1Stream offers integration with Salesforce.com

It's predicted that Salesforce will become the most-used CRM product in the world this year, ahead of rivals like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. It already has 14.2 percent of total CRM market share and trends company Trefis predicts this will rise to 25 percent in the next five years.

The reasons so many people are turning to Salesforce.com are simple. Cloud-based CRM is quick and easy to implement and the total cost of ownership is low compared to buying a solution outright. There's also flexibilty: if it turns out not to be what you need, you can switch it off at the end of month and change to something else. You can't do that so easily if you've made a huge upfront capital investment in a system.

Easy to integrate

Salesforce.com is also easy to integrate with other applications. They've already solved the problem of how to integrate with just about anything. You simply go to their app centre, download a pre-packaged integration system and away you go. For us to integrate Salesforce.com with our own hosted platform from Interactive Intelligence was the work of a few hours. Our customers can now turn it on anytime they want.

Salesforce is a phenomenal tool and a perfect fit for contact centres. There's a call scripting tool, for example, that's easily configurable by anybody with basic training.

1Stream's hosted contact centre solution is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis, with customers able to change the number of seats from month to month. Everything you need to run a world-class contact centre is available out of the box. There's no reason for contact centre operators to spend their time working on technology: Their advantage lies in their people, and managing people is what they can most profitably focus on. Hosted technology solutions enable them to do that.