Panopto integrates with Salesforce

When Salesforce hit the market in 1999, it changed the way sales organizations kept records and communicated among themselves. Now the number one customer relationship management (CRM) software suite in the world, Salesforce helps account representatives stay organized in the office and on the road and helps their managers stay on top of what their field is doing with a single, centralized, cloud-based solution.

Of course, a CRM solution is only valuable, when its information is up to date. For sales reps, that means logging calls and activities on a daily basis. And although Salesforce provides an easy-to-use web-based interface and accompanying mobile apps, ideally, call and activity logging could be better accomplished without manually typing anything — whether that’s on a keyboard or on a 4.7-inch smartphone screen. Instead, reps should be able to log their notes simply by speaking.

This was one of our goals in building Panopto’s video integration with SalesForce.

Record Call Reports from the Road

Starting with the iPhone 4 in 2010, smartphones have almost all come equipped with front-facing cameras. The merit of the front-facing camera’s effects on culture are hotly debated, but one truth remains: it’s never been easier to capture video from anywhere.

Today, video is the closest thing we have to replicate the in-person experience, capturing both rich verbal and nonverbal communication. For salespeople recording in the field, it offers a nearly effortless medium by which they can store everything by simply speaking — just hit record.

Later, when salespeople need to prepare for the next meeting, they can re-watch their earlier video and get caught up with ease. Adding video to Salesforce means that video call reports are integrated right into the same tool that they use to keep track of other notes, action items, and documents.

When added to Salesforce, the video pulls double-duty: as both a record-keeping tool and as a reporting tool back to the sales managers at headquarters. While distance and time zones can hinder real-time communication, mobile video, added in a predictable location, bridges the gap between both time and space that separates a mobile workforce from the home office.

Searchable video makes anything accessible

One key obstacle to the pragmatic, scalable use of video for recording notes is the traditional difficulty around searching the video. Most often, search relies on titles and manually added metadata to identify relevant content within a video library. What good is taking the shortcut of recording video if one must then spend the time entering tags and metadata?

Newer video content management systems (video CMS) have finally eliminated this barrier. Through technologies like automatic speech recognition (ASR) and optical character recognition (OCR), enterprise video platforms ensure that users looking for content at a later date can search both spoken word and text captured on video from slides, documents, and even handwritten notes.

As salespeople create more and more video, it will become increasingly important not only to be able to search within individual videos but across entire libraries of video content. Using the Panopto app inside Salesforce, anyone with the right permissions can search across Opportunities, Contacts, and Campaigns. And Panopto’s Smart Search and federated search capability make search results available alongside that from other text-based content inside Salesforce.

No longer is recording audio and video a barrier to finding content later.

Panopto and Salesforce unites distributed knowledge better than ever

Working in tandem with Salesforce, Panopto’s cloud-based video CMS makes video easier to record and share information than ever before and without typing. With video players and video management tools integrated right into Salesforce, complete with federated search and single sign-on, Panopto brings unprecedented communication tools to your mobile workforce.

This article was originally published on Panopto’s blog.