Demonstrating the Value of Communications Management 

More and more businesses of all sizes are now seeing and realising the benefits call management can offer. This is because call management, or call analytics as we refer to it, delivers immediate insight into customer interactions across the business and the service levels they are offering their customers. Call management also delivers insight around missed customer calls; every missed call could be a lost order or sale.

Customer service and customer engagement have become major differentiators for every business, large or small. It is important to know when people are calling, who is answering the calls, who the customer is, if the call was answered and if anyone called the customer back when it was missed. Other valuable information includes the number of out-of-hour calls and the busiest time of day. Only a Call Management System (CMS) can give a view of these calls and provide the answers.

Tollring has seen an increase in attachment rates of call management to phone systems across both legacy PBXs and hosted telephony over the past few years. Historically the attachment rate was always much higher for large enterprise customers than SMEs, mainly because of the upfront investment and perceived value. The main reason for an increase in attachment rates is an improved understanding in the channel of the value and importance of solution selling. Tollring’s most successful partners adopt a 100% attachment rate policy and lead their sale with solutions, positioning call analytics at the heart of their customer proposition. As customers increasingly turn to cloud telephony, it becomes easier to deliver high attachment rates as analytics can be integrated into the core offering without the traditional premise-based technology overheads and costs.

Call analytics delivers a clear return on investment. Much of this growth is thanks to call management solutions being more affordable, without a major upfront investment. SMEs need to remain competitive and focus on customer satisfaction as much as large enterprises and formal contact centres and call analytics help them to achieve this.

The ‘Single Pane of Glass’

The idea of a ‘single pane of glass’ to see, understand and manage all communications services is very appealing. It simplifies the customer experience and consolidates multiple datasets such as call analytics, call recording and customer CRM into a logical central point, to understand and interrogate. The alternative is multiple stand-alone vendor specific portals with different URLs, different usernames and passwords, each with a different ‘look and feel’ and no joined-up data.

Call analytics and call recording together provide the backbone of data required by call centre supervisors to comprehend customer and agent interactions. Analytics help to understand and measure service quality and customer experience (CX) from a functional perspective, delivering in-depth knowledge. Integration of call analytics, call recording and contact centre tools will reveal important statistics such as how many times a customer called, if any calls were missed, who spoke to the customer and what was said. When dealing with a customer complaint, this level of insight is invaluable and only a combination of these three applications working in a single fully integrated way can deliver this level of insight. Furthermore, regulation and compliance becomes far simpler to achieve, for example GDPR compliance.

For the channel, these applications provide a logical suite of ‘added value’ applications that sit within their voice and UC offering. Integrated solutions offer ‘joined-up’ benefits as well as ease of procurement and speed of deployment. Pricing can also be simplified, with a greater opportunity to not leave any money or profit on the table for other vendor/resellers. Resellers also benefit from a lower Total Cost of Ownership through only having to sell, manage and support a single platform and vendor.

Demonstrating The Value of Call Management 

Call Management is all about the ability to monetise call and CX data by delivering critical business insight across multiple aspects of the business and its customers. To succeed in business, it is imperative to ‘know your customer’. Call management provides information about customer interactions and the customer experience in relation to service levels.

The idea of a selling a call logger has long passed. Most businesses do not have a formal contact centre, but across the business they have staff who deal with customers via the telephone, email and chat every day. This is often referred to as an ‘informal contact centre’ environment. Call Management can bring this data together and drive real business improvements, to deliver business intelligence at its very best.

In a nutshell, resellers can demonstrate value by:

1. Understanding customer requirements and their business-critical KPIs
2. Identifying drivers for change
3. Asking questions that relate their needs and KPIs to the solution
4. Demonstrating a return on their investment (for example, place a value on a missed call)
5. Starting the product demo with relevant metrics for a powerful introduction
6. Highlighting USPs and position against competitors

Call Management is a mature technology that has been proving its worth for decades. Any reseller who puts business management improvement central to their customer offering will deliver a solution their customer needs as well as differentiating themselves, creating new revenue streams and driving customer lock-in.

As featured in Comms Business