While texting and sending emails are still communications forms, calls are more personal and mainly tailored to customers. The tone of voice and language used can either leave a customer satisfied after a call or let them question their decisions to make the call in the first place. A good quality call is crucial in ensuring customers’ needs are addressed and businesses thrive. Speaking of which, let’s talk of ways you can improve the quality of your business calls.
1. Use Call Recording Tools
Recording business calls can provide insights on their quality and areas that need improvements in future interactions. When you record calls, you get an idea of whether customer issues are addressed, the average time length of the calls, customer retention, tone of voice employees use, and how friendly your employees are to your customers.
Recording business calls help improve call quality by:
- Providing key insights. You will understand the needs and expectations of your customers better when listening to the call conversations.
- Customer satisfaction: the insights from recorded calls can let you know how best to serve and satisfy your customers.
- Future evidence: recorded calls provide excellent evidence in settling customer issues should a dispute occur.
- Quality control: when you record calls, you can monitor how your employees interact with your customers during a call and act accordingly.
- Regulatory compliance: recording calls is one way of showing that your business complies with usual regulatory measures.
- Impactful training: through call recording, you can get your employees’ strengths and weaknesses during calls and offer training that best addresses these issues.
To record calls, start by establishing which software you’ll need. There are many call recording software in the market today. You only have to do your due diligence before settling on software that best addresses your needs.
2. Monitor the Right Metrics and KPIs
Once you have your call recording software, what remains is for you to monitor the right metrics and KPIs. Metrics offer a way of monitoring the massive volume of data focusing on different business processes. There are many call metrics (call source, duration, volume, conversion rates, time, location, first-time callers, etc.) to monitor depending on your role.
With the correct metrics, you can learn:
- The type of keywords generating most calls.
- Calls with the highest conversion rates.
- ROI (return on investment) provides information on whether running a particular ad is profitable or not.
- How to track a customer’s journey using various channels.
- Marketing campaigns that are performing well.
- Whether your business has sufficient employees to answer calls.
Once you know the right metrics and KPIs to track, you’ll need the right tracking software. Several analytical software exists, but going for the one that will meet your needs and integrate with your current systems and technology is critical. The Microsoft Teams Direct Routing with built-in SBC integration is an excellent option since it offers a Public switched Telephone Network for all Microsoft Team Users enabling them to receive and make external calls via Microsoft Teams. Besides making/receiving calls, Microsoft Teams Direct Routing can monitor metrics. For instance, call reliability and quality, the type of clients, devices used to make a call, how they influence call quality, and customer satisfaction during a call. This monitoring is possible through help desk engineers and Teams admin or support.
3. Analyze Your Customers’ Feedback
Customer feedback through emails or reviews is an excellent way of knowing whether their needs are addressed or not. So, if most of your customers are complaining about a particular issue, chances are there are many people out there with the same problem that they haven’t aired it out. And the best thing to do here is to solve the problem soonest before more people experience it.
Fixing issues the right way as soon as they occur is the only way to satisfy your customers and ensure your business thrives. But if you handle issues poorly, you’ll most likely lose the customer and many more should they air out their bad experiences. Remember, well-handled customers, become happy and loyal customers. Again, after the issue is handled, ensure it doesn’t recur. So, take time and understand what caused it and whether you’ll need more technical help to prevent future occurrences.
Things happen, and sometimes disputes may occur, leaving your customers giving negative feedback. If this is the case, discussing the issue with your worker is better than taking things at face value. It could be the customer was extremely demanding hence giving negative feedback.
Or the situation was quite challenging, and your employee didn’t know or lacked the necessary skills to handle it. Whatever the case, always analyze situations before making any decisions. You can also review call recordings before approaching the issue. And remember, when you let your workers air their views, you create an honest and open working environment, making them feel heard in your company.
4. Train Your Employees
Before we discuss training, let’s talk about hiring employees. When hiring new employees, employ those committed to improving themselves continuously. This way, it will be easy for them to learn new skills and adopt them. It’s also crucial for potential employees to have essential skills, such as clear communication, attentiveness, patience, emotional intelligence, and persuasion skills.
Conducting regular training for current employees to improve their interaction skills with customers and how to use new software to ensure good quality calls is essential. Occasionally, you can reconstruct the training programs and incorporate suggestions from a quality assurance specialist to offer high-quality business calls. This way, your employees would have the right morale to strive and serve your customers better. Alternatively, you can give your employees education opportunities that will benefit them and your company in the long run.
Training coupled with evaluation and scoring is significant. Such training ensures employees are keen and attentive to grasp all the information offered. After all, who wouldn’t want to have a high score after the training lapses?
Good quality business calls play a significant role in improving profits, strengthening brand reputation, satisfying customers, and boosting workers’ morale. By implementing the above practices, you can be confident that your customers would be happy and workers satisfied.
About the Author
Alicia Kidd has over a decade of experience in writing about business, technology, entrepreneurship, social media marketing, and all things SaaS. She loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
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