Teamleader supercharged CRM for small businesses

“The big problem is duplicate data,” says Teamleader’s Partner Manager, Niels Vanden Buverie. “Businesses tend to have the same data in several different places. When someone changes something in the CRM it’s not changed everywhere.”

This is especially true for phone communication, which is notoriously hard to track across teams and platforms. Teamleader wanted to enable users to both call from within their browser, and log everything so that their colleagues could see the history of a customer interaction. To make this a reality, they turned to Twilio.

Twilio At The Heart of The CRM

“The CRM is the basis of everything,” says Niels. “All customers are stored in a database along with their phone numbers.” Hitting a phone number allows a user to dial through to a contact direct from the browser, via the Twilio API. Notes, call details, and recordings are stored against the contact.

For inbound calls, Teamleader triggers a popup notification. A user can then answer the call direct from the browser, again via Twilio Voice. Inbound calls are free, while outbound calls are priced at a comparable rate to any other VOIP solution.

Teamleader Customers

So how do these features make life easier for Teamleader’s end users? Xavier Bracke, CEO for both Quobu (www.quobu.com) and Mercuron (www.mercuron.eu), and a Teamleader client, finds that the integrated approach increases efficiency.

“We’re a digital agency and are used to working with a lot of different online tools,” says Xavier. “Most of the time, these tools are little islands and they don’t talk (well) to each other. We were pleasantly surprised with Teamleader that they managed to integrate everything.”

“One of the biggest improvements for us is the fact that we can use local numbers. We’re thinking of expanding to Luxemburg and knowing that the phone communication is taken care of is great. I can say that due to the local presence, we have now customers (and revenue) that we would not have had.”

Results

From 2012 to May 2016, Teamleader has grown from zero to 2,500 customers. While initial growth focused mainly on Belgium, the software is rapidly gaining traction in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the UK and France. Twilio’s international scalability has helped make this expansion much easier.

As Xavier Bracke also points out: “In the end, it comes down to the money, and if we can save just a couple of percent by having things integrated, it adds up to quite a bit in the end. Being able to call directly from Teamleader just saves time.”