How to get the most out of the integration of Aircall and Slack

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We are initiating a series of blog posts illustrating use-cases of Aircall’s integrations and how they can benefit your business. This one will focus on the integration of Aircall and Slack.

In case you’re wondering we have integrations with top-notch companies such as Zendesk, Pipedrive, Intercom, Salesforce, Desk, Hubspot, Zapier, Help Scout, Freshdesk and Front.

The first use case we are writing about is Medstar, a transportation company, which provides an alternative to the ambulance in Central and Eastern Washington state. They have been using Aircall and our Slack integration to facilitate calls and team communication.

We had a chat with Ezra Rocha, IT Project Manager and here’s what we talked about.

Medstar’s team member availability

What’s Medstar?

Medstar provides a wide range of transportation services, for instance: paratransit services for people with disabilities or who are elderly – doctor appointments, visits, shopping, any type of meeting. Their services also include private taxi & shuttle service for events, private events and also group visits to the city and the near by region. They also have bus services for the suburbs area.

Medstar transports roughly 5,000 customers. They have a small call center in Yakama, WA – about 14 people work there, but every team member is trained to answer calls and talk to the customers, just in case.

Back in the day, Medstar used Digium VocalCloud and desk phones. However this wasn’t the best system for one reason:

• Some people on the team are more focused on scheduling the drivers and communicating with the drivers so they would mostly not answer the phone which would ring endlessly until somebody else would pick up.

Medstars needed a reliable service for call distribution. At the same time they started doing more events and wanted something that would fonction out of the office too.

As Ezra puts it:

“Before Aircall, we were actually going through 6 different providers and had a comparison chart where we were benchmarking all the features. Then we found Aircall’s public roadmap that presented the available features and also those who were about to be implemented, we liked it and decided to give it a try”

Medstar’s call-center organization with Aircall

Medstars has several business lines each of them dedicated to one particular use or service:

• the reservation line where clients call to schedule trips a day in advance. This line is also used by medical facilities who schedule trips for their residents.

• the “will-call” line – clients need pick-up within an hour from medical facilities

• the brokers line – trips that are paid by medical insurance or any kind of insurance

• the line for the accounting department since they also answer phone

• the line for the bus route service that we provide, there’s always lots of people calling in asking for information about the route

• the managers line – for when the team is working remotely – any staff member that’s out of town can still help answer phones

Aircall and Slack integration use-case

As Erza told us,
But how does the team use our integration? As you’ll see it’s simple and effective.

The team has created 2 slack channels corresponding to 2 targeted needs and functions:

• One that lets the managers and all the team members know when people are available for phone calls and when lines are open and closed

The staff members are constantly in and out of office so they need to keep track of people who actually are in the office and accepting calls.

• Secondly, if there’s anyone trying to get through but for some reason there’s a longer waiting time, a message is sent to managers to get them on the phones also.

Basically, as Ezra said: “We don’t want to get too many people on the Aircall dashboard and make changes that could reduce our call volume”

We’ll be posting some more use-cases of our different integrations, stay tuned! In the meanwhile:

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Published on March 23, 2016.