Call Monitoring
When choosing a phone system for your business, managers are often sidetracked by the many other features on offer, such as the ability to divert a landline number to a mobile. What decision-makers shouldn’t forget though, is that there are other aspects of a phone system that they should be thinking about.
So what is call monitoring?
For those who may not know much about call monitoring, we’ve come up with our own definition:
What is call monitoring and why should you be utilising it?
This article acts as a brief crash course on-call monitoring, including what it is, how to use it and why it should be on your radar when choosing any type of phone system. Whether you own a contact centre or are a sole trader, call monitoring will benefit you in some way. Keep reading and we will tell you how.
What is call quality?
Call quality is a much broader term than call quality monitoring, as the quality of a call can refer to many different things. As well as monitoring the service provided during business phone calls, call quality can be measured by countless other variables. Such as audio quality, telephone etiquette, and your phone number its self.
If the service given during a phone call is outstanding but the customer is charged for the time they spent on the line, this will damage their perceived level of call quality. One solution to this would be to adopt the use of 0800 free phone numbers.
Where does monitoring come in?
Call monitoring measures the level of service across your external phone calls. In other words, this won’t measure the quality of your audio, your customers’ perceived opinion of your chosen prefix or anything else related to call quality. What it will do, however, is tell you how your employees are performing in external conversations. If you don’t have any employees, stay with us – there are benefits.
Call monitoring isn’t reserved only for big brands, and you should be reflecting on this from the start of your business journey. This will help you to continually make improvements to the business. As individuals, entrepreneurs should also reflect on their actions, and no matter how small your workforce, you should encourage this practice from all of your team members to create a positive culture.
Call monitoring is for everyone
Call monitoring for big brands helps to standardise the quality of a big team. As your company grows, it becomes harder to wade through data and control the work of your team. Conducting random spot checks on recorded phone calls is a good way to get a feel for the overall level of service your team provides.
Call monitoring for small businesses sends the right message to your employees. When your staff know that calls are recorded, they become a shining example of good service and don’t let it show to customers when their enthusiasm is dwindling at the end of a long day.
Call monitoring for sole traders acts as a reference guide when a call has ended. You can review your performance and take note of important points like times, dates or tasks to do that might have slipped your mind during the conversation.
Why is call quality monitoring important?
Implementing call monitoring in the workplace makes employees accountable for encouraging better quality service and allows you to identify gaps in performance where extra training is needed. In the worst-case scenario, call monitoring allows you to refer to a past customer call to review the situation in the vent of a dispute. On the flip side of this, call monitoring can also help you to recognise and reward your team when they have demonstrated an outstanding level of service.
Put simply, call monitoring is important for:
- Accountability – Part of attaining the results that you want is communicating your expectations. Implementing call monitoring is a non-verbal way of telling your employees that you expect an outstanding level of service in every phone call.
- Skills Evaluation – By listening to recorded phone calls, you’ll be able to identify key trends among your workforce that represent skill gaps that need to be addressed. Simply asking your employees what they’re struggling with won’t show you the bigger picture, as they won’t always want to admit to the difficulties they face out of fear of being judged.
- Dispute Handling – Call monitoring provides tangible evidence that can be referenced and utilised in disputes. This gives the mediator an objective outlook on the situation and helps them to resolve the issue. You can also use these examples as key case studies in training modules to help prevent such issues from arising again in the future.
- Reward and Recognition – Call monitoring helps you reward and recognise your employees. While most staff are likely to perform better if there is a promised incentive, it’s beneficial to verbally reward those who go above and beyond daily, as they’ll feel valued in your organisation and be more motivated to keep up their performance.
We’ve so far covered what call monitoring is, where it can be utilised and why it is important to businesses of every size. But which service is right for your business?
Introducing, Reveal, BDM Voice's proprietary call monitoring solution.
Despite the staggering volumes of inbound and outbound calls taking place every minute of the working day, many companies continue to overlook the opportunity to actively monitor calls and therefore be able to measure the standard of their call handling.
That’s where BDM Voices’ ‘Reveal’ service comes in. Our unique call monitoring solution is one of the most effective methods to monitor the quality of your call handling (both in and outbound) by measuring individual calls by pre-defined criteria.
How?
Our team of highly-trained call analysts take a selection of calls and provide you with an unbiased and impartial evaluation of your inbound and outbound sales calls against your criteria. This can often be difficult to achieve from within the business due to pre-existing working relationships (and, of course, impossible to do without a call monitoring solution in the first place!)
To help you understand the performance of your business on the telephone and in particular the performance of your call handling staff as a team and on an individual basis, we present you with detailed, statistical, and graphical reports illustrating performance at both staff and department level. We’ll even include sample call recordings to help evidence the apparent issues and findings of the report.
The result?
All of the calls analysed are taken from your genuine recorded sales calls, there are no ‘staged’ mystery shopping style calls. Only calls analysed in the live environment can truly identify both the problems and opportunities. Understanding how your staff deal with the array of unpredictable customer queries and behaviours is paramount to your ability to train and develop your staff and ensure every call stands the best chance of being converted into a sale.
Why BDM Voice
Our experienced team of ‘revealers’ will offer you the unbiased and impartial evaluation that your company need to make informed business decisions, regarding handling sales opportunities via telephone calls.
In the first instance, we work closely with you to better understand the process you expect your staff to follow and can offer guidance on best practices and identify any obvious issues before we even begin. Once we start analysing your calls, we simply listen to real customer and prospect calls and measure both the ‘process’ and ‘experience’ aspects. You can then expect to receive detailed, monthly reporting that allows you to quickly understand your current performance and identify where you need to be and how to get there, so you’ll be one step closer to achieving your business goals.
BDM Voice is the trusted voice in telecommunications. We regularly monitor and evaluate all forms of new customer contact technologies and practice. Ensuring we provide the best service for all of our clients, enabling your business to stay ahead of the competition.
To find out more about your call monitoring options, get in touch today with one of our friendly experts on 0330 159 4000, or by filling out our contact form below.
Let your business reach its full potential with call monitoring.
