Did you hear that ring? No, that’s not a “yet another incoming call”. That’s the bell tolling for the dead businesses that never managed to embrace the power of call analytics.
But you’re still alive and kicking – and have every chance to dodge the bullet of ignorance.
As helpful as state-of-the-art technologies like chatbots and AI assistants are, most consumers still rely on good old phone calls. Call management – call tracking, call distribution, and call analytics – hasn’t gone anywhere. It is still a game changer that propels or downs companies depending on how it is executed.
As a call-reliant business, you know how important it is to collect and interpret caller data before, during, and after the call. The story never ends at the end of a call. Once a caller converts or bounces, call analytics software searches for marketable customer insights and patterns.
Call analytics – usually done by call analytics software – interprets caller data into actionable marketing, sales, and customer service strategies that can grow your business and improve customer experience.
However, call analytics software never walks alone. It usually integrates with call tracking and distribution software to make up a comprehensive call management system.
To understand how ‘call analytics’ works, you must understand the path – the caller journey – that a caller undergoes on their way to a live operator.
The basic customer journey a typical caller undergoes encompasses:
- Dialing your company’s phone number.
- Interacting with your IVR system.
- Connecting to a live operator if needed.
Let’s follow this simple customer journey to understand how ‘call analytics’ collects data.
Related: How to Improve Data-Driven Decision-Making and Data Analytics?
Stage 1: Dialing Your Company’s Phone Number
The caller journey starts as they see your business phone number. This is where your first important business objective lurks: connecting your customer to a trackable phone number, whether local, international, or vanity.
Call Tracking Numbers
| Local | For promoting local products: According to Statista, 68% of customers prefer local brands to their international analogs. |
| International | Phone numbers with an international prefix, catering to heterogeneous audiences. |
| Vanity | Customized numbers imprint your brand’s image in the caller’s mind: for example, 844-PHONEXA. |
As a caller dials your trackable number, your call tracking system can already retrieve three pieces of data: whether the caller is new or recurrent, their location, and the traffic channel that triggered the call.
- If the caller is recurrent, your call tracking software will use previous caller data to improve the customer journey. In reality, this may translate into relevant IVR questions and a data-driven choice of a live operator.
- If the caller is new, your call tracking software will collect their location and add them to your system for further analytics.
In both cases, callers want a quick and high-quality response to their needs and wants, so you must immediately route them according to your call routing infrastructure. For most callers, they end up speaking to an IVR system.
Learn more about how call tracking works and synergizes with call analytics.
Stage 2: Interacting with Your IVR System
You don’t necessarily have to connect all callers to your IVR system – alternatives like voicemail or a direct connection to a customer support or sales operator are also on the table – but IVR is likely the best decision from a business perspective.
Designing your IVR’s structure is an extremely important part of your business. On the one hand, you can’t bombard callers with irrelevant questions unless you want to lose many of them. On the other hand, you must extract as much caller data as possible to give your sales or customer support reps a head start in the upcoming conversation.
As customers leave your IVR for good or connect to a live agent, your call analytics software already has an impressive amount of data to work with:
- Marketing data – the traffic channel that triggered the call.
- Caller data – demographics, psychographics, history of interactions, and more.
You only lack call data, but that’s not for long. Beware: the live call is about to commence.
Stage 3: Connecting to a Live Operator
Now that the system is searching for a matching live operator, all prayers go to the team that designed the routing architecture for your business phone system: the better it is, the more callers will get to the right agent on the first try.
Since connecting the right person to the right live operator is paramount, most call routing systems factor in several criteria:
- Location: Local sales reps are usually better with local callers, as they know the most burning problems of their place. For example, an auto insurance seeker from Florida will likely look for an insurance agent from the same state.
- Availability: Not all agents are available at all times. Whether a particular agent is busy at the time of a call or an office at a maximum capacity, you should consider these possibilities when designing your call routing architecture.
- Performance: The first hunch would be to connect high-intent callers to your best agents, and there’s much truth to that. Constantly depriving aspiring agents of important calls may not be a good long-term strategy – after all, how would they grow then? – but sometimes, it’s okay to sacrifice experience for money.
- Free pick: You can let agents pick their calls themselves, which usually fosters competition with all ensuing consequences. On that note, you can only give your agents leeway under certain circumstances: for example, only allow them to pick up calls when there are no queued calls.
With modern business phone systems, most callers are “naked” by the time they reach their live operator – in the sense that a sales or customer support rep on the other end of the phone already knows them through and through.
Post-Call Analytics: Where Call Analytics Software Shines
Once the dust settles – the caller converted or bounced – you can no longer extract data but can still leverage your call analytics platform to improve your business. Not only do you have piles of data within a single call analytics dashboard, but you also have call recordings that you can tap into to evaluate the call and its particular aspects – for example, the tone of speech of a sales rep if you want to improve customer service.
Advanced Call Analytics Tools Within Call Analytics Software
| Traffic Flow Reports | For companies buying call leads, you must know what publishers generate what leads. Traffic flow reports will help you assess your publishers and strategically allocate the budget. |
| Comparison Reports | Reworking heterogeneous data into patterns is a cool strategy, but it’s even cooler to reveal blind spots in your current strategies. Side-by-side data comparison provides a bird’s-eye view of inbound calls. |
| Filter Analyzer | For software suites abundant with settings and filters, it’s important to know how this or that filter affects your call outcomes. Filter analyzer puts you in the driver’s seat of your campaigns. |
These features are only a drop in the ocean of opportunities call analytics software unlocks. For serious businesses, you can go further than analyzing your past performance: predictive modeling.
Predictive Modeling: Your Failproof Crystal Ball
Foreseeing the future has long become a possibility with predictive modeling, a call analytics solution that predicts which of your strategies are more likely to succeed. This becomes possible by digging into historical data, adding your call data, and leveraging up-to-date AI predictive algorithms.
Predictive modeling might be your unfair advantage in the battle for new markets. Whether expanding to new locations, audiences, or strategies, you can simulate various outcomes and bring the winning ones to life. The best thing is that you don’t have to invest a dime in this research – you already have the data required for the simulation.
Related: A Complete Guide to Data Analysis: From Raw Data to Actionable Insights.
Your Most Important Phone Call Analytics Metrics
| First Call Resolution (FCR) | The more calls you convert on the first attempt, the better, as every follow-up and callback decreases the conversion rate. First Call Resolution analytics shows a good FCR rate of around 70%. |
| Average Handle Time (AHT) | One might think a quick call is a successful one, but it’s not true. According to HubSpot, the target time for a call is 4 to 10 minutes, which is enough to solve the request yet not enough to annoy the caller. |
| Hold Time | The hold time to seek is 0 – when none of your callers are put on hold during a call – but, of course, it’s impossible. In reality, achieving an average hold time of under 40 seconds (for calls put on hold) will be a success. |
| Call Transfer and Call Forwarding Rates | Call transfer (redirecting callers during a call) and call forwarding (redirecting callers before a call) rates indicate how good your call infrastructure is and whether you can ensure round-the-clock service. |
| Call Abandonment Rate | A high call abandonment rate – anything above 8% – means your call routing is suboptimal or your agents underperform for some reason. |
There are more call metrics than in the table. But this may not even matter if your call analytics system is set up to automatically interpret call data and issue recommendations and warnings when necessary, alongside adjusting your call architecture on the fly as new data is put to work.
Upgrade your business with call analytics software now to generate and convert more callers tomorrow.
