Although large corporate businesses have had telephony and CRM integration for years now, you may already know, it is a complex and expensive exercise that requires endless drivers, plugins, popups, on-site servers and networking that is out of the financial reach of most small businesses. It will also only work on the one site it is installed unless your remote workers join a VPN. Then there is the increasing number of mobile and home workers that work from a laptop or mobile, how can they benefit from the on-site integration of a telephone system and third-party CRM?
So, in most cases, I have found that these two critical business tools are working independently and in many cases that means time is wasted looking for contact information or losing it altogether, potential customers are lost and mobile workers are out of the office loop.
In the three decades I have spent advising small businesses on their IT and telecoms, clearly a lot has changed in computing and telephony in that time, but I have found even recently that many have a disjointed and badly thought out approach to contact management, whether that be customer or supplier information, this is all critical for the smooth operations of any business. Unbelievably many still keep key contact information on a mobile or in the accounts application; clearly, this leads to guaranteed inefficiency and in the case of the mobile a high risk of loss.
So with all of this in mind, when I designed Metavoxx, I put a CRM at the heart of the applications and built all of the communications tools around it.
When we started out we had one key rule for the development team…
‘Nothing to install, no drivers, no plugins, and no configuration, everything must be integrated in the cloud and be accessible from a browser login, or in the mobile app.’
I had no idea at the time how profound an effect this would have on our product and the five-year journey we would take to develop it. But I did know that if we could achieve this we would enable mobile workers to sit down at any computer and have everything they need to do their job, most importantly, all of their contacts and notes on everyone they deal with, and the data collected by everyone in the organisation, where ever they are, even when on a mobile. And importantly their office desk phone is with them as well so they can answer (or not) calls anywhere they are working even while travelling out of the country.
From a deployment point of view this now means that new users can be added in minutes in the same office or on the other side of the world, no remote configuration of devices is required, no business data is saved on the device, so company data stays secure, temporary workers can be granted access on their own device (BYOD) then removed at the end of their contract. Admins have full control of users, and what they can access and management can see every CRM update and listen to every call even for mobile users.
This as I see it is the future of work, flexible and location independent!
But of course, Metavoxx is not just a phone system and CRM, we have built in a full suite of communication tools into Metavoxx that I will talk about in future articles.
Paul Hanner
CTO Founder and Technical Director
