If you haven’t joined the CTI bandwagon, then you probably have a hard time tracking the duration of your calls (tasks) in Salesforce. At MK partners, we’re already enjoying the benefits of the Skype CTI Connector, but for one of our clients it wasn’t an option. So, we developed a simple process to help them capture the amount of time their reps spend on logging calls in Salesforce. It’s so simple in fact that we’re giving it away, just follow these two steps:

1. Create a new Activity custom field as follows:
   Datatype: Date/Time
   Field Label: Call Start
   Default Value: NOW()
   Field Level Security: Make it Visible to all profiles
   Page Layouts: Don’t display it on any of your page layouts
2. Create a 2nd Activity custom field as follows:
   Datatype: Formula
   Field Label: Call Duration
   Formula Return Type: Text
   Formula:
   TEXT(CEILING(0.24*FLOOR(100*(CreatedDate -Call_Start__c))))
   & “:” &
   RIGHT(“0″&TEXT(ROUND(MOD((1440*(CreatedDate-Call_Start__c)),60)+0.5,0)-1),2)
   Profiles/Field Level Security: Make it Visible to all profiles
   Page Layouts: Display it on your Task page layouts

That’s it! You now have a field that will track the amount of time between when you click “Log A Call” and “Save”. Now you just have to create the reports and dashboards to analyze and improve your call efficiency. Good Luck!