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 con be accessed from anywhere.  Salesforce is known for being a cloud based CRM.

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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!

As the product marketing specialist at InGenius, it is vital that I maintain communication with the development and technical support team, senior management team, sales representatives, channel partners, beta users, and customers so that I can do my job effectively and provide  our users, partners and customers with the quality and helpful customer service they deserve. With Mitel Unified Communicator Express it has made my life so much easier and my relationship management much more effective. I can easily lookup and dial a contact, send an email to a caller, create new outlook contacts and with the aid of the CRM plug-in, have the caller’s CRM page open automatically when they call my extension.

Since Mitel Unified Communicator Express also has a built in optional softphone, I have created multiple profiles on my lap top computer so that I can connect to my desk phone when I’m at the office and my softphone when I am on the road. It’s so simple to install and use that I am not sure how I ever got along without it. In fact, it is only second to Outlook for the application that I use the most. This application has helped me to fill plugged in to all my contacts without feeling that I have yet another application open on my desktop.

Developed by the InGenius Telephony Software team, this application is truly innovative and forward thinking in the way it embraces personalization and leverages live content.

Live Content Suite has three main parts:

• Live Desktop Portal, a web-based phone programming portal
• Live Blogger, an application for using standard blog tools to deliver custom content to phones
• Live Applications, applications such as LiveTwitter Reader, Live Weather, and Live Flickr that deliver dynamic content to phones

This is just one of the many “Unified Communications 2.0″ applications to come out InGenius and users can expect to see more in the very near future!

Live Content Suite is expected to become available for other Mitel display phone models (5320, 5330, and 5340) in the coming months.

Check out www.livecontentsuite.com to learn more!