In the current business landscape, seamless communication between teams and customers is crucial for success. Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk provide robust customer relationship management and support solutions, while Exotel offers a powerful cloud telephony platform.
Integrating Exotel with Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk allows businesses to unify their communication channels, enabling efficient call management, improved customer experience, and enhanced productivity for sales and support teams.
This article will guide you through the integration process, highlight its key features, and provide best practices for maximizing its benefits.
Exotel Benefits in Zoho Integration
The integration of Exotel with Zoho CRM and Desk offers several advantages:
- Call Notifications: Users receive real-time notifications for incoming calls on their Zoho interface, ensuring they never miss important communications.
- Click-to-Call Feature: Initiate outbound calls directly from Zoho, simplifying the calling process and saving time.
- Task Management: Automatically create follow-up tasks or events after calls, enhancing workflow management.
- Call Recordings: Call recordings are automatically linked to relevant contacts or tickets, providing valuable context for future interactions.
- User Mapping: Easily map Exotel users to Zoho users, allowing for selective Click-to-Call functionality and bulk uploads to save time.
Prerequisites for Integration
Before setting up the integration, ensure the following:
- Exotel Account: Sign up for an Exotel account.
- Account Verification: Verify your account via phone or email.
- KYC Verification: Complete KYC verification for your account.
- ExoPhone Purchase: Acquire ExoPhones for agents to handle inbound and outbound calls.
- API Credentials: Note your Account SID, API Key, and API Token from the API section.
Keeping the prerequisites ready ensures a smooth setup process for Exotel integration
Setting Up Exotel Integration
To set up the integration, follow these steps:
Step 1: Create Co-workers and Groups in Exotel
- Log in to your Exotel account.
- Navigate to the ‘Co-workers and Groups’ section and invite co-workers
Step 2: Configure Zoho Plugin Call Flow
- Access the ‘App Bazar’ section in Zoho.
- Create a new app and define the call flow settings.
Step 3: Associate the Call Flow to ExoPhones
- In the ExoPhones section, assign the created call flow to your ExoPhones for call routing.
Step 4: Enable Integration
- Go to the integration interface provided by Exotel.
- Enter your Exotel credentials and enable the integration with Zoho.
Step 5: Map Zoho Users to Exotel Agents
- Map Zoho users to Exotel agents in the integration interface, enabling Click-to-Call as needed.
Handling Calls and Tasks
Once integrated, users can manage calls effectively:
- Incoming Calls: Zoho displays a pop-up with caller information when a customer calls, allowing agents to provide personalized support.
- Post-call Actions: Create follow-up tasks and events in Zoho CRM or Desk after each call.
- Missed Calls: Automatically generate tickets for missed calls in Zoho Desk, ensuring timely follow-ups.
- Call Recordings: Access and review call recordings directly from Zoho for monitoring and training purposes.
- Task Management: Manage customer-related tasks directly within Zoho’s dashboard to streamline workflows.
Zipteams seamlessly integrates with Zoho and Exotel, and its AI-powered tools provide insightful data-driven analysis of sales calls using conversational intelligence.
Check out the LinkedIn post for more information on Zipteams and integration with popular CRMs.
Benefits of Integration for Sales and Support Teams
By integrating Exotel and Zoho, your team gets the benefits of enhanced collaboration between sales and support teams. Let’s explore the diverse benefits of exotel integration to your Zoho CRM.
- Increased Productivity: The integration reduces manual data entry and task creation, allowing agents to focus on customer interactions.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Incoming call pop-ups provide context, enabling personalised and efficient communication with customers.
- Unified Communication: Centralised access to call logs and communication history improves visibility and decision-making.
- Improved Reporting: Generate reports integrating both call data and CRM/helpdesk information for actionable insights.
Best Practices for Using Exotel-Zoho Integration
Integration alone can not be beneficial unless you harness the features for strategic steps in your sales cycle. Following are the best practices you can implement to get best from the integration.
- Regular Updates: Periodically update the integration settings in Exotel and Zoho CRM/Desk.
- Call Recording: Use call recordings for quality monitoring and training.
- Automatic Ticket Creation: Utilise automatic ticket creation for missed calls to ensure no query is overlooked.
- Click-to-Call: Set up click-to-call functionality to enhance agent efficiency.
Known Limitations
Though integration can help you improve your business, it comes with hurdles. There are notable limitations to be aware of:
- On-Call Events: Call events, such as calls answered or ringing, are not triggered in real-time. Users must manually select ‘Answered’ and perform subsequent actions after the call concludes.
- Call Recording Upload: Call recordings are uploaded every five minutes. To view these recordings, users need to refresh their Zoho Desk screen after the specified interval.
- Missed Call Details: Information about missed calls becomes available in the Zoho Dashboard only after a validation process, which typically incurs a delay of approximately five minutes.
- Feature Restrictions: Some advanced features available in standalone versions of Exotel may not be fully accessible within Zoho integrations12.
- User Limitations: Depending on your plan, there may be restrictions on the number of users who can access certain features like Click-to-Call.
These limitations can affect the efficiency of call handling and task management within the integrated platforms.
Revoking Exotel Zoho Integration
If you need to revoke the integration:
- Log into your Zoho account.
- Navigate to the integration settings.
- Select Exotel from your integrations list and choose the option to disable or remove it.
This action will stop all data sharing between Exotel and Zoho platforms, ensuring that no further interactions occur until re-enabled
Zipteams’ AI-powered Tools for Better Benefits
With Zipteams, you can make the most out of these integrations. AI-powered tools of Zipteams equip you to track and analyse the sales call in real time. With the Zipscore, your sales team can extract insights like customer sentiments and lead scoring. Zipscore also features sales training metrics to keep your team on the right track. With Zoho and Exotel integration, Zipteams’s AI tools can optimise each call for smarter and faster sales.
Conclusion
Integrating Exotel with Zoho CRM and Desk offers a unified communication platform that streamlines customer interactions, enhances agent productivity, and improves overall customer experience.
By following the setup steps and utilising the features effectively, businesses can extract the power of cloud telephony and CRM integration to stay ahead in customer service and sales management.
Book a demo today to know more about how Zipteams can help you optimise your Exotel and Zoho integration.
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