Informed business decisions rely on having accurate, timely information to hand. Your finance, sales and support teams are probably already giving you this information, but does it give you the full picture about what is actually going on?
One valuable source of insight to support these metrics is your business telephone system.
By gaining access to valuable data about the use of your telephone system, you can accurately assess business performance in terms of customer service delivery, sales and potential areas of missed opportunity, which will all help with future strategic planning.
Here are 4 ways your phone system can be used to assess your business performance:
1.Have calls been answered?
The ultimate goal for any business should be to ensure that all incoming calls are answered. This is obviously not possible ALL the time so provisions should be made to service the calls which can’t be answered – with Voicemail for example.
2.How long until a call is answered?
Rather than putting calls through to a mailbox, some businesses may choose to put calls in a queue until someone is available to answer. Make sure the waiting time is kept to a minimum to avoid the call being abandoned. Being able to see these statistics in real time allows you to see a number of useful metrics including:
- Average call waiting time
- Call abandonment rates
- Average call duration
3.How many calls were lost?
Potential business shouldn’t be lost because of a missed call. Call reportting tools can help you see which calls were abandoned/missed with telephone numbers so you can call back and follow up on the reason for their call.
4.How successful are marketing campaigns?
The success of a marketing campaign will always come down to the number of leads that were generated. A good phone system will allow you to advertise different numbers (even if you’re not physically based there!) so you can portray a local presence or “tag” incoming calls using a specific code.
The number of enquiries from these numbers/tags can then be used to calculate the overall success of the marketing campaign by giving a complete view of the responses and conversions.
Things to consider:
Staying with your existing traditional phone system could be putting your business at a significant disadvantage. Without access to valuable call reporting facilities gained with alternative solutions, making effective operational decisions to improve business performance is much more difficult.
By using a hosted (or Cloud based) phone system you can gain valuable insight about customer communications including:
• Better planning for resource allocation
• Assisting with budgeting for future peaks in demand
• Improving the levels of customer service provided
• Helping to understand marketing campaign success
• Delivering additional insight that will help inform future business strategy
