4 Business Insights Your Phone System is Trying to Tell You

Telephone calls represent the most common point of communication with customers for most organizations. This channel of engagement should be a key area of focus for mining the business intelligence available that could optimize your customer experience.

At Parallel, our experience and services are often applied to four common areas critical to execution of world-class customer engagement: customer satisfaction, staffing levels, employee productivity and identifying employee coaching opportunities. Read on to discover what insights you can garner to make better business decisions with the right ShoreTel phone system analytics.

1.  Customer Satisfaction
By measuring activities such as abandonment rate, time-in-queue, wait time and call transfers, you can determine a lot about the experience your customers have when they contact your organization. You can answer questions such as how long callers are willing to wait to speak with a representative, whether or not they’re able to get answers to their questions with the first person they speak to and how long they have to hold, on average, before they get a resolution to the reason for their call. Having perspective on the ever-changing answers to these questions is vital to your management team and provides the ability to help shape the customer experience your organization wants to deliver.

2.  Staffing Levels
Does your staff consistently match your needs when it comes to customer calls? Your best answer will come from the analytics your phone system provides. If staffing is too low, obviously customers won’t receive resolutions to their inquiries in an appropriate amount of time. If your staffing is too high, your organization is wasting funds on an expensive resource (labor). Determining the right mix on staff is complicated, and the factors weighed are compounded by the fluid nature of the needs that often shift based on time of day, day of week and external factors. The best approach is leveraging your data to help you become more predictive with smart analysis which will, in turn, empower you to make staffing decisions that are the most proximate mix of your investment of resources to the needs of your market.

3.  Employee Productivity
Are your employees participating in activities contributing to the organization’s success, or are they doing the minimum required to look busy and run out the clock? You can find that answer in your ShoreTel phone analytics. From a high level overview of employee activity, down to cradle-to-grave reporting about a specific call, uncover what your employees are really doing on every single call to determine if their activity is contributing to the goals you have for their department as well as the overall objectives of your organization.

4.  Employee Training
There are always opportunities to improve employee performance by providing the right training. However, what training is right for your employee or team? Again, you can answer this through analytics of your phone system. For example, if an employee is constantly transferring a specific type of call instead of handling that call on his or her own, it’s likely that the employee needs to be coached in that area. Or if the handle time of a particular agent is low and the transfer rate is high, you might need to take a look at that agent’s overall training to identify gaps. Alternately, if you have an employee who is consistently outperforming peers, it makes sense to study that individual’s key metrics to see how you can assist the rest of the team in repeating that success.

With the right analytics, there are endless opportunities to turn those reports into business intelligence that contribute to the business decisions you make every day for a successful organization. Given the right analytics tool, there are many things you can learn from your ShoreTel phone system.