Rich@ingenius.com.

That said, our release this week will include:

• A brand spanking new colour scheme,
• Tweet Filtering! Our app can now filter out those obnoxious “Me Too” tweets, and even adapts dynamically to the amount of twitter traffic to filter more agressively if there are a lot of tweets flowing by. Among other things, we skip repeated retweets, short tweets, and any that contain any of our blacklisted words.
• View trending topics by region – you can now select a specific region to see trending topics. It’s kinda cool to see what topics are trending all over the world. Our app makes it easy to check this out!
• We’ve cleaned up the ads – moved them from embedded in the tweet stream to a dedicated ad location at the bottom of the screen (you can easily upgrade to get rid of ‘em eh)
• And lots more! (behind the scenes UI improvements, better refreshing, better show selection, etc)

Keep an eye out for the new Tweex this week at the Apple App Store!

In a white paper, Lori Bocklund, President, Strategic Contact Inc. remarks on the issues with contact centers in implementing new technology; “Problems we see include not looking at systems in place to start out with and potentially leveraging something that already exists, over-buying (licenses, functionality, capacity, etc.), not allocating the resources to use it effectively, never getting to the “Phase 2″ functionality, not making process changes to get the most out of technology, and failing to help the users see the benefits and make changes.”

With InGenius Connector for CRM systems we solve these problems by providing:

• Multi-platform support on both the CRM side and the VoIP or SIP service provider side to help businesses leverage what they already have in place
• Per seat purchase options to avoid over-buying
• Simple deployment options that include mass deployment or easy end user download so massive resources for deployment are not necessary
• An abundance of support materials including videos, documentation, presentation and webinars to inform users how to get the most out of the application
• Seamless integrations with the CRM application users are familiar with so benefits can be seen right away and changes required to use the software are intuitive (For example, click on a phone number to call)

With growing competition and increased consumer knowledge, businesses are investing in CRM software to better develop and nurture their customer relationships to improve their current and future bottom line. What businesses are missing however is that when introducing new software or technologies they are adding an additional tool on top of an already busy customer service representative or salesforce. This is where InGenius Connector for CRM systems comes into play. We take all these tools and merge them into a single access point so that customer service representatives need only access with one interface, CRM providers extend their functionality beyond their application, and VoIP providers integrate with business processes. InGenius Connector for CRM truly connects it all!

So, what makes Tweex different?

• Tweex is a Twitter client designed for people who like to watch TV, and enjoy following along on Twitter at the same time! This phenomenon is becoming more and more prevalent, and we think Tweex makes it really easy to Tweet and view Tweets about your fave shows.
• Tweex presents you with a list of TV Shows, Events, Conferences etc. Simply choose what you’re watching, and you’ll see the appropriate Tweet stream appear in our app.
• And, Tweex is smart – it monitors which hash-tags and usernames are relevant for the show you’re watching, and will provide them for you as suggested tags! Cool!
• Tweex makes it easy to Tweet about shows too. It presents you with your current #hashtags when you’re tweeting, and inserting them into the text of your tweet is as simple as clicking on a button!

If you’re an iPad owner, check us out over on the Apple Store!

Over the past few weeks InGenius has attended several trade shows and we were blown away by the demand for our CRM integrations for InGenius Connector.  Specifically we have been showing our InGenius Connector for Salesforce application that allows for Salesforce.com users to make and recieve calls directly from Salesforce.

CRM users are thrilled with the application because it allows them to easily track their calls, add notes to a call, have contact records pop-up on an incoming call, and click-to-call from a contact page. What is comes down to is that InGenius Connector for Salesforce helps businesses and small contact centers improve their efficiency, provide better customer service and have more accurate call reports; all of which translates into huge cost savings and potentially greater sales. According to the blog post by John Reed, if businesses can not provide quick, quality service to their customers, the business is doomed to fail. With InGenius Connector for Salesforce, InGenius helps businesses provide exceptional customer service by tying their telephone to their CRM application. Users will never have to put a call on hold to find the contact’s information because it will automatically pop-up, managers can easily keep track of phone call records, and to reach a customer it’s as simple as clicking on their phone number. As Reed puts it “Good CRM means never having to say hold!” and with InGenius Connector for Salesforce you won’t have to!!!

If you would like more information on InGenius Connector and CRM integrations contact us at sales@ingenius.com and we would be more than happy to answer your questions.

We’ve already run into one celebrity on our way here; the Travelocity gnome!