Sir Francis Bacon astutely remarked that "knowledge is power" more than 500 years ago and it's an observation that holds truer than ever today. Organisations of all sizes can learn much from analysing inbound telephone call statistics, but few have access to technology which allows them to do so. Historically, capturing inbound call data would require expensive telecommunications hardware equipment, known as a PBX (private branch exchange) system. Nowadays however, hosted software can be deployed to fulfil this operation in a much more cost-effective manner.
Telecommuncations providers like Numberstore (www.numberstore.com) provide geographic and non-geographic telephone numbers which "overlay" organisations' existing telephone numbers. As well as providing a wide variety of call management facilities, these numbers perform the all-important task of data capture. A caller's number (CLI) is recorded as the call is received along with other key information, such as whether the call was answered or unanswered, the call duration and the path which the call took (for example, through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, a call-hunt group or to a voice mailbox).
Call Detail Records (CDRs) are extremely powerful to organisations for a number of reasons:
&bullBy assigning dedicated telephone numbers to particular advertising and promotional activities, it allows them to gauge the response. They can ascertain the number of calls, average call duration etc, which a particular campaign yields.
&bullCDRs allow organisations to benchmark the performance of call-handling personnel, be they inbound sales, customer or technical support staff. Average call durations and time-to-answer are valuable KPIs in measuring SLA performance.
&bullThey allow organisations to understand and optimise call delivery thereby improving call-handling efficiency and the caller experience. For example, a call hunt group may be optimised following analysis of the CDRs because certain destinations are taking too long to answer calls or are frequently busy.
Since data is now available for online analysis, or .CSV download, organisations are able to learn much about their internal efficiency and the effectiveness of their promotional activity for less than ?10 per month. Furthermore, call statistics form only one part of many call management features available from a hosted inbound telephony solution. Many other call routing services are included in geographic and non-geographic number service plans.
For further information, please visit Numberstore now.
