What’s the best way to add voice and SMS to your CRM product?

Is it just me or are CRM players rushing to become contact center platforms?

The top CRM players have added voice and SMS capabilities to their existing offering. Salesforce has Lightning Voice and LiveMessage, Zoho has Phonebridge, and Zendesk has Talk. And they’re adding other communications technologies, such as messaging and WebRTC, in what definitely looks like a push into the cloud contact center game.

CRM platforms help companies manage interactions with customers and prospects covering sales, customer service, tech support, and social media. Like every software platform, CRMs have moved to the Cloud—SaaS is now a given in the CRM space. Salesforce, Zendesk, and many alike already have thousands of small-to-medium-sized enterprises as customers and these SMBs usually run basic consumer-facing communications, which become more sophisticated as the enterprise grows. At this stage, the natural option for these SMBs is to turn to SaaS/Cloud Contact Center solutions.

For CRM players, it’s the ideal phase to come in and offer built-in contact center functionality because (1) the requirements at this point are still relatively simple and (2) having built-in contact center features saves the enterprise the headaches of integrating their CRM with another contact center solution. The very first communications channels that will be requested are usually telephony and SMS, sometimes locally, but increasingly on a global level.

And this is why CRM providers are starting to beef up their offering with voice and 2-way SMS built in to transform their platform into a ‘mini’ contact center and thereby increase their ARPU.

The CRM market has hundreds of players, and with the top ones already offering multi-channel communications features, everyone else must catch up fast to remain competitive.

A quick and easy option is to use one of the popular CPaaS, such as Nexmo or Twilio. While this option works when rolling out a proof-of-concept in a limited number of countries, it becomes highly expensive and suboptimal in terms of quality and reach when scaling for live contact center deployments.

When scaling for live deployments, a better bet is to work with a provider that is as close to the source as possible in as many countries as possible, ideally a local telco itself, and offers better pricing structures across borders.

At Bandwidth, we’ve focused on delivering precisely this.

1: Numbers

We provide the phone numbers you need in the countries you want. Our numbers support both voice and 2-way SMS, so you can display a single number for your customers to call or text.

2: Coverage

Why settle for 20, 30, or 40 countries? We offer phone numbers in 60+ countries along with direct PSTN access to minimize hops and improve quality and reliability.

3: The price tag

We have direct interconnections and operate our own global infrastructure. This allows us to offer better, direct-to-carrier pricing.

4: Functionality

Our numbers can also be reached via WebRTC; we provide embeddable code for your website that creates a click-to-call button associated with the phone number. Yay! Calls flow through our private infrastructure for optimal quality and we manage it for you, so no browser incompatibility issues, security incidents, or broken communication.

5: Easy to integrate

With our API, voice and SMS capabilities are just as quick and easy to integrate into your solution as a CPaaS. Get set up in no time and service delivery in real-time.

So what are you waiting for… check out our services, get in touch with us and we’ll turn your CRM into a contact center, instantly!