Scope

We were inspired by a customer who was on Vonage using their CTI integration with one of the top CRMs — Salesforce. It was buggy, and it didn’t work well. And they had a team of 300 employees. We were able to deliver a solution that was much better, and acquire that customer.

Vinix was already the industry’s most advanced service provisioner. Now they’ve taken their software up to the next level.

With Velvetech, we created computer telephony integration directly with Salesforce so that our customers relying on this CRM could access our telecom services right in Salesforce CRM.

CTI for Salesforce:

make and receive phone calls within Salesforce
look up customers by a number
review the ticket and notes
log calls automatically
save call recordings
listen to calls
review calls stats

Challenges

Most of our fears had to do with lack of experience in taking our software development efforts out and working with an outside supplier on a strategical part of our product line. The usual business fears: not getting what we paid for, not getting a quality product, not getting good response time. That was the key.

Velvetech is so responsive, they have an extraordinary ability to make you feel like you’re their only customer.

I don’t know how they do it. Extraordinary is the only word I can use.

Process

I talked to Velvetech’s CEO Yuri and was confident they could do it. They were very prompt and professional, with good conceptualization. So we pulled the trigger and ran with it.

Velvetech did research and came up with questions for the core engineering team. I had seen from their experience when I googled them, that they had already worked with the telecom platform KAZOO – proof of our strength in delivering telecom technology solutions.

Once my engineering team saw initial Velvetech’s coding, they said it was the closest any outside team had come to a true understanding of their product, i.e., KAZOO.

Results

I couldn’t be more happy with the decision! It really was a gamble and I had to convince my team and my investors, but it really paid off. I crunched the numbers of doing it in-house or with a third party; the numbers made more sense to go outside.

Customers said the 1.0 version we did with Velvetech was better than anything much larger competitors of ours had created. It’s a tremendous competitive advantage!

Our solution benefits any Salesforce customer who wants to utilize our network.

Plans

Salesforce is the largest CRM in the world. To have that Salesforce CTI integration and be able to provide this for future customer acquisition and future customer growth . . . it’s immeasurable.

We’re already planning the next product with the Velvetech team. A larger project to utilize KAZOO telecom technology and others.