For those of you who don’t yet know, Fonality recently released its UAE (Unified Agent Edition) version of the PBXtra product. It is also currently in beta for trixbox Pro, and will be GA sometime in February. UAE is one of the most amazing products that I have seen in a long time…I wouldn’t even call it a product so much as a solution.

Imagine this…you have a small sales force that uses SalesForce.com as their primary CRM. A call comes into your PBX and lands in the sales queue…sales agent Joe gets the call via round robin and spends five minutes on the phone with the caller before they determine that A) this is already a pre-existing customer who is already working with sales agent Bob and B) they need to now transfer the call to Bob. At this point, sales agent Joe has wasted 5 minutes of his time, and lost his place in the round robin sales queue. Extrapolate that out over your number of sales agents, and the number of days/months/years they spend on the phone, and you can see that the amount of time wasted can really add up.

UAE SOLVES this problem (and many others). Using the queue circumvention feature, a call comes into the main IVR and then does a database lookup in a copy of the SalesForce.com database stored locally (and updated automatically) on the PBXtra or trixbox Pro system. If the Caller ID of the caller matches an existing opportunity or account, it automatically directs that call to the owner of the opportunity or account. If the Caller ID does not match, it then goes into the queue normally.

What?!? Imagine the increased efficiency obtained with that single feature alone, and UAE is already worth the extra cost (which is minimal compared to what the customer would already be paying to SalesForce.com). And that’s just ONE of the amazing integration pieces that customers get when implementing UAE.

Other features include click-to-call right from SalesForce.com, automatic screen pops that match based on opportunity or account (and if it doesn’t match, allows the user to enter in notes and create the opportunity or account right there), a deal-size alert which shows the user exactly how much revenue the phone ringing on their desk represents, automatic call logging in SalesForce.com with integrated recordings (if you have the call recorded, there is a link to the recorded call right in SalesForce).

There is NO other company (Cisco, Avaya, and Shoretel included) that offers this level of SalesForce.com integration. Period. This solution is better, cheaper, and easier to install than all other PBX integration offerings out there today as well. What does this mean for PBXtra or trixbox Pro resellers? This means they automatically have the advantage against competitors, and are much more likely to make the sale.

Time to install? Once the PBX is in place, it takes less than a minute to configure, and about 30 minutes to synchronize between the PBX and SalesForce.com. Try that with a Cisco or Avaya solution…their solutions require weeks of lead time to install and can even require expensive hardware cards necessary for the CTI integration. That’s just plain stupid…but at least they’re a lot more expensive!

Obviously, I’m pretty biased being a Fonality employee…but put side by side with other offerings…no one can touch UAE in the areas of installation time, price, and most importantly…features.

As an added note…check out this YouTube video featuring our Janitor/CEO Chris Lyman…he explains UAE in a great little sub-3 minute video, and it will show you even more about this amazing product: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8Yqgvhjb-k

-Schwood