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Accounting Firm Adds Crunch with Vonage Cloud

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One of the touted benefits of getting communications services from the cloud is the ability to switch from one provider to another should the need arise. That benefit has proven of value to Crunch, a U.K. accounting software company that recently migrated from one provider to the next in part to strengthen the integration of Salesforce into its contact center.

The client experience is “king for us,” and that “first and foremost [is] about giving people the tools at the coalface to instantly know a client when they call or email, without having to delve too far into the system,” Martin Hesketh, head of client services at Crunch, shared with No Jitter in a recent interview.

Crunch uses Salesforce to manage email contacts for its 11,000 clients, which means it has rich data to mine for improving the client experience (CX) and agent performance. With a 1-to-5 ratio of phone-to-email, having a contact center platform that could support a deep integration with Salesforce was critical, and its existing provider, CloudCall, fell short, Hesketh said.

To better address its contact center requirements, Crunch turned to Vonage, and is now using the Vonage Contact Center platform, Hesketh said.

Vonage Contact Center plugs into Salesforce, allowing Crunch to “report on our email and phone call CX and performance in one place while also having access to much deeper reporting in the Vonage portal for calls,” Hesketh said. In addition, with CRM information at their disposal and the contact center platforms dynamic routing capabilities, agents can make informed routing decisions based on customer data.

In addition, Crunch has access to real-time and historical data pulled from Salesforce. “We never had this level of integration with our previous provider,” he added.

As one advantage of this integration, Crunch is able to match a caller’s phone number with contact data in Salesforce to identify the client and route the call to the appropriate support agent. The agent receives the client data from Salesforce along with the call, Hesketh said.

Crunch’s relationship with Vonage extends beyond the contact center, as it is now using the company’s UC offering, Vonage Business Communications, for employee communications, too. “We’re kind of in the midst of a Vonage takeover,” Hesketh said.

A broad reach was an important decision criterion for Hesketh when evaluating cloud providers, as was a company that Crunch could consider a true partner, he added. With Vonage, Crunch had its own project manager and implementation team to help with number porting — which Hesketh said is a massive headache — and other tasks, and was able to stay on track with its migration.

Crunch is mainly taking advantage of Vonage telephony services today, but Hesketh said he sees the power in video and voice analytics, and plans on enlisting those services for employee communication and customer-facing purposes in the not-too-distant future. “We already use video in a very limited way for some of our accounting processes and we intend to expand this significantly in the coming year,” he said.

In the end, a much slicker experience is what Crunch was going for, Hesketh said, and “it’s absolutely what we’ll be able to achieve.”