All businesses should be looking to improve the way they work – whether that’s in service, efficiency or any other area. It’s how businesses gain an edge on competitors, grow, and thrive.
But you can’t improve how you do things until you understand how you do things. This is where analytics comes into the picture.
Call analytics may sound dry, but it’s a truly great tool. Used well, analytics will give you the insights you need to boost productivity.
Let’s begin with the basics.
What is call analytics?
Call analytics is a phone system add-on that automatically analyses call-related KPIs. It does the hard work for you. It’ll pull all the stats, and present them in easy-to-read reports that give you real insight into how you’re doing. In turn, you use this info to do it better!
Call analytics from Chrome couldn’t be easier to use. You can customise the reports, which will be sent to you automatically at intervals of your choosing. In addition, it produces live wallboards. Combined, these tell you about your performance in retrospect and in real time! Now let’s look at the most important question: how it benefits you.
What are some benefits of call analytics?
There are so many benefits to call analytics, but let’s look at our top three!
Boost efficiency
This is the big one. If you handle a lot of calls, you have an obvious business interest in making the process as efficient as possible. This is where analytics will help. Over time, you’ll gain an understanding of how long calls should take. And you’ll also see where they’re taking too long. This allows you to address the root cause, and take the steps to make you more efficient.
Improve customer experience
Customer experience matters. If it’s not up to scratch, how do you ensure customer loyalty? How can you expect to boost your reputation and reviews? And here’s something that’s terrible for customer experience: long hold times.
If people have to wait an age to get through, it makes for a poor first impression. But analytics can help you avoid this. You’ll get the insights you need to understand why people are waiting, and then you can start to address it!
Understand your business
Ultimately, this is the goal. Analytics will help you make sense of how you’re performing. From this, you can start to draw up realistic SLAs (service level agreements). You’ll understand what you can reasonably expect from your team.
You’ll understand who’s performing like a star, and who needs extra support. This in turn means you’ll know your business so much better – and all that will be based firmly on evidence. Whatever your plans for the future, these insights will help you strategise so much better.
What businesses are call analytics for?
The simple answer? Any business that handles a lot of calls. The obvious examples are contact centres and busy reception desks, where call analytics are pretty much essential. But these tools are just as important in any business or department where calls are a major part of your day-to-day work.
The point is this: you need to be efficient in any business task that you do a lot. If you can find ways of shaving off precious minutes and seconds, they really add up.
Some call KPIs and what they tell you
At Chrome, our analytics suite offers a lot of valuable stats. When you’re crunching numbers, what really matters is the relationship between them. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t look at a few key stats and what they tell you. Here’s our top three!
1. Call volumes
This simply tells you how many calls you’re getting. You can view this company-wide, by department, or by skill. On the face of it, it just tells you how busy you are. But there’s much more to it.
Let’s say that you’re getting too many calls on an extension on a particular product. You can’t reach all of them, and so you’re losing business. At the same time, people who aren’t trained on that product have more idle time.
With this information, you could decide to train more people to handle calls on that product. This means you reach more people, and pay for less idle time, without recruiting anyone!
2. Missed calls
Every call is an opportunity. And missed calls mean missed business – not to mention frustrated customers. Ultimately, if people have to wait too long to get through, they’ll give up.
Our analytics suite will tell you exactly how many times this happens, as well as how long people wait. It might be that your hold music isn’t engaging enough. Maybe your IVR is confusing? Or perhaps you’re just taking too long on calls? You can gain insights into why by looking at other stats. This in turn will help you make the right adjustments.
3. Average call duration
This does what it says on the tin: it tells you how long, on average, each call takes. Again, you can look at it company-wide or on a departmental basis. So what does it tell you?
Let’s say you’re missing lots of calls through to a particular line. Maybe it’s because calls there are taking too long? If so, you can look at ways to train your team in making them faster? Of course, you don’t want to compromise on quality, but there’s a balance. Again, these stats, and the relationship between them, will help make you faster and better.
Partnering with Chrome
We’ve been providing analytics solutions for years, along with high-performance phone systems that make every call more efficient. We’re committed to using our expertise to help. To get more out of your business communications, get in touch today.
