What is call analytics?

Sales and marketing teams are always interested in the actionable insights that can be mined from the company call center or customer service platform.

These insights include things like: how are clients interacting with your agents, and what can be learned to improve the customer experience, future advertising initiatives, and consequently future profitability?

Call analytics aims to answer this question by collecting, analyzing, and reporting on data and metrics found in phone calls.

While you can certainly have employees listen in on all your call center conversations, doing so would be immensely inefficient. Instead, modern solutions use artificial intelligence to scan through call data and record vital data points like:

• Caller’s name and contact information
• How the caller found your brand
• How the call was routed (to hold, to voicemail, or answered)
• Date and time of the conversation
• Product or service caller was interested in
• General sentiment of the call
• How likely it is for the caller to convert to a customer

Using this data, marketing departments can get a better idea of what the customer journey looks like, tweak advertising efforts accordingly, and resolve issues that could compromise on conversion rates.

By the time people have called your business, they are well into the conversion process. They’ve already determined a need and done basic market research into potential solutions, and you’ve just made the shortlist. A phone conversation is a critical step to learn from.

The problem with phone conversations is that they aren’t easy to quantify and analyze. But with the right call analytics tools, you can understand how your audience is reacting to your advertising efforts. You can analyze the performance of your sales agents, help them improve the work they do, and find potential problems that could be cutting into your bottom line.

And after the call, you have more information with which to determine best next steps, such as what the retargeting campaign would look like. Overall, you’re getting more out of your marketing budget and more personalized marketing through what you discover in call analytics.

Call analytics is so versatile that industries everywhere are finding applications for it, including B2B, technology, finances, e-commerce, education, travel, retail, and real estate to name a few.

The aim of call analytics is to find out where calls are coming from, what the customer generally wants from the call, and how the call is going while it’s in progress. So what tools and software does a business use to pick up the related call metrics?

• Call recording: You’ve probably called a customer service line before and been told that “this call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.” Call recording saves a copy of the conversation with the customer so that you can see what happened during the call.

• Transcriptions: Listening in on all your calls probably isn’t feasible, especially if your call center receives hundreds of calls a day. Automated transcriptions are an excellent way to parse all that audio into readable text for easier reference.
• Data reporting: Advanced reporting capabilities are the perfect way to turn your call data into actionable insights. You can see what advertising campaigns are actually working and tweak your efforts to boost conversions.

Features like these are only possible if your company has a smart approach to business communication. The use of softphone tools is an excellent way to generate these insights automatically.

Call analytics doesn’t have to work alone. What you learn from it can be applied to other aspects of the business as well.

• Advertising tools like Google Ads can use the data from call analytics to measure return on investment more accurately and optimize advertising campaigns with the same keywords that you’ve heard in phone conversations. In other words, your ads will become more relevant to what your customers are talking about.

• Marketing analytics ties in well with call analytics. You’re gaining insight into consumer behavior and can see what sales channels and campaigns have been working the best through the content of your calls.

• Customer relationship management platforms operate mainly on data, so providing additional information through call content is just another way to boost its effectiveness.

As technologies like artificial intelligence continue to emerge, we’re going to be seeing more potent forms of call analytics in use by various industries around the world.

Transcriptions will become more accurate. But, more importantly, AI tools will be able to listen in in real-time and provide on-cue guidance for representatives, resulting in a much better customer experience. AI analytics will be able to search for keywords in the conversation and mark key moments during the conversation for reference later.

Call analytics isn’t usually purchased separately; it comes packaged with ucaas solutions that provide cloud communications to business functions like call centers and customer service representatives.

Once you have a streamlined, central platform for all your communication needs, integrating call analytics into your workflow becomes much easier. From there, you can start reaping the benefits of this major source of marketing data and insights.