I discovered a new feature in Dynamics 365 for Sales–native click-to-dial functionality. Click-to-dial is an oft-requested feature among sales users, more so among the customer service users. For this blog, I’m focusing on the seller using Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise in the Unified Interface.
If you’ve been using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales or perhaps Dynamics CRM you may remember back in the day there was native click-to-dial functionality but it integrated with Skype. Not Skype for Business mind you, but Ye Olde Skype for Windows. It wasn’t great. Integrating Dynamics 365 with traditional PBX is technical and complex. There’s nothing simple about it. And now there’s something called the Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework for softphone dialing. In preview right now, and again it takes some work.
What I wanted was something easy. And I found it, stumbled upon it really, very recently in the course of my typical day working with prospects. Not only does it make calling a breeze, but it also creates a phone call record that’s associated with the Contact, Lead or Account record. Let’s take a look using Chrome browser.
Here’s an average everyday Contact record. I’m using mine as an example.
Let’s draw our attention to the phone icon to the right of the Business Phone field.
Click on the phone icon. A couple of things happen. A call record appears making it easy to document my call. And I’m presented with 2 dialing options. My softphone, in this case, Dialpad (integrated with Office 365). And my Android mobile (I’m signed into my Google account in Chrome and my mobile).
First, I’ll choose Dialpad.
Piece of cake. It launches the Dialpad app and dials the number. Now let’s go back and try it again with my mobile device.
I’m presented the option of using the Dialpad app or my phone’s native dialer. Let’s choose the native dialer.
The number populates dialer. Click the phone icon and voilà!
Easy. Now I just return to my call record.
Complete and save. That’s it!
I encourage you to check this out and experiment with it. The native click-to-dial is a great little time saver. It makes follow-ups and sales calls a much more pleasant task. Good luck with it!
By Mark Abes, Vice President, Dyn365Pros, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement partner, San Diego, Southern California
