This investment is going to allow us to accelerate the development of highly requested features, expand our growing customer base, and better serve our white-label partners, and couldn’t have come at a better time when we’re seeing critical momentum in the adoption of our social PBX offering.

The Ringio team is hard at work on delivering an awesome 2012 for our community. And we’re thankful for all the support we have received from the metro Washington DC high tech community, and in particular CIT.

Using Ringio and want to share your story?  Write me!  Know others who will benefit from Ringio?  Spread the word!

Recently I was having some issues with calls getting lost before they actually made it to the appropriated end user. I was able to send Ringio a quick email and in no time they had me back and running once again, speaking to my customers without any dropped calls.

Thanks again Ringio for your continued support and for all that you do for my business.

–

I keep getting great ideas on new videos to make and have been cranking them out so much I never got around to using Camtasia until now.  It’s pretty awesome.  I’m pretty sure you’ll love the style of the new videos.

Enough about videos.  I actually wanted to let you know that we now sync with Batchbook CRM!  Check it out.  If you’ve been procrastinating about signing up for Ringio, I encourage you to sign up now.  No time is better than now to start using Ringio, especially as we move into November and December… with Ringio, you’ll be fully equipped to handle all that business volume you’ve been planning for.

You can learn more about the integration in the feature page, or in the Support Community.

To watch how you can be up and running in 5 minutes:

Hi there, this is Rebecca. Cannot believe I have been with Ringio for 4 months! A young company, Ringio boasts a mature VoIP software product full of cool features. I remember when I was hired, a “novice” in VoIP, I was amazed as well as confused by all the rich features Ringio has to offer — ringlist, call history, notes and Google contacts sync, just to name a few! Guess what, it did not take long for me to start enjoying and appreciating these features and I now find them not as confusing as I had thought, but very flexible and practical. A bit of a learning curve!

]]> http://www.ringio.com/blog-pbx/proud-to-be-a-ringioer-2/feed/ 0 http://www.ringio.com/blog-pbx/ringio-now-syncs-with-salesforce-crm/ http://www.ringio.com/blog-pbx/ringio-now-syncs-with-salesforce-crm/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:51:24 +0000 Jon http://www.ringio.com/?p=3264 At Ringio we work hard (and have fun doing it) to make things easy for you.  Especially when it comes to integrating your CRM contacts.  Customers tell us day in and out how much they love having their client records attached with calls and voicemails.   If you are using the Salesforce CRM, things get even better, as Ringio now syncs with Salesforce.

You can learn more about the integration in the feature page, or in the Support Community.

To watch how you can be up and running in 5 minutes:

You can learn more about the integration in the feature page, or in the Support Community.

To watch how you can be up and running in 5 minutes:

Many of you have been eagerly waiting for some of the features in this release (especially the new, smooth outbound calling process), and we want to thank each one of you for your continued support, feedback and patience – you know who you are – and hope that you are as excited about using these cool features on a daily basis as we are working on them, night and day!

Please take a few moments to familiarize yourself with the changes introduced in this release.  You will notice you are on Blue Ridge if your Ringio software indicates v1.10 in the log in screens.

Recorded Webinar covering the major features

Major new features

Outbound Calling Enhancements
Currently, if you make an outgoing call using the Ringio software, there is a slight chance that the contact you’re calling will hear their phone ring first, before you hear your phone ring. When they pick up, they hear something like “Sam is trying to call you…  just a moment”.

After Wednesday, this will no longer happen. Ringio will always calls you first, and it will only start dialing the other party after you pick up your phone.  As a result, you will notice that:

• The beep sound you hear when you are connected with the other person is removed.
• The calls connect much smoother and the initial audio delay from picking up the phone and the time when the audio starts between the callers is removed.

Call Transfer Interface Made Simpler

Currently, transferring a call requires numerous clicks.  After Wednesday, all you have to do is click on the transfer button and type in the name or number of an existing contact while you are on the phone and you can transfer the call with a single click.

New After Hours behavior 
Currently, if you have specified hours during which your business is closed, during that time callers will hear “Thanks for calling. Our office is now closed”.

After Wednesday, they will hear all the options in your main menu, or your custom greeting if you have one, and then, if they select a department and the department or the business is closed, they will hear the “not available” options to leave a voicemail or request a callback.

Salesforce.com and many other CRM integrations through OneSaas plugin

OneSaas is a powerful Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud integration platform designed to solve the challenges of integrating separate Cloud-based or On-Site software solutions. With OneSaas, you can effortlessly manage all of your contacts and synchronize your Ringio call data to your contacts in Highrise, Google, Salesforce, and many more. 

OneSaas allows you to:

• Manage all of your contacts with a single set of log-in credentials.
• Control what information (such as contact details and notes) gets synced, and the direction the data is read or pushed to and from your CRM.
• Trigger a manual synchronization request.
• View status information about a sync, such as how many contacts, notes and rings were added and updated.

Visit this link for more information on how to enable the OneSaas plugin with Ringio.

Note Taking Enhancements

From the Ringio Desktop software, you can now edit notes for new or existing contacts without disruption when a new call comes in, or when you click on other contacts.  The note-taking field tells you exactly which contact you are editing notes for so you can enter notes at your own pace.

• You can now edit a note before, during and after a call and the note will always be saved.
• The note-taking interface tells you who you’re editing the note for. 
• You can still continue editing a note even if you click on other contacts.  Note taking for higher-volume departments works like a charm.  You can now also add a note for an unidentified contact.

Cool Enhancements

• You can now click on a playing voicemail and skip to fast forward or rewind to a prior point without having to listen to the entire voicemail and replaying it over and over.

• The Ring List in the Ringio Desktop software now updates more smoothly without forcing a refresh of the existing list when a new Ring comes in.
• The Ringio software now shows weblinks with CRM profiles of your callers.

• If you disconnect your Google account from your Ringio account, you can now delete the Google contacts from Ringio and keep the Ringio account clean and tidy.
• You can now edit the details of a contact while talking to that contact, and the changes are reflected immediately.
• In your All, Missed, Callback and Voicemail tabs, if you have more than 15 calls in the Ring History, there is a now a “More…” button.  When you click on the More button, it will load an additional set of Rings in the Ring History and continue to be visible for you to click on until your entire Ring history is displayed.  

• In the Ringio Desktop software wherever you see an email underlined, if you click it it will open your default mail client and compose a new email to that contact.

• Ringio now spends more time trying an outgoing call before giving up and directing the call to voicemail.
• Sorting in the Contact list has been refined.
• There is now a new way to look at your contact list, “All by Group” has been added. It displays your Coworkers first, then your VIP contacts, then the rest of your contacts.

Notable Bug fixes

• Fixed the issues where Ringio sometimes doesn’t call your phone after you accept it.
• Ringio Admin dashboard is now supported on Internet Explorer 8 and 9.
• We removed the confusing greyed out Transfer button from department screen pops
• You can now Quit Ringio Desktop on a Mac by pressing CMD-Q or by going to the “Ringio” Menu and selecting Quit
• You can now use Ringio without explicitly creating any departments.  Ringio will route all calls to all users in a round robin way by default even without departments set up.

1. Podio

Price: Freemium to $99 per month

Podio is a very cool piece of software. In fact, after looking into it, I decided to give it a try for managing my fraternity brothers (but they’re a whole different beast).

Instead, you are more likely to want to keep everyone on the same page as far as tasks, contacts, and updates — especially if you don’t all share an office. Podio makes this stupid simple. It’s lean and clean, but powerful. In fact, there’s a whole community of people that build apps for each niche of your business. This type of customization alone could transform that slacking area of your business.

Using Podio to manage people and things works wonders in keeping your customers from getting lost in the shuffle. In fact, install a few of the CRM or other customer service apps and you’ve got a great addition to your customer service powerhouse.

Best part, if you’re a small business (less than 10), then it’s free!

2. Rapportive

Price: Free

Rapportive is a Gmail extension that becomes cooler the more you use it. Imagine a scenario where you receive an email from one of your customers. In the side panel, you get their location, links to twitter feeds or other social media sites, a picture, and where they work. You find from his twitter feed that Joe the freelancer from Seattle just had a baby. And a congratulations is in order.

Who doesn’t want this kind of interaction with his customers? Well, maybe a stuffy bureaucratic business, but they’re no fun anyways. And for a grand price of $0? Done.

3. OnePageCRM

Price: Freemium or $19 per month

I’m a bit of a sucker for minimalistic design, and OnePageCRM hit that sweet spot. Not only is the interface intuitive, clean, and easy to look at, it’s a no bs design.

OnePageCRM has a thing for “action.” Every contact is actionable: contacts are sorted by when action needs to be taken with them. You easily find out what that action is, when it’s due, and who is doing it.

What’s cooler, OnePage is very metrics focused. You can use it to analyze your sales process down to the dollar or percentage point. Actions and results, just what your customers deserve and your business needs.

4. HighriseCRM

Price: $25 – $100 per month

If you haven’t heard of Highrise or 37 Signals by now, you should have. Highrise has a familiar feel to its sister product Basecamp, something we use here in the Ringio office. That is to say, it has a lot of features in a simpler, no-glitz package.

In contrast to OnePageCRM, it doesn’t have that action-focused drive. Although you can plan tasks and set dates, it doesn’t play as big of a role. It focuses instead on giving you as much information about each contact as you could ever need. With this, you can handle and take care of each individual customer.

5. Ringio

(Or any other virtual PBX with its head on straight.)

Alright, you knew he’d recommend this one. But we really do believe (and experience daily) that by making something so simple as a phone system customer-centric, we are able to give the best experience and interactions to the people who matter the most. We work most directly with our customers over the telephone, but its the area where we are most likely to trip up. Doesn’t it make sense to have this part of your business locked down?

But here’s the real beauty of Ringio in this case. Ringio already does (in the case of Highrise), or is planning to, partner and integrate our software into all of these already amazing customer service platforms. Stay tuned for release updates. Your customers will never know what hit them.

This week, we bring you a really cool company from Seattle, WA, Bottle Your Brand. Bottle Your Brand is a premium supplier of private label bottled water, personalized wine labels, beer labels and other custom stickers. Want a unique wine label to commemorate your wedding? Then Bottle Your Brand is your place.

Scott Springer, the owner of Bottle Your Brand, was gracious enough to answer a few questions regarding how he does business and gives the best customer care.

 

 

Ringio: In what ways are you customer-centric?

Scott: We like to think of what we do in a more figurative sense: we empower our customers. Our new Design Online system gives you the power to upload pictures, change text, and match colors so that your label design is as unique and amazing as what you’re celebrating. You can design your label completely from scratch, pitting your extraordinary creative powers against a blank white label, or you can use or alter one of the designs we’ve created.

Ringio: When you first came across Ringio, what problem did you have that you were looking to solve?

Scott: For several years, we have had a corporate PBX system with regular trunk lines. As growth continued, we were experiencing high inbound/outbound call volume and the need for additional user functionality. In addition, we were also looking to become more of a “virtual” office with the ability to communicate outside of the office.

Ringio: Before Ringio, how were you solving that problem, and why was the solution sub-optimal?

Scott: As minute usage grew, our phone bill was becoming a major expense. We tried to work with the telecom provider and the only solution they offered were “package” bundles. None of which fit our needs.

Ringio: OK, so you adopted Ringio, how did things improve?

Scott: We have experienced several benefits thus far. Including;
- single account, with easy admin controls
- call handling options for each user
- more functionality than standard pbx systems

Ringio: Can you share any quantifiable benefits?

Scott: - greatly reduced phone bill ($500+ in savings/mo)
- no long distance charges
- call log with notes for each call.

Ringio: Those are all great. What are the features of Ringio that you enjoy the most?

Scott: – easy admin controls
- user admin is clean and efficient
- call log (placed, missed, voice mails)
- accessible from any location with internet access
- multiple platform capabilities (pc/mac, laptop, smart phone)

Ringio: Well Scott, it’s been a treat. We wish you the best for Bottle Your Brand.

Until next time!