VoIP integration with CRM: The essential guide

Teamwork is a challenge — especially when your team doesn’t have context for past interactions with contacts. If no one can get the full picture, how can anybody pinpoint where a deal went south? 

For any growing team, integrations solve misunderstandings and miscommunications. VoIP-CRM integrations sync data between your VoIP system and CRM, such as Salesforce or HubSpot. 

In this guide to VoIP integration with CRMs, you’ll learn how it works and how it benefits you, how to choose the best VoIP system for CRM integration, and what CRM integrations the top VoIP providers offer. Now, let’s dig in.

What is a VoIP integration? 

VoIP integrations help solve operational problems and improve communication by syncing data in real time between platforms. The result? Clear and consistent communication on autopilot.

You can use multiple VoIP integrations (such as Slack, Zapier, and email) if your VoIP provider allows it. This process lets you maximize the strengths of each platform without making any tradeoffs.

How it works

So, how does this integration work? The general idea is that your VoIP system can sync with other tools to automate specific workflows. For instance, using OpenPhone’s Zapier integration, you can seamlessly integrate customer service software like Front with OpenPhone to import new messages from OpenPhone into Front as they arrive.

What is a VoIP CRM integration? 

A customer relationship management system, or cloud CRM, is a tool businesses use to track customer interactions.

A VoIP CRM integration connects your CRM system with your other business tools, enabling information sharing.

For example, working with a team can make it tough to track who has communicated with a contact and when. Integrating your VoIP business phone system with your CRM simplifies this process. It automatically logs calls made using your business number, saving time and ensuring everyone on the team has up-to-date information. This shared context makes it easier to ensure customer satisfaction.

How it works

A VoIP phone system can integrate with your CRM to complete a variety of tasks — not just logging calls. For example, a VoIP integration can give you a CRM with text messaging, call notifications, voicemails, and call recordings all automatically logged — providing your team with a single source of truth.

Your CRM contacts can also automatically be pushed to your phone system so you can see when an incoming call is from a contact already added to your CRM. Then, you can pull up their history in just a couple of clicks and be ready to go. 

8 Benefits of using a VoIP integration with CRM

Still need to get buy-in from your team on connecting your CRM to a VoIP system? Or curious about some of the other perks?

Let’s break down the top eight advantages of using a VoIP-CRM integration in more detail:

1. Drive more revenue

With auto-logged activities, you can run reports in your CRM to see how your team spends their time on the phone. Filter by customer support representative, dates, and other criteria to get an accurate overview of VoIP phone usage. 

You can use metrics like time spent on calls and conversion rates to coach your sales team, reward team members who go above and beyond, and track call outcomes.

2. Collect vital customer information in a flash

Without a VoIP system with a CRM integration, your team would have to dial customers individually, input call data by hand into a CRM, and spend extra time tracking down information when it’s time to follow up. 

Instead, if one teammate calls a client and someone else needs to follow up, they can easily access that previous interaction from one dashboard. With VoIP integration, they can also click-to-call directly from the CRM.

3. Save big on operating costs

Time is money, and VoIP-CRM integrations help you save both by streamlining your operations. Instead of manually following up with prospects and coordinating with team members separately, all your communications and data are securely stored in one place in the cloud.

With freed-up time and capital, your team can focus on the things that matter most — like reaching out to new prospects or improving your company’s services or products. 

4. Track all your phone communication

A VoIP-CRM integration simplifies operations by centralizing customer contact information and providing a clear sales funnel overview. With click-to-call enabled, reps can make calls directly from your VoIP service on desktop or mobile, eliminating the need to use personal phones for work. This ensures no call data is missed and helps maintain a healthy work-life balance with separate work and personal numbers.

5. Save time after every call

The best VoIP-CRM integrations auto-log all activities, saving your team time and energy. Since your CRM automatically stores all your inbound and outbound calls, voicemails, call recordings, and texts under the relevant contact, it reduces time spent manually logging information.

Plus, the next time you need to reference a customer conversation, you will know exactly where to find it.

6. Organize customer contact information across systems

Worried about entering duplicate contacts? How about the stress of keeping up with multiple address books? 

With a CRM phone integration, you can throw those worries out the window. CRM contacts can automatically be pushed to your VoIP system to avoid duplicate contacts.

7. Deepen your existing customer relationships

Integrations streamline customer acquisition and strengthen trust and relationships with existing clients. With a CRM, you can quickly address customers’ concerns, view caller history, and review past requests, all in one place.

By automating repetitive tasks, like switching between platforms or sending repeat messages, VoIP-CRM integrations free up your time to focus on delivering valuable customer support.

8. Work more efficiently with automation

Automatically syncing activities like calls and texts is just the beginning of what you can do. For example, integrating your CRM and VoIP via Zapier can help you send messages automatically when you get a new lead and send bulk messages for product updates. 

When you link your primary business tools together, you never have to compromise on your business call management or customer relations — you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Top 5 VoIP providers with CRM integrations

Ready to begin your search? We’ve done some legwork for you. Here’s a convenient comparison with some of the top VoIP providers, and you’ll find an overview of each below the grid.

Provider	OpenPhone	RingCentral	Dialpad	8×8	JustCall
Starting price	$23 per user per month	$25 per user per month	$25 per user per month	Contact for a quote	$29 per user per month
Unlimited calling to US & Canada	✓	✓	✓	✓	X
SMS/MMS to US & Canada	✓	100 per user per month	US and Canadian customers only	✓	✓
Salesforce integration	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
HubSpot integration	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Auto-log calls	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Auto-log texts	✓	✓	✓	X	✓
Shared phone numbers	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Additional phone numbers	$5 per number per month	$4.99 per number per month	Varies for local and toll-free	Contact for a quote	$6 per number per month

Keep reading for more information about the top five VoIP providers with CRM integration.

1. OpenPhone: Best option for growing teams

Pros

• Free calls and texts in the US and Canada
• Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zapier integrations
• Lightweight CRM for shared contacts, inboxes, and notes
• Easy setup
• Transparent pricing

Cons

• Integrating with other CRM systems via webhooks or Zapier requires more legwork

OpenPhone is a cloud-based VoIP phone service designed to help you build better relationships with your customers. You can use our platform to reach contacts anywhere in the world on devices (laptops, computers, smartphones, and tablets) your team already uses.

Every user comes with a number (US, Canadian, or North American toll-free) for unlimited calling and texting in the US and Canada. 

You can also assign team members to a single shared number. With shared numbers, every member assigned to the number can call and text from that number. This means everyone can work more efficiently as a team and follow up on conversations quickly and seamlessly.

On the Business plan, you’ll also get call recording, phone menus (IVR auto-attendant), group calling, call transfers, and analytics and reporting to help you interpret your customer data. It’s like having a universe of business tools at your fingertips whenever you need them.

As one user put it, “OpenPhone gives me the ability to do everything I usually do on my phone from the desktop while I’m using my CRM. I love the voicemail transcripts and text message conversations I can have within the platform!” 

You can track it all in OpenPhone’s lightweight CRM or integrate with Salesforce and HubSpot. Each CRM integration lets you automatically log all phone interactions into your CRM and see when a CRM contact reaches out when your team is using OpenPhone. You can also loop in teammates outside your CRM and phone systems by integrating with Slack. If you don’t use any of those, our Zapier integration, API, and webhooks let you create workflows to connect OpenPhone to your CRM.

In addition, all call recordings, texts, and voice messages are in the same view inside your OpenPhone workspace, allowing your team to easily catch up on conversations and help customers. Call transcriptions and summaries help your team get even more context.

Thousands of growing teams and businesses use OpenPhone to build better relationships with their customers. You can try OpenPhone for yourself by signing up for our seven-day free trial today. Then, once you decide OpenPhone is the right fit, you can easily port any existing US, Canadian, or North American toll-free number straight from the web or desktop app. 

OpenPhone pricing

Here are OpenPhone’s pricing plans, designed to give your team the flexibility to scale as your business grows:

• Starter: $15 per user per month to share a number with up to 10 teammates, auto-attendants, scheduled texts, and more 
• Business: $23 per user per month to unlock call transfer, logs and analytics, HubSpot CRM integration, the ability to share your phone number with as many teammates as you need, and more
• Enterprise: Custom pricing to unlock a dedicated account manager to tailor a plan to your team’s needs

2. RingCentral: Top option with a Microsoft Teams integration

Pros

• Call, text, and video conferencing features
• CRM integrations available with an upgrade
• Document file sharing and team messaging for collaboration

Cons

• Limited text messages (100 per user per month)
• Difficult to review customer calls, texts, and voicemails
• Call recordings only remain for up to 90 days

RingCentral is a unified communications platform (UCaaS) offering call, text, and video conferencing features on every plan. If you field many calls, you might like that RingCentral caters to large enterprises with large call centers.

While RingCentral offers a lot of features, it all comes at a price — and with a lot of glitches.

One RingCentral user wrote, “Our salespeople are always on the move using WiFi. This may not be all RC’s fault, but the reliability is so bad for some of our salespeople that they have just stopped using the app when they’re not at their desks. This causes a lot of different issues (not using something we’re paying for, their numbers not hitting our KPI reporting software, etc.).”

While that’s not ideal, RingCentral has helpful features if you can get it to work properly. RingCentral integrates with CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Zoho and has related features — like automatic call recording, video meetings, and integrations with Microsoft Teams, Slack, and other popular apps. But those are locked behind higher tiers. Even with upgrades, you can’t quickly review all calls, texts, and voicemails with a customer in the same thread.

Another caveat? RingCentral’s shared phone number feature is only helpful for incoming calls. While you can use shared lines to answer calls with other team members, you won’t be able to field incoming texts together. And those automatic and on-demand call recordings? They expire after 90 days. 

When all is said and done, your time might be better used looking for other VoIP systems with CRM integrations if you’re not a call center.

RingCentral pricing

RingCentral pricing has three major tiers:

• Core: $20 per user per month for unlimited calls in the US and Canada with business SMS (25 texts per user) and toll-free minutes (100 minutes per account)
• Advanced: $25 per user per month to access video meetings with voicemail transcriptions, automatic call recording, CRM integrations, 100 text messages per user, and 1,000 toll-free minutes per account
• Ultra: $35 per user per month to get additional storage, device analytics, 200 text messages per user, and 10,000 toll-free minutes per account

3. Dialpad: Best option with AI-based agent training

Pros

• Salesforce and HubSpot integrations 
• Call and voicemail transcriptions
• Speed coaching for larger teams

Cons

• Additional numbers require an upgrade
• Pro plan requires you to pay for at least three users
• Time-consuming to set up

Dialpad is another VoIP business phone system built for call centers and larger teams. It offers AI-based training for call center agents. But if you’re a small business, you might find that its bells and whistles make your workflows less streamlined instead of more.

Its Salesforce integration lets you automatically log inbound and outbound calls, voicemails, recordings, and SMS messages sent or received directly from its desktop or mobile apps. But don’t expect perfection — it won’t always do what you want.

One Dialpad user wrote, “Sometimes the integration to Salesforce isn’t perfect. Notes don’t always transition over how I would like for them to, and the transcript could be better at times.” 

Dialpad’s HubSpot integration logs calls and connects matching contacts and notes between Dialpad and HubSpot. However, SMS messages are not currently logged to a number, making reporting less precise.   

If you’re a smaller business or solopreneur, you might be frustrated to find that Dialpad requires you to pay for at least three users on their Pro plan. Of course, you’ll need at least the Pro plan to access advanced features like CRM integrations. So, if you’re on your own — you’re on your own. 

Our guide to Dialpad alternatives covers some other roadblocks you can run into when setting up your team in Dialpad. 

Dialpad pricing

Dialpad plans include:

• Standard: $15 per user per month for unlimited calls, SMS and MMS support, and unlimited video meetings 
• Pro: $25 per user per month to access local numbers in 70+ countries, up to 25 ring groups, CRM integrations, and international SMS (three user seat minimum)
• Enterprise: Custom price to unlock guaranteed uptime and unlimited ring groups (100 user seat minimum)

4. 8×8: Best solution for large enterprises

Pros

• Global call coverage 
• Unified mobile, desktop, and web app

Cons

• UI is outdated 
• Salesforce and HubSpot integrations don’t log texts
• May have to pay for features you don’t need

Another VoIP business phone system with CRM integration is 8×8. It’s a cloud-based VoIP offering voice, video, and text messaging features.

But 8×8 is another VoIP business phone system built for enterprises and not for small businesses, so these features don’t come cheap.

Its Salesforce and HubSpot integrations don’t log texts, meaning you can’t push business messages to your current CRM. 

You may also find transparency, customer service, and even CRM integrations are lacking. One user wrote, “Like many other reviewers, I believe this integration seems to be broken. When you attempt to open 8×8 within HubSpot, it just creates an error prompt that says, “This 8×8 integration dialog is already opened!”.” 

Small businesses trying to promote teamwork, monitor budgets, and prioritize customers might want to shop around to find a solution that suits their business needs. 

8×8 pricing

8×8 recently introduced several new plans:

• Contact Center: High-volume messaging, omnichannel routing, and AI-enabled self-service
• CX Beyond the Contact Center (8×8 Engage): Calls, integrations, and advanced queue management
• Communications APIs: High-volume SMS, authentication and fraud prevention solutions, messaging, video, and voice
• Unified Communications (8×8 Work): Calls, team messaging, and video conferencing

But you’ll need to contact them directly to request a quote.

To get an idea of 8×8’s pricing structure before this change, check out our guide to 8×8 pricing.

5. JustCall: Top choice for outbound sales teams

Pros

• Offers sales dialer for outbound motions
• Salesforce, HubSpot, and other integrations
• Inbound minutes included (1,000 per user)

Cons

• More expensive than other providers
• Add-on fees can pile up quickly
• Some integrations are smoother than others
• Limited outbound minutes (500 per user)

JustCall offers call center software and automations to contact centers and customer support teams. (Noticing a trend here? It seems most VoIP business phone services are designed for call centers.) It serves 6,000+ enterprise customers within a wide range of industries, including some well-known brands.

While JustCall does offer Salesforce, HubSpot, and other advanced integrations, they leave room for improvement. This JustCall user wrote, “The dialer was very buggy and it often would just not work. It would pop up and nothing. Followed everything support asked, and it would still not work reliably. I tried my hardest to get this integration to work because when it did, it was awesome. But that was rare.” 

What’s more, JustCall is one of the pricier options, and you’ll have to pay for outbound and inbound minutes if you go over your limit. With all these barriers, some small businesses will find the upgrades and add-ons aren’t worth dipping into the budget.

JustCall pricing

The first thing that stands out about JustCall’s plan details is the price tag. There are four major plans:

• Essentials: $19 per user per month (one user minimum) for call recording and voicemail, basic analytics, and Slack integration
• Team: $29 per user per month (two user minimum) to access AI call transcriptions and summaries, 100+ CRM and data integrations, and call menus
• Pro: $49 per user per month (two user minimum) to unlock bulk SMS campaigns, power dialer, and intelligent call routing
• Business: Custom price (10 user minimum) for personalized onboarding, enterprise-grade SLA, and single sign-on (SSO)

How to select the best VoIP system for CRM integration

The first step to integrating VoIP with CRM is to find software tools that are compatible with each other. Otherwise, you won’t be saving much time at all. If your current phone carrier or VoIP service provider doesn’t offer CRM integrations, perhaps it’s time to look elsewhere.

Beyond ensuring a VoIP platform integrates with your CRM software, teams can shortlist their must-have VoIP features, such as:

1. Track growth easily with KPI analytics

A modern VoIP system with key performance indicator (KPI) tracking and analytics simplifies reporting and helps you measure growth. 

Many systems integrate directly with your CRM to display metrics like:

• Total time on the phone
• Number of messages sent
• Activities per hour
• Number of unique conversations

You can also review actions by the time of day to determine when your team is most active or when inbound calls spike.

2. Improve team efficiency with CRM contact visibility

Example of an incoming call from a HubSpot contact in OpenPhone

As your business grows, it becomes disorienting to constantly switch back and forth between your CRM and phone address book.

With a VoIP provider like OpenPhone, your CRM address book can sync automatically with your phone inbox. That makes it easy to quickly identify CRM contacts in your VoIP system each time you receive incoming calls and messages. Your team can also keep tabs on customer information and communications without juggling multiple desktop windows.

3. Simplify collaboration with auto-logged conversations

One of the biggest perks of integrating your CRM account with your VoIP service is the ability to auto-log activities. After you get a VoIP number, you can effortlessly capture all customer messages and calls.

You won’t have to take any additional steps to ensure your colleague in sales sees the customer service call you just made on a client account. The auto-log feature makes it easy for cross-departmental collaboration, and it’s an integral component of any VoIP-CRM integration — a feature OpenPhone proudly offers users.

4. Streamline communication with additional business features

Other business phone features could be helpful to streamline your internal business communication and general workflow.

OpenPhone stands out from the pack with features built for the modern-day workplace. Our VoIP service includes all the business tools you’d expect, along with those you didn’t know you needed:

• Away voicemail greetings
• Customized business hours
• SMS and MMS capabilities
• Snippets (text message templates) and auto-replies
• Scheduled text messages
• Phone menu (IVR)
• Call recordings
• Caller ID
• Call analytics
• Internal chat threads
• Integrations with tools like Zapier, Slack, and email
• API to integrate with other CRMs and automate specific text touchpoints
• Call transcriptions and summaries

You can try OpenPhone today with a seven-day free trial. 

5. Maximize value with a VoIP system that’s easy to scale

Choose a VoIP system that grows with your business. Look for a provider that allows you to easily add users and lines without requiring costly plan upgrades or hidden fees. 

This flexibility ensures your team can expand while keeping costs under control. OpenPhone has straightforward plans that support your business’s growth without unnecessary expenses.

Using HubSpot or Salesforce? Connect your CRM to OpenPhone

There are plenty of CRM platforms and VoIP providers on the market today. The trick is finding the right tools for your business and ensuring they’re compatible.

If you’re ready to make the leap and connect your HubSpot or Salesforce CRM to OpenPhone, what are you waiting for? OpenPhone’s business features and integration capabilities make it more than a run-of-the-mill phone system. Take advantage of call logging synchronization with your CRM account, transparent pricing plans, and easy scalability using OpenPhone.

Test it for yourself by signing up for a free trial of OpenPhone today.

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