ProsperWorks, which provides CRM for Google’s G Suite business tools, last week announced the addition of in-app cloud communications functionality.
The new features are available through a custom integration with RingCentral, which provides enterprise cloud communications and collaboration solutions.
The integration lets users make, receive and log calls without leaving the CRM solution. It provides them with information such as callers’ contact details, past interactions and deal status, and it eliminates the need to take manual notes.
Users also get activity and goal reports.
“The analytics a company can glean from call activity can be indicative of deal closure probability, customer interest, service issues and other factors,” noted Cindy Zhou, a principal analyst at Constellation Research.
“The challenge with CRM has been a lack of data entered,” she told CRM Buyer.
Users with active RingCentral Office accounts can log calls and corresponding notes in ProsperWorks through voicemail.
“These new functionalities were an incredibly important focus to implement,” said ProsperWorks CEO Jon Lee.
“At the end of the day, we have a simple mission, which is to help businesses sell more efficiently,” he told CRM Buyer. “The ability to make and receive calls and log notes from directly within our CRM delivers immediate value to the user in terms of productivity and efficiency.”
The integration “is a logical next step to provide greater customer value and increase usage of ProsperWorks’ CRM solution,” observed Constellation’s Zhou.
Other cloud-based communications providers already have or are developing, call activity integration into CRM, including 8×8’s Virtual Office for Salesforce, she noted.
Who Gets to Play
The integration is available to users who have a premium or enterprise RingCentral office account or are on the ProsperWorks business plan.
It doesn’t need any other software installation. It runs within ProsperWorks and integrates seamlessly with a RingCentral desk phone or desktop app.
“VoIP and mail integration are two key areas that help sales automation players drive increased sales productivity — more time selling — while increasing the fidelity and detail of information captured in CRM systems,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.
“We find sales people that spend more than 8 percent of their time entering data in CRM are not optimizing their time for actually selling,” she told CRM Buyer. “This integration will help bring them to optimal.”
Major CRM solution providers like Salesforce offer VoIP integrations through third-party plugins and marketplaces, ProsperWorks’ Lee said, but “these options are simply bolted on, poorly designed, and require installation and setup.”
This is also true for other CRM solutions that have tried to integrate with Google’s G Suite, he said, noting that ProsperWorks’ integrations “are truly native in that they were built from the ground up to integrate with G Suite — and now RingCentral.”
The Opportunity for ProsperWorks
Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle dominate the more-than-US$20 billion CRM market, but “the modern workforce is changing,” Lee remarked, and “these giants are slow to adapt.”
ProsperWorks therefore sees “a tremendous opportunity to capture a significant market share over the next few years, especially with small to mid-market businesses,” he said.
These companies “just don’t have the time, resources or budget to implement and maintain larger, more complex CRM systems, and they’re already making the switch to collaborative productivity software like G Suite,” Lee noted.
Burgeoning Competition
Insightly, Solve, Zoho, Agile and Salesflare are some of the other companies offering CRM solutions for G Suite.
“A number of emerging CRM players have taken advantage of the economies of cloud to deliver cost-effective CRM solutions for sales, marketing and service,” Nucleus’ Wettemann observed.
It’s possible that other players will jump on the G Suite bandwagon, as the apps’ popularity with businesses has increased, but “we’ve already got a major head start in regards to our experience and our close working relationship with Google,” said Lee. “In fact, we’re officially recommended and used by Google.”
Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.
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