What phone data can tell you about your business

Phones are essential to how businesses connect with customers, vendors, partners and internal colleagues. But beyond what phones let you do, how they’re used can also tell you a lot about your business.

Phone data can reveal operational patterns that are difficult to spot day-to-day, from when call demand peaks to which teams handle the most calls. These patterns can give you a clearer picture of what’s happening across your business and where there may be opportunities to improve processes.

Useful phone data isn’t limited to call centers with hundreds of calls going through every day, either. Traditional business phone systems used by sales, support, operations, reception and other teams can generate valuable data, as well.

For businesses, that information can support better decisions about staffing, call routing and customer service. Here’s a look at the call metrics you can capture, what it can tell you and how you can put it to work.

The top call metrics to track

Your business phone system can capture a range of data about the calls coming in and out. Looking at these metrics over time can help you identify patterns in call demand, employee workloads and how calls move through your business:

• Call volume is the number of calls made or received during a specific period. Looking at call volume over days, weeks or months gives you a sense of how much demand your teams are handling.
• Call timing and distribution looks at when calls happen and how they’re spread throughout the day or week. For example, you might find that call volume consistently increases on Wednesdays between 3 and 5 p.m., making those your peak hours.
• Call duration is how long a call lasts. By tracking this metric, you might be able to flag, for instance, that calls tend to run long after a recent product update with customers asking for help with technical issues. An average handle time calculation can also give you a baseline for how much time employees typically spend on calls.
• Call type or status categorizes calls by incoming, outgoing, internal, missed or dropped. This count can give you a clearer idea of how your team is using the phone and how many calls are actually reaching someone.
• Answer rate is the percentage of incoming calls that are answered as opposed to missed or abandoned. This can show how consistently calls are being picked up and whether that changes at different times or for different teams.
• Call transfers look at how often calls are passed from one person, extension or department to another. Looking at transfer patterns can show which teams receive the most handoffs and how often a call moves through your organization before it reaches its destination.

On their own, these metrics can give you a quick snapshot of your phone activity. When you look at them together and compare them over time, they can reveal patterns that inform better decisions around call coverage, employee training and call routing.

How call analytics can improve business decisions

Call data typically becomes more valuable when you analyze across multiple metrics. For instance, a high call volume on its own can tell you there’s demand, but combine it with answer rates, call duration or transfers, and you can get a better idea of whether your current processes are keeping up.

Here are a few ways businesses can use call analytics to make more informed decisions.

Improve call coverage

Firstly, you can use your call data to improve staffing decisions. Say your reports show that volume consistently increases between 2 and 4 p.m., with missed calls also rising during that window. That could point to a call coverage gap.

Looking at call volume, answer rates and peak hours together can help you determine whether you need more people available at certain times and whether you should adjust schedules or set up overflow coverage so calls don’t go unanswered.

If you run a retail business, for instance, and notice that there’s often a spike in calls after a weekend promotion, you could compare call volume and answer rates during past promotional periods to see whether your usual coverage can handle any expected increases in inquiries.

Identify training opportunities

Your call history can also give you clues about where employees may need additional support. Say you work at a real estate company and notice that an employee’s calls with prospective buyers are consistently longer than their peers or that their calls are frequently transferred to multiple team members before they’re resolved.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the employee or team is underperforming. The data could point to a need for better training, easier access to property information or clearer processes for handling different types of inquiries. Looking at metrics such as abandoned calls, call duration and call transfers together can help you identify where additional support could improve employee success and call resolution.

Refine call routing

Call analytics can also inform more technical decisions about how calls move through your business. If call transfers show that a large share of calls reaching reception are repeatedly passed to the same department, that could suggest an opportunity to adjust your current routing setup.

You could then use those call history details to rethink your business phone tree, call groups or routing rules. For example, if you’re a law firm where calls from existing clients are transferred to the same practice group 90 percent of the time, you could adjust your phone tree to give those callers a more direct route to the appropriate team.

The goal is to ultimately create a call flow that reflects how people actually contact your teams and gets callers to the right person sooner.

Used in this way, your phone data becomes a valuable source of information you can use to understand and fine-tune how your business operates.

Optimize your operations with a visual view of call metrics

Your business is already generating phone data every day. You just need a built-in call analytics solution to present that data in a way that helps you spot patterns and improve how you work.

Ooma^® Office is a business phone system with over 100 features that help businesses, from startup to enterprise, stay connected, serve customers and manage calls more easily. With our call analytics, you can visualize calling trends, better understand how calls flow through your business and make more informed decisions about your phone system and day-to-day operations.

Want to get more from your business phone system? Learn more about Ooma Office today.