5 Essential Features Your Call Center CRM Should Have

Set Your Sales Team Up for Efficient Outbound Prospecting

Next to your dialing system, your CRM is probably the most important piece of software your call center has. But not all CRM systems are created equal.

Choosing a CRM system that plays nicely with your dialing software and comes with features that support your sales reps on calls is a vital part of setting them up for success. Below, we cover 5 essential features every call center CRM should have.

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Integration with Other Tools

A robust CRM should seamlessly integrate with the other tools your team relies on daily. This saves your reps from wasting time switching between different programs and struggling to manually import or export data between them.

PhoneBurner helps you avoid these headaches by integrating seamlessly with over 200 software programs tailored for sales reps and call centers. These include other CRMs (if you’re not using our built-in CRM features), virtual sales floors, video calling platforms, and more. Some examples include:

• CallBlitz: Bring your team together for remote call blitzes. Perfect for virtual call centers.
• Zoom: Switch from a phone call to a video demo in seconds.

These integrations and others make your call center more efficient by giving your reps more time for the parts of their jobs that drive results—dialing, having conversations, and closing deals.

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Compatibility with Your Dialing System

In addition to integrating with other software tools, your CRM should also work seamlessly with your dialing system. This helps streamline the workflow for your sales reps, creating a smoother and more productive environment throughout your call center.

This also prevents the need to enter data and call activities in multiple systems—a huge time saver.

PhoneBurner’s power dialer is designed to work with other leading CRMs to easily sync data and save time for your reps. This includes native integrations with top CRMs that empower your call center staff to make calls without ever leaving their CRM.

Here are some of our native integrations:

• Salesforce: Dial without leaving the platform and automatically update prospect info after each call.
• Zoho CRM: Start dial sessions directly from the Contacts or Leads module.
• Nimble: Dial directly from Nimble’s relationship-focused CRM and streamline workflows.
• monday.com: Start and monitor dial sessions from your monday.com Board View.

This means your reps get a single unified interface for most or all of their work—which reduces training time, increases adoption rates, and boosts productivity. The result is more high-quality conversations with prospects and more deals at the end of the day.

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Contact Management

A CRM should do more than just track information for your prospects before calls; it should also support your sales reps during and after conversations. Critically, the less time and effort you need to spend importing and manually parsing through this data, the easier it is to make use of it.

Effective contact management includes:

• Comprehensive Contact Records: Maintain detailed records of each prospect and refer to them easily at any time during conversations—including their interaction history, preferences, and feedback.
• Real-Time Prospect Data: PhoneBurner organizes and displays info about each contact you’re speaking with to help guide your calls. Your reps can see all prior call activities, plus any notes that have been taken, custom fields and tags, and dynamic scripts that make this information actionable in the moment.
• Segmentation Tools: Organize your contacts into segments based on criteria like engagement level or purchase history for targeted outreach.

By simplifying these processes, your sales reps can focus more on building relationships and closing deals rather than getting bogged down by administrative tasks.

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Reporting & Analytics Tools

Using PhoneBurner for your call center gives you a deeper understanding of the impact your outreach efforts are having. Our reporting and analytics features automatically track and present tons of useful data, including:

• Activity Tracking: See when prospects open your emails or view your attachments, giving you valuable insights into their engagement.
• Customizable Reports: Track the metrics most relevant to your goals, whether it's call duration, conversion rates, or follow-up success.
• Real-Time Leaderboards: Foster healthy competition among your reps by displaying performance metrics live.
• Live Call Recording & Monitoring: Provide targeted feedback in real-time, helping your reps improve their pitch and technique.
• Answer Rates: Getting calls answered is an increasingly critical component of success. PhoneBurner helps you dig deeper into answer rate analytics to identify strategies, lead sources, and other factors that contribute to conversations.

These tools give you the data you need to make strategic choices about your sales process. Use them to identify your highest-performing agents, support the ones who need help, and assess how prospects are responding to your efforts.

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Post-Call Workflow Automations

Automating post-call workflows can save your team significant time after each call and ensure that no follow-up tasks fall through the cracks. Key automation features to look for include:

• Call Logging: Your CRM software should automate call activities and outcomes so admins have the visibility they need to drive results. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
• Custom Disposition Buttons: Different call outcomes require different post-call processes. This demands a lot of time following each call to ensure that prospects are adequately managed, categorized, and followed up with. With custom dispositions, PhoneBurner takes care of these tedious workflows automatically. Create and configure buttons for every outcome and execute all the post-call processes—including emails, texts, tags, CRM update and more–in one click. Learn all about using our custom disposition buttons here.
• Automated Follow-Up Emails: Send personalized follow-up emails automatically based on call outcomes. If you’re using PhoneBurner, you can link these to our custom disposition buttons to send a perfect customized email with no extra effort.
• Text Messages: PhoneBurner lets you pair one-click texts to different call outcomes so that you can send the right message to each prospect once the call is over and keep the conversation going.
• Data Entry Automation: Automatically update contact records with call notes, tags, follow-up dates, and other relevant information.

Automating these workflows takes pressure and stress off your call center agents, allowing them to focus on conversations instead of busywork. It also reduces call reluctance, and ensures prospects are nurtured with predictability and consistency, no matter the outcome of each call.

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Support Your Reps from Start to Finish on Outbound Calls

Choosing the right CRM for your call center gives your sales team the tools they need to succeed. Look for a CRM that offers integrations with other tools, compatibility with your dialing system, built-in reporting and analytics, and effective contact management features. These essentials set your call center up to handle outbound prospecting with confidence and ease.

We built PhoneBurner to include these features (and lots of others) in a user-friendly package. If you haven’t tried it out for your call center yet, start your free trial here and see how your reps can use it to forge stronger connections with more prospects.