Christopher J Pizzi

Integrated Salesforce.com, Angel.com, and RetailStream

Challenge: Call center agents and customers need a single authoritative set of data

Solution: Push data from telephony system and Salesforce.com to RetailStream

National In-Store provides technical services to Pure Digital Technologies in the form of a call center and a national field of technicians. Managers of stores or photo departments, primarly with CVS, would call the call center if they had problems with their Pure Digital photo machines. The call center agents would either walk the store employee through troubleshooting, or dispatch a technician to repair or replace the machine.

If a case required a technician, it would be logged in RetailStream as well as Salesforce. RetailStream's internal reports and customer portal would match and combine data from both systems to present a single, unified view of all Pure Digital-related data. This allowed NIS to deliver higher quality and more timely service to Pure Digital.

I automated the redundant data entry and manual report integration by combining RetailStream, Salesforce.com, and Angel.com with web services. When an incoming call arrived in Angel.com it would call a PHP script on RetailStream which would look up the caller ID in Salesforce. If the number was not recognized, the caller would be prompted to key in the information, which another Angel-RetailStream interaction would store in Salesforce for future reference. The caller would finally be prompted to indicate the nature of the problem, and the collected information would be logged as a new case in Salesforce.

If a call arrived after-hours, or if there were no agents available, the caller would leave a voicemail. A case would still be logged, including a link to an audio recording of the voicemail. An agent could listen to the voicemail from Salesforce and then press a button on the case page to call the store back. This was achieved by having Salesforce call a PHP web service in RetailStream, which would initiate an Angel.com outbound call to the agent. When the agent picked up, Angel would transfer the call to the store.