Phone & softphone

What "built-in phone system" means

Most CRMs describe telephony as an integration: you buy a cloud phone system somewhere else, connect it with a plugin, and calls appear in the CRM afterwards — usually as a line of text, sometimes with a link to a recording hosted by the other vendor.

SaleInline runs the phone system itself. There is a PBX in the platform, your agents get extensions on it, and the softphone is a part of the CRM interface rather than a separate application. The practical differences show up in three places:

• Calls are records, not references. Duration, direction, outcome and the recording belong to the lead, and are a dataset in the report builder like anything else.
• There is one bill and one party responsible. When a call drops, there is no argument about whether it was the CRM, the connector or the phone vendor.
• Routing knows who your users are. An IVR can send callers to a department or a specific person because the PBX and the CRM share the same user list.

Two ways to connect a line

This is the decision most teams need to make first, and either option is fully supported.

The first option surprises people, so it is worth being explicit: you do not have to change telephone providers to use the softphone. You enter the extension credentials you already have, and the platform acts as a transparent gateway — it bridges the browser\'s encrypted WebSocket connection to the standard SIP your operator speaks. Your customers keep calling the number they know, and your existing contract carries on.

Multiple lines are supported, which is how branches and departments are usually separated, and each inbound line can be routed to a different team.

The softphone in the browser

The softphone is a panel inside the CRM. There is nothing to install, no desk phone to buy and no second application to keep signed in.

Click to call from anywhere

A phone number on a lead, a deal, a list row or a conversation is a button. The call starts in the browser and the log is attached to that record automatically.

Incoming calls pop the customer

When the phone rings, the matching contact opens, so the person answering already knows who is calling and what was last discussed rather than asking.

Recording

Calls can be recorded and the audio is attached to the lead, playable from the record. Recording is subject to your local legal obligations about informing the other party.

An extension per user

Each user has their own endpoint, so internal calls between colleagues work and inbound routing can target one person rather than a shared phone.

It recovers on its own

The softphone reconnects automatically after a network blip or a laptop waking from sleep, which is the difference between a phone system people trust and one they keep a mobile beside.

IVR voice menus and routing

An IVR is the recorded menu a caller hears — "press 1 for sales, press 2 for support". Building one is a settings screen rather than a support ticket.

1. Upload your greetingRecord the audio however you like and upload it; the platform converts it to the format the PBX needs.
2. Map the keysEach key goes to a department, a specific user, or everyone — the list comes from your actual CRM users, so it stays correct when somebody joins or leaves.
3. Set working hoursThe menu can behave differently outside business hours, so callers at 22:00 get a message rather than a phone ringing in an empty office.
4. Decide what happens with no keypressUsually ring everyone in the target group at once, so an undecided caller is not dropped.

Because the routing targets CRM users, an inbound call reaches the right person and the log lands on the right record without anybody typing a number into a form afterwards.

The power dialer

The power dialer works through a list of leads and calls them one after another, so the agent spends their time talking rather than copying numbers.

You build the queue from the lead list — filter to the segment you want, use "select all matching this filter" if it is larger than one page, and send the selection to the dialer. After each call the agent records a disposition: answered, no answer, wrong number, not interested, call back. That disposition is stored on the call log, which means it becomes a report dimension.

The reason dispositions matter more than they look: without them, "we called 400 people" is a number with no information in it. With them, you can see that 180 never answered, which is a list-quality problem, not an effort problem — and those are fixed in completely different ways.

The power dialer is available from the Growth plan.

What gets logged, and what you can measure

Every call — inbound or outbound, answered or not — writes a record containing the direction, the number, the CRM user, the timestamp, the duration, the disposition where one was set, and the recording where one exists.

Because calls are a dataset in the pivot report builder, the questions teams usually want answered are reports rather than requests:

• Calls per agent per day, and how many were answered.
• Outcome distribution by list, campaign or source — which is how you tell a bad list from a bad pitch.
• Average call duration by outcome, which is often the earliest sign that a script is not working.
• Missed inbound calls by hour of day, which usually reveals a staffing pattern nobody had noticed.
• Calls alongside the lead response time measurement, counted in working minutes so that a call returned first thing in the morning is not recorded as an eleven-hour delay.

What you need to run it

The requirements are modest but worth checking before you plan a rollout:

• A modern browser — the softphone uses WebRTC, which Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all support.
• A headset. Laptop speakers and microphone work, but echo on a speaker is the single most common complaint in any browser-based phone deployment, and a €20 headset removes it.
• A stable connection. Voice is sensitive to packet loss rather than raw bandwidth; an unstable Wi-Fi connection is a worse experience than a slower wired one.
• An extension with your provider, if you are bringing your own line.

Voice traffic runs over an encrypted WebSocket transport, so calls stay inside the browser session rather than travelling as plain SIP across the network.

When the audio is bad: what to check

Browser-based telephony is reliable, but when it goes wrong it always goes wrong in one of a small number of ways. Working through these in order resolves the overwhelming majority of complaints, usually in the first two steps.

The last row is worth expanding, because it catches people out. Many operators require the number you present as caller ID to be explicitly registered on their side before outbound calls will connect. If internal extension-to-extension calls work and external calls are rejected, that is almost always what is happening, and it is resolved in the provider\'s panel rather than in SaleInline.

How the phone connects to the rest of the CRM

The telephony module would be a modest feature on its own. What makes it worth having in the CRM is what it touches:

Call → lead

An inbound call from an unknown number creates a lead, with the number already normalised to international format so it does not duplicate an existing contact.

Call → activity timeline

Direction, duration, outcome and the recording appear on the customer record next to the WhatsApp messages and the notes, in one chronological history.

Call → report builder

Calls are a dataset, so agent activity, outcome distribution and missed-call patterns are reports you build rather than exports you request.

Lead list → power dialer

Any filtered segment can be sent to the dialer as a calling queue, and the dispositions come back as structured data on each lead.

Shift calendar → response time

A returned call counts towards the response-time measurement in working minutes, so calling back first thing in the morning is not recorded as an overnight delay.

Department chart → who can hear what

Call logs and recordings follow the same visibility scope as every other record, so a branch manager hears their branch\'s calls and an agent hears their own.

Which plan includes what

The phone module itself is part of the platform on every plan. A SIP line from us is an optional add-on at $60 per month; if you connect your own provider line instead, there is no add-on to buy. See the pricing page for the full comparison.