Streak received a big upgrade last year to allow our users to better organize and share contact information with our simple, intuitive, and automatically enriched Streak Contacts. One of the most popular benefits of Contacts is the ability to take actions directly from a Contact, like sending an email (which is automatically attached to the box), a calendar invite, a Hangouts Chat invite, or a Hangouts Video Call.
Those are all great ways to save time, but the star of this post is starting a calling directly from the Contact card!
<a href="#getting-started-ringcentral" class="anchor-link">Getting started with RingCentral</a>
<a href="#making-your-first-call" class="anchor-link">Making your first call</a>
If you have a telephone number associated with a Contact, Streak will use your default dialer tool to call that phone number! By default, Gmail will use your Chat/Hangouts dialer to make the call. But if you’re using a more comprehensive VOIP solution (like RingCentral), you can change the default so Streak uses RingCentral (etc) for click to call!
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If you haven’t already, download RingCentral for Desktop, open the app, and login to your account. You’re now ready to make RingCentral the default dialer for your computer!
Within the RingCentral app, click the “Settings” dial in the bottom righthand corner…
and click “Apply” next to “Set as a default faxing and calling application”
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The next step is to turn off Chat in Gmail (again, if not already done). The reason you need to do this is: by default, any tel: or call:to link clicked in Gmail will automatically dial using Google Chat/Hangouts dialer. We don’t want to use Chat/Hangouts, so to turn off that setting:
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On the first use of RingCentral for Desktop, you’ll get a prompt asking if you’d like to open the RingCentral app. The messages are slightly different between Macs and PCs (as you can see in the images below), but you’ll want to select the option that will launch RingCentral. By selecting the checkbox to “Remember my choice,” your computer will immediately open RingCentral for Desktop when you click on phone numbers using tel:, callto:, and fax: protocols.
As long as you don’t have any other Chrome extensions that may cause conflicts (for example, another dialer like the Dialpad extension — which is an alternate tool you can use), you should see the fruits of your labor!
As you can see in the GIF, a Call Log is automatically created in the box as well! It’s just one less step you have to worry about, now all you need to do is add notes from the call and your team is in the loop! This is done whether you use RingCentral, Dialpad, or Hangouts Dialer.
For those who haven’t used RingCentral or don’t know much about the tool, check out some of their additional resources on their Youtube channel, Customer Care Center, and Blog.
If you run into any issues getting the connection between Streak and RingCentral set-up, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@streak.com!
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