Become a Softphone Expert: the Magnificent Nine of Tips and Tricks

Softphone.Pro offers many exciting features that make working much easier. They are all readily available, well-documented, and in sight in Settings so you are just one step away from the next level. Let's point them out and facilitate the boost!

1. Turn recording on

To have a record is better than to have nothing. Recorded calls are of high use when you need to know who said what literally, for disputes and controversial issues it’s good too. This is why Softphone.Pro can record audio. Sure, if needed, you can always find it in your PBX but usually it takes time. In Softphone.Pro you find and play it back immediately, just in one click.

Make sure that the tick responsible for automatic recording is on.

2. Use hotkeys

That’s a wonderful feature that seriously picks up the slack. With only a keyboard one can dial a number (Ctrl+J), answer (Ctrl+Y), hangup (Ctrl+K), change the status (Ctrl+L) and much more. Frankly, these letters drive us even more than IDDQD and WASD :)

3. Manage your status

We’re talking about a colored circle in the upper left corner:

Besides, you can see colored circles in the Contacts window, this is it too. It works if you have enabled the option “Enable presence indication (BLF)”. If not yet, do this! In such a case, you will see who of your colleagues are online, busy, or away. They will see your status too. Inter alia, that's customer care: should one see that a necessary callee is away, there is no sense to transfer the call and waste their time, it’s better to help the client in some other way.

By the way, you can set any statuses: e.g. Training, Weekly Meeting, whatever. (And the recently mentioned combo Ctrl+L, allows you to choose the necessary one quickly and without a mouse.)

4. Try various windows

Softphone.Pro can operate in a compact mode and even run minimized in tray, but if there is enough space on your desktop, we invite you to enable the Call Log window. With it you can quickly call someone back, play a record and recall the date, time, and duration of the call: this information is always in sight.

The Contacts window will be of use if you repeatedly call the same people: colleagues, business partners, friends, whoever. (Should the tick “Enable presence indication (BLF)” be on, you’ll see who is online.)

Last but not least, the Personal Stats window shows how many calls you’ve made or received and how much time spent.

5. Enable clipboard

On most modern websites phone numbers are callable: usually it is done through sip:, tel: и callto: protocols ( we wrote about itrecently). Clicking launches an associated app, so-called click2call aka click-to-call. But what if there is no calling hyperlink or you work with a Google Sheets client base where the numbers are just a plain text?

Of course, this is not an insoluble problem, the mission is possible: you can type and dial manually; you can copy and paste; you can install the Google Chrome extension. One more good way is to activate the clipboard.

It speeds the work up: a double click (select) — Ctrl+C (copy) — a floating window in the bottom right corner, the number is already there — press the green button, that’s the final step. If someone calls you, the softphone will automatically copy the number, you can paste it in CRM and save time. Try it!

6. Use dialing rules

Remember CRM and Google Sheets from the previous example? Now fancy that the numbers look different, no uniformity: some with plus, some without; brackets, hyphens and no brackets and hyphens. At the same time, your PBX needs numbers in some specific format… so let’s bring order everywhere at once.

The dialing rules don’t change numbers in your CRM and don’t invade it: the numbers are modified on the fly, your PBX gets them ready and in the right form. Time economy again: sometimes matters might be extremely urgent, no time for manual editing… well, you know :)

PBX gets them ready and in the right form

7. Tag calls

It allows to tag calls needed for some purposes. For example, one of our clients uses “a good talk” tag for teaching agents working with objections. Another client uses the tag “add to knowledge base” (when an agent fails to find an answer). We ourselves use the tag “support” when a client needs assistance with configuring: in this way we understand a ratio of technical (successful, repeated) questions in the total amount.

8. Integrate with CRM

When clients call you, the softphone searches for them in your CRM. If successful, it shows a client’s name in a popup. It’s always good to know who’s calling: no torture tiring questioning and a perfect opportunity to greet by name. A pleasure for customers and some brownie points to you.

With majors it works right out-of-the-box

With majors (Zoho, Freshdesk, Zendesk, Pipedrive, Hubspot, SalesForce, Capsule) it works right out-of-the-box though any other CRM or industry software gets integrated no much longer via event handler. For example, clients call your sales number: it launches the necessary app and opens a web page with pricing or FAQ. Upon the call end the audio record (if necessary, the screen record too) gets uploaded into a cloud or a network folder.

9. Pay attention to manuals

If you are just getting acquainted with the softphone, this piece of advice is definitely never superfluous: we’ve made up the “Quick Start manual”, it’s about the key features such as inbounds and outbounds, call management, interface and contacts.

Also note that the softphone is fully compatible with all the VoIP providers. For majors (Nextiva, Ooma, RingCentral, Twilio, Vonage) there are specific nominat instructions: how to set the softphone up, configure an account, and what to do with the SIP server, login, password, domain, and the other credentials. For the full provider list please click here.