A cloud phone service provider increased their revenue by 95% using Zoho CRM.

The company

Founded in 2007, Global Call Forwarding is a cloud phone service provider that offers international phone numbers, call forwarding, and advanced call management features to help businesses connect with local and global customers efficiently and cost-effectively. The company is owned and operated by United World Telecom (UWT), an international telecommunications service provider founded in 1996, and is headquartered in Delray Beach, Florida, USA. It also has additional offices and staff located in India, Thailand, Ukraine, and Latin America.

Global Call Forwarding prides itself on its 27 successful years, maintaining 99.999% uptime, servicing 160+ countries, and uninterrupted 24/7 support.

The challenge

Before using Zoho, Global Call Forwarding was using a native CRM hosted on their servers and Sugar CRM. With the growing scale of their business and business data, the team started finding it difficult to manage their daily operations using their old CRM, which was slow and lacked flexibility and reliability. Also, they were unable to locate leads and accounts due to the CRM's complex navigation. The team finally realized it was time to find the right CRM to support their sales team.

This was when Luke Genoyer, Business Development Manager at Global Call Forwarding, was tasked with finding a new CRM for the company. By this time, the team was pretty clear about what they were looking for in a CRM:

• Flexibility
• Reliability
• Swiftness
• Easy navigation
• Integration capabilities
• Comprehensive functionality

Why Zoho

After some internet research, Luke and his team came up with three names: Zoho, Salesforce, and HubSpot. They moved ahead with Zoho CRM for the following reasons:

• Excellent support from the pre-sales stage to date
• Cost efficient
• Easy to use
• Better collaboration facility
• Privacy policies

"The reason we chose Zoho is the quality of its ongoing support throughout the pre-sales and implementation process, which definitely is far better than the other tools we were evaluating," Genoyer says. "Cost and ease of use also contributed to why we chose Zoho."

The solution

After a rigorous evaluation, the team moved ahead with implementing Zoho for their business. The implementation period lasted for about two to three weeks, and the team is proud to have achieved certain milestones using Zoho.

Lead management

Global Call Forwarding has multiple sources of leads, including their website, emails, calls, and chats. All of these sources are integrated with Zoho CRM to serve as a central repository of lead information. SalesIQ by Zoho, which helps the team track website visitors, is also integrated with Zoho CRM, which syncs the data in real-time, avoiding delays in the sales team's follow-up process.

"My favorite feature is the integration between SalesIQ and Zoho CRM," says Mouen "this has helped us capture all the meaningful information related to a lead and push them directly into the CRM, allowing the sales team to strike up meaningful conversations with them."

Structured follow-up process

Following up with leads is an essential step in the sales process at Global Call Forwarding. The team strives never to miss an opportunity and ensures a timely and continuous follow-up process to nurture and convert leads.

The sales team uses workflow rules to schedule timely follow-ups and trigger reminders for every sales rep. Given the sales team's spread globally, Global Call Forwarding uses blueprints and several API integrations with their business system and database to ensure that leads are mapped correctly and that reminders are triggered and sent to the appropriate sales reps to avoid confusion.

Zoho CRM also acts as a central repository for the sales team, pulling information from several sources into a single system. This makes it easier for the sales team and eliminates the time otherwise spent on toggling between different tabs to gather information.

The team has also integrated their own telephony system with Zoho CRM to enable automatic synchronization of all customer communications, which saves a huge amount of time for the sales team, who would otherwise spend it on taking notes.

Flexible collaboration

The team at Global Call Forwarding believes CRM not only serves to facilitate customer management but also to ensure transparency within the teams and provide a clearer and more robust picture of the customer journey.

Zoho CRM has made it easier for the sales team to collaborate within the CRM using the team collaboration features, which include using notes and tagging each other for quick notifications—all while sitting miles apart.

Better performance tracking

The sales and customer success teams also make extensive use of Zoho CRM's reports and dashboards to get an analytical view of their performance and business conditions. After Zoho's implementation, generating reports and tracking business is a breeze for management. They believe it's faster and more reliable.

Benefits and ROI

Apart from all the qualitative benefits of enhancing the team's capacity and work speed, Global Call Forwarding has also seen a spike in the number of business accounts they close per month. They've doubled the number of accounts they win each month after implementing Zoho.

The team also confirms that they've been able to achieve this because Zoho has increased the team's efficiency and has helped them automate mundane tasks—thereby affording them more time to think and act.