It is a common saying, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Businesses often talk about growth opportunities and leverage key changes in their routine operations to improve their team output.
However, what drives these decisions is an important metric that should be bought in attention. Unfortunately, rather than being proper data analysis these metrics are mostly verbal and subjective discussions.
As a result, the decision-makers often end up making hasty changes with no data to measure or monitor the result of those changes.
When we talk about supervising current performance and suggesting changes for improvement, reports are the most ideal solution.
A clear and effective overview of the daily business activities is essential for the heads to evaluate the current status of each employee or department.
After all, in order to make the right decisions, heads must base them on reliable and timely updated information to be certain of those choices.
According to a survey from Deloitte, 49% of respondents say that analytics helps them make better decisions, 16% say that it better enables key strategic initiatives, and 10% say it helps them improve relationships with both customers and business partners.
Well, believe it or not, a company’s survival depends on the effectiveness of those with decision making powers.
Organizations working with high and extended manpower often face this challenge of supervising their employees in an efficient yet automatic way. This is when reporting solutions enter into the picture.
Your marketing, HR, tech departments can easily file their weekly/monthly reports of the task done and you can evaluate them as per your convenience.
But, what about your team who isn’t involved with gaugeable tasks that could be logged in the end?
Here, I’m referring to your customer-facing professionals, the ones involved with your business calls.
How many prospects are connected with them? How do your agents respond? How many customers reached out for complaints? How many people apply for jobs?
Some of you might have a clue of that, while many of you may have no or absolutely wrong idea about your customer calls.
Having said that, I’d actually want to discuss what would be the results if you remain unaware of your business call activities?
Result of being clueless about your business calls
Team performance can’t be measured
Organizations on average have around 30 executives involved in attending customer calls.
It goes without saying how vital calls are as a medium of customer communication and any negligence can significantly impact your brand image. Organizations which are aware of the probable damage, they do create quality supervision teams to monitor the way their executives are communicating on calls.
Now, how would you precisely monitor this communication? Can you make your quality heads roam around the executives to hear their conversation? Certainly, not!
In the absence of a reliable data or reporting structure, it can never be feasible to gain insights into your team performance.
As a result, you’ll continue to remain unaware about:
1. How many prospects were lost without optimum efforts
2. How many customer calls were missed by your executives
3. How many customers were mistreated by your executives
4. How many refund cases came due to your team’s fault
5. How many hot leads were never called for discussion
And, the list can continue.
The gist is simple, team performance can never be improved if you don’t have this data in your hand. You might continue to form new policies/regulations, but their impact could never be measured without proper reports, hence, you might end up going in the wrong direction.
Team performance can’t be supervised
While looking at the above data points, did you think of the long-run impact of these problems?
Well, to start with:
– Hampered brand image
– Poor customer service
– Question on company’s professionalism
– Decreasing team performance
– Declining quality of overall results
While we talk about reporting of customer calls and the conversation taking place between your executives and customers, we shouldn’t just focus on its impact on your team conduct. Those ten-fifteen minute’s conversation with the customer has a lot of things at stake. And, they can easily turn to your disadvantage if not checked effectively and improved appropriately.
No measurement plus no supervision means no improvement
If there are no reports to show the loopholes in your team functioning, how would you detect the changes that you actually need? You might continue to spend in your marketing to drive more leads, whereas measures should have been taken for proper follow-ups on the existing leads.
You might continue to lose business in refund cases, whereas, you should actually be correcting your executive’s way of treating customers.
With no evidence of the current problem, it’s impossible to identify the direction where changes need to be implemented.
Every business wants to optimize growth opportunities. However, some of them fail to identify the gap where work needs to be done.
Better hiring or better training or better lead quality, the fault could be in anything. It’s the proper reporting that can give you the most appropriate answer.
The complexity of large organisations with many subsidiaries makes the issue of supervision and decision-making more complicated. Here the need for reliable reporting at all levels becomes more crucial to ensure effective changes.
What is reporting of business calls?
While a lot has been written about the impact of being unaware of your business calls, it would be right to dive into the precise meaning of ‘reporting’ customer calls.
The term or concept of reporting customer calls can have different attributes, I’ve categorized them in two broad ones:
1. Qualitative aspect
While referring to proper reporting of customer calls, hearing and analyzing the conversation is an important component of the same. Recording of customer conversations enables you to comprehend your customer requirements, quality of leads driven by your marketing, level of product understanding by your agents, their way of interacting with your customers and so on.
Components like these empower you to make decisions in the required direction and even understand your customer persona. The changes could be making modifications in your marketing approach or improvising the training given to your executives.
Without hearing what your callers ask and how your executives respond, you won’t be able to upgrade your customer’s calling experience.
And it’s an inevitable fact of today that customer experience or service is one of the top-most success metrics for businesses today.
2. Quantitative aspect
Reporting of quantifiable data largely encompasses the number of calls taken, missed and made to your customers/prospects.
Businesses invest and generate leads according to the executives and needless to say, these leads are ‘valuable’. When timely calls are not done to these prospects it certainly decreases their chances of conversion and poses a question on your brand service.
Norms should be created on the number of attempts on each lead, ideal time gap between each call, maximum time by which follow-up call should be done, and more. These pointers would help you improve your customer service and team efficiency, and these points cannot be implemented without proper data in hand.
Summing it up, be it the number of calls being unattended or hang-ups done on customer calls, both are important attributes to be checked and corrected on time. And, for both the purpose, reporting of customer calls is what’s required.
Checklist of an ideal call reporting software
Now that we have gone through the ins-and-outs of call reporting, it is equally important to look at the features of your call reporting solution. This solution would precisely be an application that would generate recordings and reports of your customer calls in an effective and comprehensible manner.
Having said that, you can’t disagree with the fact that several vendors in the market today claim to provide exclusive features, competitive pricing, forged reviews and whatnot. All to outstand the competitors and lure clients.
While there is a high probability of picking the solution blindly, one should be careful while making the final decision. Certainly, you’d start searching on the internet or call your entrepreneur friends and take their advice. But, there’s one thing you should do before anything else.
Here’s a checklist that you should consider before finalising your solution or vendor:
1. The advancement in technology
Call reporting as a feature is provided by vendors in distinctive forms, be it with traditional PBX systems or heavy software. From comparatively simpler beginnings, call reporting applications have now become much more advanced and effective.
Call reporting solutions now, not only simply provide call reports but also analytical reports to assist you in better and informed decision making.
While discussing advancement, cloud companies are the emerging players in the market, for obvious reasons. Cloud-based call reporting solutions are proving to be highly beneficial for businesses looking for analytical and reliable call reports, but with no heavy CAPEX involved.
So, while you search for your solution, ensure that it is built with the latest and updated technology, something which could actually help you take leverage of the advanced and analytical reporting.
2. The customer support provided
Presently, the quality of the customer service provided is as important as product quality. It goes without saying that many companies only focus on winning customers but don’t pay any attention to their issues after the deal is closed.
While you would invest in software, you’d require assistance with multiple kinds of issues. And, here, you would never want to be stuck with a vendor who can’t assure satisfactory service with their product.
Therefore, it’s important to check the support mediums of the vendor you finalize and how accessible it is in future.
3. Additional features available
While all your call reporting solutions will generate reports for you, there are many vendors who also provide additional features alongside. The auxiliary features could include a live monitoring panel, options for downloading the recordings, sharing the reports, getting timely updates on your mobile phone and others.
In fact, the interface of your reporting panel is equally important while you look for a reporting solution. The features available on the panel, how easy-to-use it is, how fit it is for your agent’s, and so on.
As a matter of fact, the reports also vary from solution to solution. Some just generate reports of recent calls, while some show comparative representations of previous years as well.
Undoubtedly, you’d want a solution that would provide analytical reports and not just the basic ones. You’d want a solution that can show you today’s call activities in real-time as well as provide 2 years older call reports.
4. Security of the application
Security of our data is a major concern when we use any online application. Businesses often overlook this feature and later in time, it results in their lost or hacked data. While implementing a solution that would crawl your customer and executive’s phone numbers, and also record their conversation.
The call reporting solutions collect your call data records from your agent’s phone and then store them in a database. Using a software-based interface, you are then entitled to view your call records in a functional and intuitive format.
Therefore, a solution with no safety measures won’t be able to prevent your data and you might end up losing it all. Understand the security measures of the reporting solution and where your data will be stored.
P.S. Cloud solutions have proven to be the most secure ones for storing business data.
5. Customer reviews and rating
Customer reviews are no less than personal recommendations for businesses looking for different services. Well, to some extent, it’s true as well. People who are currently using that solution would be the best reference to confirm the attributes of that product.
However, it is important to note that many companies put up fraud reviews and ratings to lure customers. Where it won’t be possible for a layman to understand if the review is genuine or not, these ratings and feedback will act just for comparative purposes between different solutions.
After all, when everything else seems fine, there is no harm in checking the customer ratings of the respective solution/vendor, just to be on the right page.
6. Scalability options
You might receive 10 calls today and 100 calls next week and 10000 next month. What if your solution has limited capacity and can’t report/record more than 500 calls?
Problem, isn’t it?
This is why it is crucial for us to implement a solution which can easily handle your increasing call volume and store all the data without any glitch.
One can never be sure of the future usage and therefore, we should onboard a solution which could easily handle your business growth.
To tell it concisely, some of you might think of call reports as an add-on or extravagance. Well, had it been 2010 I would have agreed but not anymore. It’s 2020, advancement has increased manifolds, Forbes agrees!. Just like you need to have proper data of your revenue, similarly, you ought to have proper reporting of your everyday calls to assure constant and easy supervision.
So, step up for the effective supervision of your customer calls and leverage changes in the right direction with proper call reporting.
