How Aircall helped Refract increase its call activity by 30%

Refract is a business built to help sales teams get the most out of calls with customers. Its technology highlights ‘decisive and defining moments’ of every conversation, allowing reps and team leads to search, review and fine-tune their approach as and when they need to.

So when they took a moment out from helping other businesses succeed and looked at their own processes, they immediately identified a gap. Their current set-up wasn’t as agile as it could be – and the sales team’s efficiency was suffering as a result.

Already one of the 70+ businesses that integrated with Aircall’s software, they knew where to turn. Here’s how they did it.

Searching for efficiency (and a clearer view of the road ahead)

Richard Smith leads the growing Refract sales team, and had a clear view of how he wanted his team to operate.

“Most of my day is spent helping them develop, building out the upcoming pipeline, and generating an understanding of the areas where both efficiency and effectiveness could be improved.”

The team is an agile one too, using a variety of different platforms to ensure their working days are as streamlined as possible. To add another tool into the mix, integration was a key factor.

“It’s also important to understand the range of tools we use. Zoom, Hubspot, Kue, Membran, Slack – all of these are part of the team’s inner mechanics. To level up our sales processes, finding a solution that could integrate with these was key.”

A need for speed, integration and reliability

Before Aircall, the team worked well but, for Richard, there were significant areas of improvement. With just desk phones in the office, flexibility was limited – not to mention the speed in which they could carry out these calls. As a predominantly-outbound sales team, this presented an issue, and one that was accentuated by the looming threat of a global pandemic.

“Our desk phone set up wasn’t where it needed to be, and to upgrade it we didn’t want to have to completely overhaul the way we worked. The solution had to be easy to set up and configure so that the team could begin using it right away.”

As well as this, it needed to be reliable – something Smith round the competition couldn’t necessarily deliver on.

“We were trialling a competitor around the same time and it simply didn’t match up; we had issues with call quality from the outset, which made us turn to Aircall. Combined with the ability to access on our smartphones, picking up calls wherever we were, the decision became an easy one. And that’s before I even talk about how easy it was to integrate with Refract’s own software.”

Increasing activity in an instant

As soon as Refract adopted Aircall, the change in productivity was immediate. Richard oversaw his team’s operations level up almost immediately, with call frequency displaying a significant increase:

“When we’re involved in high-activity calling, we can reach new heights. We noticed an increase of 30%+ in terms of additional calls being made by our sales reps during these periods, vastly improving our productivity and efficiency across the board.”

They also found that working remotely became much easier too, with colleagues out of the office still able to hit targets that were initially harder to reach without the in-office set-up – something that has proved invaluable during the enforced working conditions of the 2020 pandemic.

A feature for every need

From there, the teams were able to improve their processes exponentially. They could tailor their strategy as they wished, avoiding traditional stumbling blocks like non-localised numbers and losing track of the number of calls they were making across each day.

“Having the ability to switch the dialling code was a huge positive for us, as well as Aircall’s ability to immediately identify the country code that was put into the system. It streamlined the team's work, creating efficiencies we previously wouldn’t have been able to access.”

The team soon found the simplicity of Aircall’s features to be one of the biggest benefits in their day-to-day processes, with time being saved across the board:

“The CRM integrations also worked wonders, particularly the ‘Click to Dial’ feature. I’d hover over a number in our system, and I could immediately call them through Aircall. It sounds simple, but it’s a real time-saver.”

A match made in heaven

The synergy between the two products was evident from the start. Now, Refract is an integrated Aircall partner and the two systems are used by a number of innovative sales teams around the world.

“From the five minutes it takes to set Aircall up, you can immediately start analysing calls within Refract – it’s extremely cool to see how quickly you can get started.”

Speed was not sacrificed for quality, either – something that made considerable impact when it came to making a purchase decision:

“For us, one of the things we can’t compromise on is call quality. We’re analysing conversations, and looking to identify patterns in them across multiple languages. Without the quality – with recordings delivered in compressed files, for example – our output dips. With Aircall, this simply doesn’t happen.”