You are on the phone with your customer and have thought everything through – you have the most important things in mind, the call is structured and efficient. But even the slightest data enquiry about the person you are talking to robs you of valuable time. You have to search and the call is delayed by unnecessary waiting time. But how is it possible to display information about the person you are talking to directly during or even before a call?
CTI (Computer Telephony Intergation) is the term used to describe computer-assisted telephony. This does not necessarily mean that you have to make calls using your PC. Instead, your PC is used to operate your telephone: Answering and ending calls, setting call diversions and calling up stored contacts, etc. Now, as with a mobile phone, you can store a lot of information for a contact, such as name, company, date of birth, photo and much more. This information can now also be displayed in a window on your PC when you receive a call.
With a CTI solution, companies can work much more efficiently and increase customer satisfaction enormously. No more searching for telephone numbers and typing on the phone. In conjunction with an ERP system, such as SAP Business One, there is no need for double data storage, all information is maintained centrally in a single system and is always up-to-date.
Incoming calls are even more effective: all data from the ERP system can be displayed directly on the monitor when an incoming call is received. If you are thinking of data such as name, address or company, this is not wrong and is of course possible. But you can do much more: sales data, open items or open orders can easily be displayed during an incoming call. The call window can be customised for each user and the data displayed can be reduced to the information that is really needed.
Employees who work with the ERP solution SAP Business One can immediately carry out an interaction in SAP Business One from the call window, in which all customer data is displayed directly when the call is received. In sales, for example, a sales order can be opened immediately without having to ask the customer for their name or customer number – or a service ticket can be created in the service area. Here too, there are many ways to take the individual needs of users into account.
Distribution
A customer advisor receives a call from his customer. In addition to the customer’s name and address, he is also shown the reliability of the payments of the last invoices and the customer’s outstanding items. Here he can see that the customer has open items totalling 4,863 euros on his customer account and that his payment behaviour is on average 9 days over the due date.
Once he knows this information, the customer advisor knows how to assess the customer even before he has started the call. The customer wants to place an order during the call – With one click from the call window of the CTI software, the sales order opens with all the customer data in SAP Business One. The customer now wants to negotiate a longer payment term and more discount. The information known to the customer advisor from the call window is sufficient to make an informed decision quickly. At the end of the call, he will transfer the customer to the company’s accounts department to clarify the status of the outstanding items on his customer account. Of course, the accounting department also has all the information immediately on the screen thanks to the CTI software and can adapt ideally to the customer and their situation.
Service
A service dispatcher also sees all customer-relevant data on his monitor when a call comes in – only he does not see any accounting-related data. The caller reports a fault with their telephone system and needs a technician on site quickly. The service technician can use the stored address to display a route to his customer with just one click and give him an arrival time – taking into account the current traffic situation, of course. He can also open a ticket immediately from the call window, which he can then send to a service technician.
