On this page:
- Why Use It
- How to Set It Up
- How It Works
- Tips & Tricks
Why Use It
For various reasons, most companies find it useful to keep CRM records of phone conversations they had with a particular customer.
With the help of this tutorial, you will discover that automatically storing information in your CRM for each customer call is not that difficult.
The CRM notes in question can store information such as the time the call was placed or received, the identity of the staff taking or placing that call, the duration of the call, etc.
How to Set It Up
In order to integrate Amernet with your CRM, you must use Call Events API and the API provided by your CRM.
Let’s consider an example of logging all incoming calls from our customers to their CRM profile. Let’s assume that we have an extension that is tied to an external phone number, i.e. our Customer Support line.
For this, we must create a simple script in any programming language. The script should identify the customer based on caller ID and should place a note on their CRM account.
If we name the script LogIncomingCalls.php and host it on http://example.com, we must configure the Phone Call Events from the Amernet interface so that it runs our script for the Dial-In event. More details here.
For multiple extensions, we must configure each of them as described below.
How It Works
When Amernet receives an incoming call on our Customer Support line, our script will be triggered with a series of call parameters described here.
The script (earlier named LogIncomingCalls.php) should have the following structure:
if (isset($_GET['CallerIDNum']) && isset($_GET['CalledExtension'])) { // use the CRM API to identify the customer ID based on the caller ID number $CRMcustomerID = identifyCustomer($_GET['CallerIDNum']); // use some internal logic, or SystemAPI to determine employee name based on the relation phoneNumber - staff member $employeeName = identifyEmployee($_GET['CalledExtension']); // use the CRM API to leave a note on the customer leaveNote($CRMcustomerID, "Incoming call at ".date('Y-m-d H:i:s').' answered by '.$employeeName.' ('.$_GET['CalledExtension'].')');} |
After executing the script above, a CRM note reading “Incoming call at 2013-04-13 14:51:23 answered by Mary Sue (003*021)” will be posted on the profile of the customer that placed the call.
This code sums up the logical steps recommended for a successful integration.
You can use the example from Track My Calls as a starting point of your integration and replace the database requests in this example with API calls to your CRM application.
Tips & Tricks
You can use System API to fetch more log information about the extension (staff member) that answered the call.
To find out the duration of the call, you can combine Hangup and Dial-In events. On a Hangup event, you can update the note that was previously added to the customer.
If you want a more comprehensive example on a specific CRM, please add a comment to this page and we will consider building a demo for your CRM.