Selling the value of call management

The call management applications of today deliver valuable insight into a customer’s experience through detailed real-time call analytics, such as:

• Unreturned missed call reporting, which should be at the heart of any customer service strategy for improved customer satisfaction and retention. Such reporting has become more sophisticated, even enabling businesses to identify which calls were terminated after being answered by an auto-attendant.
• Real-time call reporting, which will show how long it takes to resolve a call, how long the caller had to wait to be answered and how the call was resolved (by the customer calling in again or the customer being called). 
• First Contact Resolution (FCR) analysis, which will impact customer satisfaction. Understanding FCR rates help any business with customer facing sales, service or technical teams to keep an eye on the success of new customer interactions. 

The good news is that whether the call management solution is deployed via the cloud for hosted telephony or on-premise for PBX phone systems, features have now evolved to deliver the same level of analytics and overall functionality.

The importance of integration

Fully integrated call management centralises and visualises data from inbound calls, outbound calls, call recordings and   call handler activity in one application.  Integrating this data with customer relationship data brings a new dimension to     CRM, by ‘completing’ customer relationship management. 

• Understand the whole customer experience: Report on the number of times the phone rings before being answered, the number of unresolved missed calls through to how the call was handled and what was said at company, branch or an individual customer level.
• Facilitate more informed, strategic decision-making: Integrate call analytics with call recording to track how long a caller waits to be answered or called back, then assess how the call progresses by listening to the recording. From this it can be determined if the call outcome was negatively affected by the wait time.  Live statistics on contact teams such as call queues, coupled with historical trends enables staff modelling, helping businesses to gain greater efficiencies.  

Sharing call management with CRM systems and the wider operations teams across an organisation is proven to improve customer service levels and importantly, to deliver significant competitive advantage.
 
Why the channel should focus on fully integrated call management 
Gone are the days when such systems were deployed solely in large enterprises. This means that these solutions are now accessible to not just large corporates, but to a huge SME market. Cost effective call recording together with innovation in call management with Unified Communications and CRM integration has meant that SMEs can now take advantage of powerful solutions that deliver real business intelligence. 

How resellers can demonstrate the value of call management to customers

• The Channel must become more innovative in their approach.  They need to sell call recording and management solutions together with telecoms offerings to help deliver real customer outcomes, thus creating a point of differentiation from competitors.  Understanding customers’ business drivers for change is imperative. 
• Selling call management using the cost-justification model gives solution partners the advantage, differentiating them from those strictly meeting a list of requirements within a specific budget. 
• Improving customer interactions is essential to every business.  Demonstrate how valuable insight can enhance their business based on their specific needs.  For example to understand the value of missed calls, to enhance staff performance, to monitor call quality and replicate what works, to protect their business from fraud or to comply with industry regulations.
• Increase revenue through solution selling.  Margin-rich call management adds value to a phone system and enables companies to gain a return on their telecoms investment.

Our most successful resellers are those that sell 100% of systems integrated with call management and sell the solution before they sell the PBX.

The same benefits to customers apply no matter how the solution is deployed although for hosted telephony customers they also benefit from 24/7 access to call analytics from anywhere on any device.  In addition the latest features are automatically made available, so there is no requirement for involvement from IT departments. 

---