By Brandon W. Yuille

At first glance Call Capture may seem to be just another caller id program (like the ones that listen on your modem port). This is completely incorrect! Call Capture is a complete management/contact suite that is built to work with the Cisco IP Telephony system (expecting future versions to handle any IP phones that use SIP). Ever wonder why you switched to your new VoIP phone system (besides the low cost)? Well, you’re about to find out.

When running Call Capture, when someone calls, you get a notification via a fade-in window on the bottom right of your desktop that informs you of the person's name/company and other information. At this point you have some options: add this person to your contact directory, wait until you are finished with your conversation to add them to the later by navigating to your call history (which is almost infinite in space), or if they are already a contact in your system you can bring up all contact information that has been previously entered (by a coworker, yourself, ect) simply by clicking a button (I bet that customer will be amazed that you already know the entire history of their problem as soon as you answer).

Hopefully by that last point you're noticing the power of this application; real time accessible data by anyone in your company! There’s never a chance to miss a lead because you were unable to locate the contact’s information from Bob before he went home. Now you know everything Bob, John, Shirley, ect know when they know it.

Chances are, if you are reading this, you are involved in managing other employees. If so, then you know how important it is for them to gather as much information as possible on every single person who calls your company. Generally if someone calls you and you sell computers, they’re not looking to buy a car. That’s why every call you receive should be regarded as the best sales lead you’ll ever get! The problem lies in the fact that getting your employees to record this valuable information is almost impossible. Even if someone made a note of 2 inquiry calls chances are they are not telling you about the 30 they didn’t. Call Capture changes all this. Now you have an easy to use software suite linked in to all of your employees to view call history reports and other very useful information for determining the productivity of the individuals you are managing.

The Call Capture interface makes adding a contact about a 2 step process: when a person calls and they are not already in your contact list, you will be prompted with a new contact window to enter in some information about the person (don’t worry, we’ve implemented automatic name, company, and address information for you so you don’t have to bother with that). Then once you have all the information you need from the person, simply save their new contact window and instantly everyone in your company has access to this information. Now when you transfer this person over to tech support, they can bring up any and all information about this contact and the customer is saved from the annoyance of repeating themselves.

I’ve only tapped the surface of the Call Capture suite. As I said, this is only an introduction, but hopefully with the new knowledge of Call Capture you should have no more questions about why you bought that new phone system!