It is not that uncommon that a software company creates new software based upon customer requirements. Actually, this is the way things should be done; not exclusively, but to quite an extent.

Now, there are few software vendors who are truly independent. Most vendors are, and need to be, part of one or more other vendor ecosystems. This is simply a matter of scale, as there are only a few vendors who have the size and market power that are necessary to surround themselves with a good number of customers, ISVs, system integrators and other partners. And the number of these ecosystems is rather shrinking than growing. 

What this means is not that these few companies can implement and deliver what they want, but that the other ones need to carefully check two things.

First, which ecosystem(s) to belong to, be it one or more than one. And as the CEO of 3CLogic, Denis Seynhaeve in a recent CRMKonvo said: It is important to choose wisely, which ecosystem to commit to.

One of the fundamental consequences of this decision is the degree of dependency on other vendors that the smaller vendor has. This degree naturally decreases with the number of ecosystems it participates in, although they can never be truly independent - which is also not wanted when playing the ecosystem game. Conversely, participating in more than one ecosystem increases options and the potential reach.

On the other hand, there are some other factors that come into play. The software architecture and the software itself will become more complicated when different vendors’ systems shall get augmented. Deep knowledge in different technologies is required, if deep integrations are necessary. As a consequence of all that, the implementation and maintenance become more expensive. This has an adverse impact on pricing.

Different vendors at the core of an ecosystem prioritize the functionalities they deliver differently. This means a vendor that engages into enhancing core solutions cannot necessarily guarantee an equivalence of functionality across platforms, unless extending it outside the platform and integrating via APIs. While this is a viable option, it increases the complexity of the system architecture at the customer.

This is precisely where the wise choice that Denis spoke of comes into picture.

The choice is about which ecosystem or ecosystems to join.

And there is definitely a value in focusing on one ecosystem. One of these values is time to value for customers.

Let me provide you with an example of a company I regularly interact with at this point. The company is called Fastcall and builds CTI solutions that extend Salesforce. Fastcall is a so-called ISV (independent software vendor) and has fully committed to the Salesforce stack. Being a Salesforce-only provider, the company is by definition dependent on Salesforce but tied its success to the success of the Salesforce platform. Its management pays particular attention to Salesforce’s new feature releases. Those that show promise to add value to their customers then may be adopted in their solution. This can be started as early as the new feature is in a Salesforce beta program.

For Fastcall, this has several advantages. These range from being able to work within the Salesforce stack to being able to quickly leverage new features that are offered by Salesforce and to turn them into more value for mutual customers. One of these features being the Einstein Conversation Insights, which got released at the end of March 2021.

Einstein Conversation Insights is a framework that can be used to analyze call recordings to find predefined keywords and to obtain some metrics. One of the important aspects of this framework is that it is agnostic to the source of the call recordings. This means that it can be easily used by partners like Fastcall by simply uploading a call recording and getting results in return.

Well, this somewhat simplifies things.

Still, looking at the example of Einstein Conversation Insights, Fastcall was able to build, QA and deliver an integration with this new Salesforce functionality in less than a month. Fastcall recordings are made available to Einstein Conversation Insights in real time, which in turn delivers useful insights into the recorded conversation.

The message here is that partners who focus on one particular ecosystem, in this example Salesforce, can react with tremendous speed to offer more value to their customers. Especially, if these partners are smaller, they can, and usually do, prioritize their developments closer to the needs of their customers, which are often smaller in nature, too.

Earlier, we spoke of wise choices. What could be wiser than aligning product development to the needs of one’s customers?

This post is a guest piece from Richard Rosen, CEO and founder of Fastcall, a Salesforce CTI vendor and one of my clients. I was talking with Rich about customer focus for focused businesses in a crowded market, and our talk drifted into how limits aren’t a bad thing.

Our chat was fun. It was deep. Quotes from the Tao Te Ching and/or a Star Wars prequel may have been thrown around, and I didn't want to keep it private. To that end, I asked Rich to turn it into something applicable to other business readers. Fastcall is my client and it’s my job to show its strengths, so of course it’s the example in play here. But Rich presents a much-needed perspective whether you’re a user or developer of business applications. I turn things over to him now.

Representing your brand as an owner requires a tricky balancing act in an industry where integrity and thought leadership are highly valued. You want to attract new customers and shout the qualities of the product, of course. But that’s making a sales pitch, and nobody wants to read a sales pitch. Then again, integrity and thought leadership mean revenue in the future, when your company (especially a smaller one) needs revenue now.

I’ve been holding back from writing about what Fastcall is capable of—that’s what the website and the AppExchange listing are for—but this is an incredible company and there’s plenty for me to brag about. So here’s my plan: I will talk about what we at Fastcall do best, but with as little reference to our products as possible. It’s about why you should consider us, but not what you should get. It’s about why the specialized company is often the right one, and why boundaries—as represented by what Fastcall “only” does—are empowering.

Home Field Advantage

A discussion of which Fastcall products you should use would be a short one anyway, because we only have three apps. The word “only” is misleading, because having those three is a conscious decision to keep us focused on our core competencies. We know Salesforce CTI very well, it’s our home field. Why should we play on somebody else’s? We are very comfortable doing what we do, and I’m confident that our work will stand up against any other vendor.

Fastcall is only available on the Salesforce AppExchange. That’s our native environment, and everything Fastcall does was built exclusively for it. There’s no reason to go cross-platform; Salesforce is the #1 cloud CRM platform, and all the customers we could ever want are here. We are subject matter experts on Salesforce technology. Our certified developers know the platform, we know Apex and visualforce. Fastcall customers know that if they need solutions to a problem, we will always be able to provide the best.

These Shoes Fit

Finally, we will only sell you what you agree that you need. Our main product, Fastcall, has three pricing levels. The first one, Essentials, is about half of Fastcall’s functionality. The next step up, Pro, has twice as much and costs twice as much.

Our third level, Custom, is for customers who want to pick which specific functions they want without anything extraneous. We don’t charge a premium for that customizability, and why should we? One great thing about cloud computing is that each part of an application has an on/off switch. Besides, we only charge for usage.

The walls of a house are its boundaries, but they also hold up the roof. By knowing our business and channeling our efforts, we can focus 100% on serving our customers the most up-to-date CTI application in the Salesforce ecosystem. Those are the things that make Fastcall what it is, and what let us be the best at what we do.

Starting with the concept of blades we went across a number of different topics related to customer experience with our guest Denis Seynhaeve.

Denis is the CEO of 3CLogic, a company that is dedicated to 'pluggable' contact centers in the cloud, helping organizations to provide good customer experience via voice technology.

So, naturally a number of questions arises. What is blade technology (hint, it doesn't have anything to do with the blade runner but is closer to the blades used in data centers ...)? How does this technology contribute to a customer experience? Why choosing AWS and not another hyperscaler - or run out of own data centers? And, first, and foremost: Why the concentration without exclusivity on ServiceNow? Here, Denis clearly has a strategy that differs from the one pursued by Richard Rosen of Fastcall, who has an exclusive focus on Salesforce.

And, last but not least the fundamental question: How to choose the right ecosystem to play in, if one is not an 800-pound gorilla?

Answers to these questions and more in our CRMKonvo

Since February or March of Anno Domini 2020, the Corona pandemic is making the headlines and is driving digital transformation, or at least the digitalization of businesses.

For sure, this crisis has forced and is continuing to force many a company into enabling its employees to work remotely. This has accelerated an already ongoing fundamental change of the way people work.

It has also had an impact on work culture.

People can no more just drop by a colleague to ask a question, but need to pick up a phone. Meetings do not happen in the meeting room around the corner anymore but by utilizing technology – virtual meeting rooms – voice and video. Salespeople can no more travel to their customers for face-to-face meetings. Instead they were forced to adopt and master virtual meetings, something they didn’t believe they could possibly do in 2019. It seemed far too alien.

Many of us have learned that this change is rather an opportunity than a threat. We needed to, and did adapt, on a business- and a personal level. In doing so, we realized that many things that we thought of “will never work” actually work quite well.

This adaption happened and happens in three distinct steps. We first used any available technology, just to keep the lights on. Then we started to put processes around them to become more effective and now we are looking at improving efficiencies. These efficiencies, that we look for, will be achieved by the harmonization and reduction of the number of the used tools and their deep integration into each other and essential business systems.

And make no error, the change we have done will stick to quite an extent as a recent Stanford study, that surveyed 15,000 Americans, found. The survey evidence suggests, that more than twenty percent of all full work days will be supplied from home or distributed offices even after the pandemic ends.

This jibes with results of the fourth editions of the Salesforce State of Service and State of the Connected Customer surveys. According to the State of the Connected Customer report, the phone is customers’ second-most preferred communication channel (up from place three in 2019).  According to the State of Service report, It is also the communication channel that is most widely supported by service organizations.

In addition, the report finds that “agents also prefer the phone for complex issues that require two-way conversation, and don’t see the phone being replaced any time soon. However, how agents answer and process phone calls is evolving. The majority of service agents – aside from those on underperforming teams – are more likely to handle voice calls through a computer than a desk phone.”

Figure 1: Service Organizations that report using the following channels; source Salesforce State of Service 4th edition

What is also notable is the strong growth of online chat, messenger apps, and video support between 2018 and 2020.

By extension, the same preferences apply to colleagues cooperating on any given topic. They, too, need and want to communicate using phone, chat, or video.

In addition, they want to use this without hassle, anytime, from everywhere, and with any device.

So, there is certainly a necessity for businesses to enable their workforce for efficient digital communication. This can be done using standalone specialized tools, integrated and embedded tools, up to and until full communications suites like Slack or Microsoft Teams, which are mainly run standalone and in parallel to business systems.

From an efficiency and user experience point of view, integration is key. Employees need to be able to stay within the frame of the business applications they use rather than switching between applications and changing contexts. The communication tool needs to share data and information that is created directly with the business applications it is integrated into. Only then is the tool of maximum help for the people and hence gets best acceptance.

From an IT point of view, installation and configuration must be smooth and simple, done without a major project or cost, which means that they need to be built into the business application, rather than attached to it.

This is where vendors like e.g. Ringcentral, Aircall or Fastcall come into the picture. Searching for CTI on Salesforce AppExchange reveals many options. These vendors offer the tools that extend Salesforce to enable CTI. The differences between the former two and Fastcall are that Fastcall is specialized on, built exclusively for one vendor – Salesforce – and made part of the Salesforce code stack, whereas the others are not. Hence Fastcall is best suited to fulfil the needs of Salesforce users, including a seamless UX.

And for the geeks amongst us: without API calls, which reduces the complexity of the IT landscape and therefore increases the RoI.

Summarizing, if business leaders are looking out for a strong, integrated toolset for internal as well as external communication to gain the efficiencies they want, they need to look out for the following traits offered by the software:

• First and foremost: The software needs to do the job of making life for the employees easier
• It needs to be embedded into the host software, and not run side by side
• Ideally, the vendor is specialized on the software stack that your employees use and the software uses the same UI as the host software
• The software needs to share information and data with the host software and write into the same database
• The vendor needs to offer good support and regular, frequent updates to the software

That’s it. This catalogue will point you into the right direction for finding a well-integrated solution for your CTI needs.

The News

Fastcall, a renowned developer of CTI solutions that are exclusively dedicated to Salesforce, recently announced the release of its Intercall solution. Intercall helps teams to communicate and interact internally from within Salesforce. The app allows phone and video communication. Using Intercall, an employee can call coworkers via their Salesforce user profile instead of using a particular phone number, making it unnecessary to know the current location of the coworker or to perform repeat calls due to unavailability.

It is a first-of-its-kind Salesforce app and offers video and screen sharing within an integrated Salesforce phone application by leveraging Salesforce and Twilio.

Intercall is the latest addition to Fastcall’s suite of applications and is designed to enhance work-from-home productivity for Salesforce users.

Phone applications found in the Salesforce AppExchange today, including Fastcall’s namesake application, enable companies to increase productivity by empowering sales and service team members to communicate quickly and effectively with clients and prospects via phone. Intercall allows companies to streamline their internal telephone and video conversations whether within or between departments, therefore complementing Fastcall’s capabilities.

Main benefits of Intercall include:

• Screen sharing and video conferencing in virtual meetings while working within Salesforce instead of an external application. Intercall also creates Salesforce activities for every Intercall call.
• Replacement of phone directories that are more often than not outdated while enabling a centralized phone directory with data that is already in Salesforce.
• Calling coworkers via multiple endpoints at the same time with ringing the softphone, mobile phone, and desk phone all at the same time, Intercall prevents wasting time by dialing multiple numbers until you connect to a teammate and the hassle of leaving, listening to, and deleting numerous voicemails.
• Building transparency and accountability via automated call logging within Salesforce. Just like an external dialer automatically records external communications with customers in Salesforce, Intercall enables greater accountability, tracking, and transparency in the work-at-home environment and empowers managers to get a comprehensive view of team interactions and collaboration.
• Call recording for future reference, training or to share directly with team members for easy information sharing.
• Easy and efficient one-click information distribution of voicemail messages to team members or the whole company via voicemail drop.

Richard Rosen, CEO of Fastcall says “Success doesn’t depend solely on interactions with clients. A business is only as strong as how its teammates interact with each other. Intercall makes it easier for colleagues to collaborate and communicate. Imagine a work environment where you could reach a teammate on the very first try, without having to dial their office and mobile phone, with the click of one button. I am excited about the efficiencies Intercall creates and what we have planned. Intercall transparently extends the range of products that are offered by Fastcall by offering an intra team facility in addition to the outbound and inbound services that are already available”.

The Bigger Picture

With growing office campuses and team members working more and more from home it becomes increasingly important to provide employees with an easy and efficient way to collaborate with each other and to communicate and share information with their customers. 

Businesses are looking for solutions that fix their problem fast. This can be seen by the revenues of Zoom nearly quadrupling or the usage of Microsoft Teams skyrocketing from 13 million daily active users in July 2019 to 75 million daily active users in April 2020. At the same time Slack grew its paying customers between February and July 2020 by more than 20 percent, too.

Because of this, vendors of CRM solutions have increasingly been strengthening their built-in collaboration suites or forming partnerships with these companies or specialists like Fastcall, which usually is the faster way of achieving this objective.

My Analysis and PoV

The Corona crisis has increased the demand for online meeting solutions, which has caused a growth spurt for companies like Zoom, Webex and co, but also for collaboration services like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or telephony solutions like simplii that integrate with various applications.

With the exception of Microsoft Teams, none of these solutions are services that are natively embedded into business applications, but are either standalone or integrated via APIs. At minimum, this causes some additional integration labor and often leads to double maintenance of valuable information, with the corresponding risk of information loss or ambiguity and a reduction of user satisfaction. In addition, the user interface of the collaboration solution normally differs, which further deteriorates the user experience as the communication software does not follow the UI style guidelines of the surrounding software.

Then there are a few solutions that are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. They specialize in optimally supporting this single platform and are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. One example for these is service providers is Fastcall.

Most businesses are already sold on one CRM solution or another, or have even committed to a platform. Especially for these businesses, solutions that integrate directly with them are the first consideration.

In the case of a business committed to using Salesforce, it should have a deep and hard look at what is available via AppExchange. 

Intercall certainly fits the bill here; although it is still a young product and might miss some sought-after features, like virtual backgrounds, or scrapbooks etc., the combination of features is already giving considerable value to corporate users.