A few months ago, I predicted that the low hanging fruit for WebRTC in the enterprise space would be in customer service and support applications, including e-commerce sites. This prediction turned out to be true when FreeCRM announced that it has already integrated WebRTC into its cloud-based CRM solution. In the initial offering, the agent is only able to make outbound calls to the PSTN. This fall, the company will enable inbound calls as well.
FreeCRM has not developed this capability alone. Rather, it has deployed an Asterisk PBX in its cloud that acts as a gateway to the PSTN. Asterisk announced support for WebRTC in its Version 11 release back in
November of 2012. The company reports that the WebRTC audio is solid and that the solution works flawlessly. Also, because it is cloud-based, FreeCRM can aggregate the usage and get very low costs for PSTN calling.
FreeCRM works on a freemium model with “typical” freemium conversion rates (the WSJ reported these are 1% - 2%). FreeCRM’s CEO reports there are roughly 290,000 registered users, and if 2% of these are paying users, then the company has roughly 5,800 paid subscribers.
WebRTC outbound calling capability is only available in FreeCRM’s premium product branded VoiceCRM, which costs $39.95/user/month. However, for this price, users can make unlimited free WebRTC-based calls to any PSTN/mobile number within the United States. Fifty percent of the company’s users are based outside of the U.S., so FreeCRM is looking for solutions that can give these customers WebRTC-to-PSTN international calling plans that are economical.
FreeCRM is firing the first shot in the WebRTC CRM wars that are certainly heating up. Several other CRM vendors are working on WebRTC integration into their products. FreeCRM claims these solutions from traditional CRM vendors will likely cost 3x – 5x more per fully functional CRM seat than what FreeCRM charges.
