Mobile Call Tracking for Zoho CRM - Zoholics Recap

crm, mobile, marketing, collaboration, sales, call tags, call notes, call sharing, call flags, call search, 

Our team is fresh off a week in Austin, Texas having attended the Zoholics conference, the largest annual gathering of Zoho users, where iovox announced a new two-way call tracking solution for mobile phones. For perspective on the event, we interviewed Thibaut Behaghel, iovox’s director of business development, who was attending his first Zoholics conference.

Thibaut Behaghel is the former CEO of WannaSpeak, a France-based provider of call tracking, recently acquired by iovox. Thibaut now heads up global business development for iovox from our Paris office.

Q: Thibaut, thank you for sitting down with us after a busy week in Austin. Tell us about your first Zoholics event.A: I’ve always known about Zoho and the team at iovox has raved about the impressive culture, growth of the company and the loyalty of the customers, but I had never experienced it firsthand. The whole experience far-exceeded my expectations.

Q: What specifically was more than you imagined it would be?A: Well, it starts at the top. All the key executives, CEO, President, Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Evangelist, and so many others were at the event the entire time and were easily accessible to customers and partners alike.

That level of access for a company the size of Zoho is just very unusual and stood out to me in a very positive way. Zoho has built a culture and strategy with vision, drive and patience. I could feel it in my discussions with Zoho employees and partners. Even their customers relayed their genuine culture, and alignment between words and actions.

Beyond that, I was quite surprised by the geographic diversity of the customers and partners. I thought it would be mostly a US audience, but we engaged in very productive discussions with Zoho partners and customers from the US, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, throughout Latin America, UK, France, Spain, and Germany. It is clear to me having talked to these partners that Zoho has tremendous momentum in the market. Zoho is already a big company but has very impressive growth statistics. It feels like the right time and place for iovox.

What got us excited, is the level of interest around the new mobile solution from iovox which integrates with Zoho CRM.

Q: Why do you think people are interested in this new solution?A: We keep hearing about the shift to mobile for all kind of interactions, thanks to more and more powerful devices made available in the palm of our hands, yet the actual experience of making a phone call and call handling itself hasn’t really improved at all. Our focus is on improving the basics of what the phone was all about in the first place – making phone calls a better experience.

There’s nothing like the iovox app on the market. At first, people visiting our booth would say, “well, I use VOIP softphone on my mobile and I can do mobile CRM” and then you ask a few more detailed questions and they would quickly realize that what iovox does is very different from mobile VOIP-dialer based solutions and solves a real problem of certain types of calls falling through the cracks.

Q: What ways do calls “fall through the cracks”?A: Several ways. First, we know there is frustration with mobile VOIP dialers in situations where there is low coverage and calls get disconnected, or when the user simply forgets to use the dialer in the first place when making a call, which makes the call not easily inserted into CRM. Second, inbound calls to a person’s cell phone number can bypass the mobile VOIP dialer. In these two simple examples, both call types become challenging to integrate with CRM. Fortunately, the iovox app is designed to remain active in the background allowing a user to make and receive calls like they normally would and then choosing which ones get shared into Zoho CRM. That functionality, among many other features, sets iovox apart.

Q: Does the service only work on certain mobile carriers?A: It works on any carrier, in any country, on iOS or Android devices.

Q: You mentioned other things the iovox app can do. What specifically?A: For Android users, they can record and transcribe their side of the call, so they never forget what they said during a conversation. Those transcriptions can be copied and shared into Zoho in full or in part, depending on the user’s preferences. For any user, iOS or Android, Tags can be added to calls to help remember what the call was about and those tags, along with any notes, can be shared straight into Zoho CRM.

Q: Who benefits from this solution from iovox?A: One thing we heard frequently at the iovox booth was the conflict that often exists in a company between management and sales. Management wants all interactions tracked. Sales, particularly the mobile sales person, wants to close deals and is often busy driving between appointments, so it’s challenging to stop at any point during the day just to update CRM. What iovox offers is something for both parties. Management is happy because we’re enabling all business interactions – even those on BYOD phones – to be tracked, and mobile sales people are happy because literally in 30-60 seconds from finishing a call they can update Zoho with a few taps on the iovox app. This is a big time saver for the sales person and reduces conflict with the manager/owner. A win-win.

Q: How does someone get started with iovox?A: The iovox app is free to download for iOS and Android.

For the Zoho integration we offer a 14-day free trial and after that it’s only $5.00 per month per user. We wanted to keep in step with Zoho’s strategy of making their platform feature-rich but still affordable and we’re following their example here. Part of our announcement this week is that our service is now available through the Zoho Marketplace.

Q: What were some of your other experiences at Zoholics?A: I’ve been part of big companies and I’ve also built my own company and I know how important customer loyalty is to the success of any enterprise. It’s not hard to draw a straight line between the culture that Zoho has created and the loyalty that culture engenders among their customers. One quick example is that on the last day of the show, we arrived at our booth to find a personalized, handwritten note, by the Zoho team, thanking us for being a new partner. The note was more than a generic message; it was specific about what iovox does and how it can help Zoho customers. It seems like a small gesture, but when you repeat hundreds of small gestures like that they add up over time and you build goodwill – and loyalty. I was very impressed with the genuineness of the people I met from Zoho. With Zoho, you feel respected and valued as a partner and it goes back to the culture. Everything Ryan (CEO), Dan (COO) and Ashley (Product Manager) said about Zoho was true.

Q: What’s next for iovox now that the service is in the Zoho Marketplace?A: We have a lot of learning to do and that’s best done by sharing information and listening. We’ll be doing several webinars in the months to come, and I’m personally planning to attend some of the upcoming European Zoholics events in Paris, London, Berlin, and Madrid. We’ll be featuring customer success stories in video and print and getting word out through a variety of methods that iovox is open for business in the Zoho Marketplace. I’m personally very excited about the future, and the relationship with Zoho is my #1 priority.

To learn more about the new iovox solution for Zoho or to start a free 14-day trial visit https://www.iovox.com/features/crm-integration.