Zoho has unveiled the Zoho PhoneBridge Platform, a platform for telephony vendors to develop and deploy solutions that integrate cloud PBX and call center management applications with Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk. other Zoho business applications are expected to be added soon.
Now, vendors can enable access to powerful call management features directly from Zoho. Zoho PhoneBridge offers robust application programming interfaces (APIs) for vendors to create telephony-powered editions of Zoho applications that let users perform single-click dialling, see incoming call pop-ups, automate their call logging, and review in-depth call analytics, all from within their Zoho applications.
"Conventional integration platforms create a lose-lose proposition for vendors and end users alike,"; said Mani Vembu, chief operations officer at Zoho, in a statement. "Zoho PhoneBridge Platform lets vendors deploy integrated solutions in less time, with less development effort. In fact, call center management and cloud PBX vendors need zero knowledge of Zoho applications to integrate their applications with ours. Our platform focuses the vendors' development efforts on their side of the integration, and that can eliminate over 50 percent of the overall development burden."
Zoho partnered with 15 international telephony vendors who have used the platform to build completely integrated solutions for Zoho Applications. They are AT&T Office@Hand, Jive Communications, Vonage, Aircall, Syntec, Babelforce, Sipgate, Kixie, ActivePBX, HubThunder, Duocom, Ameyo, Mondago, Inopla, and iKontel.
Through the Zoho PhoneBridge integration, users of these companies' phone products can now do the following:
- Click to dial from an existing number in Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk;
- Screen pop customer or prospect profiles on incoming calls;
- Automatically log calls inside Zoho;
- Comment on calls; and
- Create new leads and contacts.
"Aircall has a wide range of integrations that add value to our cloud-based voice services. Partnering with Zoho is a natural extension of our integration ecosystem due to essential business tools, including Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk, that Zoho provides to the global SMB market. We anticipate building a base of customers that use integrated Zoho and Aircall services to empower their sales and service teams," said Glenn Fleischman, vice president for North America at Aircall, in a statement.
"We're excited to work more directly with Zoho," said John Pope, CEO at Jive, in a statement. "We anticipate many Zoho users will see the additional value in using Jive for their hosted phone system."
"We are highly invested in finding the right telephony vendors to partner with. The partners powering the newly released Zoho PhoneBridge integrations are all leading players in their respective regions, and they all have very powerful products," said Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, in a statement.
More than 300,000 businesses across 60 countries actively use Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk, collectively completing deals worth more than $200 billion every year. Call management solutions are the most favored Zoho CRM integrations, with more than 40 million calls logged and more than a million hours spent on calls by salespeople annually.
The release of Zoho PhoneBridge platform comes along with Zoho's latest announcement of a host of productivity-centred features like Zia and Blueprint, for users of Zoho CRM.