i can has apex?

My company uses Cisco IP phones, and recently upper management decided that our sales team needed an auto-dialer. As in, right now.

If you've ever worked in a call center, you know that auto-dialers are great when you have a group of people making scripted calls of a giant list. You sit with your headset on, and - bam! - you're talking to your next "customer".

But if you're talking to individual contacts that you've been working with, a script doesn't cut it. So when "Bob Johnson" suddenly comes up on your screen, you have no idea why you had him on your call list, what you've discussed lately, or where he is in the sales process. Sure - you could just take a glance at his contact record for 10 seconds - but by the time you see his name, he's already said "Hello!".

"Hey Bob, it's Zach. Say - could you hold on for 10 seconds, while I figure out why I called you?"

No good.

Still, upper management wanted to make the reps more efficient with their calling, and gave us 6 weeks to do it. Solution: Salesforce.com and Cisco's "Click to Dial". Best part: if you're on Salesforce, you already have it (you just don't know it!)

It's no more difficult to use that it sounds. Click on the phone number, and the phone at your desk starts dialing. Very cool.

So our resident Cisco guy called our Salesforce Sales Engineer, who brought in a subject matter expert from Cisco - and a few conversations later, it was ready to go! We tested internally, then with a small group of sales reps, and are now rolling out to all 800 users - all within the 6 week deadline.

There was some frustration (inspiring the image on the right!). A widget that connects your computer to your phone that needs to be installed (software...ick). After the admin configures it (basically just adding your cisco call manager account username and password, and your IP phone's MAC addresss), the user then needs to select their exension one-time the next time they log in. No problems, just the trial-and-error one expects from such an endeavor - missing passwords, substituting "5" for "S" in a MAC address, etc.