Here’s a quick checklist to help determine if your business could benefit from incorporating call management software.
1. Your Customer Experience Is Lacking
Maybe you’ve received negative feedback, or maybe you realize that your team is a little stretched and the customer experience for your business has taken a bit of a hit. Unanswered calls, long hold times, questions that aren’t answered quite right, or sentiments that don’t reflect your brand can all negatively affect your customer experience and hurt your business.
Deploying a call management tool allows you to become more efficient over all by automating basic functions. This means more time for thoughtful, planned responses and stronger conversations that drive relationships with your customers. On top of this, structured call flows and queues better manage wait times and get customers where they need to go the first time, without extra holds or transfers. Every interaction a customer has with your business, in its entirety, is more cohesive and sensical. This two-part approach means not only a more fluid customer experience, but a higher quality interaction overall—and not just one time, but every time.
2. You Need To Grow Or Scale
If your business needs to grow, call management can facilitate that growth more smoothly. You may not be ready to add to your team, or staffing in your industry may be a longer-term challenge. A call management tool can help you float those gaps.
Call management software implements some instantaneous efficiencies to reallocate team time. First, auto attendants and welcome messages consistently begin an interaction, from a branded greeting that matches your ideal voice and tone to menu options that share standard information (e.g., location and hours). You can even streamline some contact by creating self-service options with automations or through Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Basic information like account balances, outstanding invoices, payment plans, and more can all be automated responses. IVR can also help your customers resolve common, predictable issues like password resets without a team member even pressing a button.
Internally, call management systems improve communication and organization. Integrating with your current CRM to keep your data in one place and establish a reliable knowledge base for quick access to answers and resources to respond to customer inquiries faster and with more consistency. Dive into robust analytics to establish call volume trends and resolution rates that help you to optimize workflows and see where your processes can be improved.
Together, these features can help your current team stretch and flex through your initial stages of growth while you work to stabilize and adjust staffing accordingly.
3. You Need to Refocus
It’s remarkable how quickly customer interactions can shift your focus. Whether it’s an issue with your product or service or just ongoing maintenance, customer interactions are an often overlooked component many growing businesses can’t always predict and don’t plan for. They are important, but also take your focus away from your primary goals. You are not alone if you feel like you can check this box.
When you offload basic operational demands and customer support a call management tool, the impact of that regained time is palpable and you need to have a plan to reallocate or risk it slipping into other inefficiencies. Rather, reassign that time back to the innovation and expertise that got you to this point—the core areas of your business that allow you to sustain, grow, and flourish.
Call management has the added bonus of collecting data, so you don’t miss a single important interaction, let alone miss a call. From call recordings to live dashboards and analytics reports, you can identify patterns, consistent issues, and areas for improvement with confidence and then put your time toward an intentional, proactive strategy.
4. You Need To Understand Your Customer Interactions
Do lackluster survey results or negative external reviews have you guessing? You can’t figure out what went wrong, let alone where it went wrong and it’s costing you current and prospective customers. Maybe you have a hunch, but are you really going to invest time and energy into a guess?
Call management tools with analytics and reporting can answer your when and where, so that you can understand your customer interactions and invest in solutions that get results. Real-time dashboards can tell you anything from how long callers are on hold to how many customers are waiting to be helped. Call tagging can then flag calls for review or escalation. Once you’ve narrowed the field, call recordings let you hear interactions word for word. Then, at any point, your team leaders have the power to guide team members in real time, through live coaching with listen, whisper, barge, and steal. These checkpoints at every stage of engagement allow you to hone in on the exact catalyst for precise, confident resolutions and redirections. When you know the problem, you can solve it.
5. You Want To Improve Your Brand Image
It’s easy for things to get disjointed, especially in a growing business. New hires come on and before anyone realizes, everyone is on a slightly different page or chapter of the book. Customer responses may be inconsistent from one team member to another, and the voice of the business may be varied or flawed as well.
When you manage your calls and automate some of your processes you’re back in control of your brand quickly. You control how a call is answered and the tone of that introduction. You control how a customer flows through your menu to reach the person they need. And because that interaction is intentional, you are more likely to preserve your brand along the way. Fewer touch points mean a more consistent message with less internal frustration to route the call, resulting in a big brand win from start to finish.
6. You Need To Control Your Call Volume
Navigating the highs and lows of your call volume is taking too much time away from the important aspects of your business. A day or two of high calls can derail a team, leaving frustrated employees as well as customers.
Engaging call management software can not only alleviate the pressure on those high call volume days, it can help you to establish patterns and more predictably create a plan for how to navigate. Between creating custom call flows that pace and direct traffic to evaluating live dashboards and routine reporting to identify trends, you can get back in control and give that control back to your teams as well for increased productivity and proactive strategies moving forward. When call volumes are too high, engage a callback option and keep that customer from growing frustrated from a long wait.
7. You’re Ready To Stop Being Reactive
If you’re tired of being surprised or caught off guard with anything from lost leads to customer feedback, it might be time to look at some call management.
For all of the reasons already listed, a simple call management tool can keep you proactive. Structured call flows help to regulate your incoming traffic and make interactions predictable. CRM integrations keep your teams organized and information readily accessible. And analytics through live dashboards and routine reporting allow you to identify patterns and brainstorm solutions for areas that need your attention. When you have the time and information to plan, proactive responses dramatically reduce unforeseen interruptions and issues. They also allow your teams to operate in calm, productive workflows.
8. You're Struggling With Organization
Aspects of your business are disjointed and your systems aren’t talking to each other as much as they should be.
If you want to keep the right hand talking to the left, managing your calls is a great first step. Integrate a call mangement tool with your existing CRM and keep your customer data safe, organized, and robust. Allow your team to enter data directly into your CRM, tag calls for next steps, and report back to establish opportunities for automation and streamlining. This improved organization means a more knowledgeable team base ready to engage and support your customers on any level.
9. Your Sales Team Is Off Its Mark
Does your sales team struggle to make connections? Are the manual efforts just not translating to increased sales? Do they not have time to follow up on leads as quickly as they need to make the deals? Are you missing calls all together?
Increase your sales team efficiency with the automation and a personalized touch. From simple steps like predictive dialing that only connect your team to live calls to click-to-dial that lets your agents call directly from your CRM or contact list in one click, these simple automations don’t just save time, they preserve focus, allowing your sales team to stay in the zone and maintain an efficient work flow.
Call management can help in other ways too. Integrate with your CRM to keep your entire company organized by housing your customer data in one place. Tag calls for specific products, planned follow-up, or something unique to your company—you’re in control. Your team can also automate follow-ups for simple events like reminders, confirmations, and received payments. Together, these features offer a powerhouse of efficiency.
We aim to write blogs that inform and educate readers about our industry and products, so yes, we have a cloud-based call management software that does all of this. However, more than anything, we want to provide resources that help your business and businesses like yours thrive in communication-rich environments that unburden your teams and make it easier for you to do what you do best. We aim to unlock doors to products that are often unaccessible without sacrificing the quality or outcomes from those tools. Of course, we feel our tools are the best, but don’t take our word for it. Here’s our most recent review from Best Reviews on our call management tool.
