Businesses today use more software tools than ever before, and one of the most popular types of tools is a CRM solution, which stands for Customer Relationship Management. CRMs help businesses gain insights into – and keep structured records of – details about their leads and customers more effectively. This enables them to better track their customer base, improve customer service, and ultimately drive sales. So with businesses using more software tools like CRMs as a part of their daily operations, it only makes sense for business phone analytics to be integrated with those software tools as well. The good news is, modern phone systems (often called Unified Communications solutions) now offer the ability for your phone system to actually access and use the same data as your CRM solution. This offers businesses the unique ability to gain insights about customers as soon as a call comes in, it helps businesses better measure the effectiveness of phone interactions with leads and customers, and more. Let’s look at just a few of the main benefits of call reporting and business phone analytics from integrating your CRM with your business phone system.

Advantages of integrating your CRM with your business phone system

1. Know More About Every Call

Integrating your business phone system with your CRM enables you to have the CRM record for a caller to automatically appear before your employees answer the phone. This enables them to know:

• Which company the caller is with
• Where they’re located
• Who they last spoke with
• What they spoke about

Not only can caller information help improve incoming calls, but having quick access to existing customer information can also enable outbound-focused teams to have better conversations with customers and prospects, which ultimately leads to better win rates and more sales. It goes without saying that enabling your phone system to take advantage of the phone analytics stored in your CRM in order to know more about the person on the other end of the phone can offer huge advantages for everyone involved.

2. Save Time and Improve Customer Service

Having insights into your customers without having to ask them questions saves everyone time and can create the foundation for a much more pleasant phone experience. For example, when a customer calls, wouldn’t you want to know when they placed their last order or when they last contacted your team for support? That type of insight can move conversations along faster and streamline communication. Here’s another scenario where phone system analytics comes in handy: Let’s say your business ships products and uses a website or software for tracking. It would probably be beneficial for employees to be able to answer questions about where customers’ packages are without having to look it up manually, right? Well, when your phone system is integrated with your CRM, that information can be right at your fingertips without having to search for it, saving your team a ton of time and hassle. If you have data in your CRM system, it only makes sense to enable your business phone system to take advantage of that information.

3. Easier Call Center Management

Call center managers often handle things like call volume management, staffing decisions, and new call center agent training. Let’s look at how a quality Unified Communications solution can benefit call center managers in each of these areas.

Better Call Volume Handling

A quality, modern phone system can provide web-based access with an access control list (ACL), which gives managers the power to easily extract information such as:

• Queue logs and status
• Concurrent calls by agent
• Call log details to track number of calls received and placed by hour/days/week

This information empowers call center managers to stay on top of call volumes in real-time so they can lead their team more effectively.

Better-Informed Staffing Decisions

Call center managers are often faced with determining the best time to take agents off the phone without impacting queue wait times. Quality call reporting helps with this by including insight into the number of calls by hour, including where the call volume peaks and drops the most. Managers can look at this data and quickly see which time periods require a full staff to manage the call volume and which ones are ideal for pulling agents offline for training.

Better Training for New Call Center Agents

Call center managers cannot monitor all calls at the same time, but he or she can review calls at a later date with call recordings.  Your UC phone system should make this super easy by allowing the IT manager, or call center manager with proper ACL, schedule which queues or agents (and what type of calls – inbound, outbound, or all) to record.  The system can even off-load the recording to an FTP server for easier access.  Not only can this be used for training, but if you have issues with customer expectations you can listen to the call recording to find out what was promised. Many call center managers actively train agents and aren’t always able to watch the queue metrics in real-time. In this scenario, the manager can schedule an hourly or daily email with the details of the call queues, including average wait time, average entry position (into the queue), number of abandoned calls, or even maximum wait time.

Next Steps

Want to see call reporting and phone analytics in action? The Switchvox business phone system puts you in the driver’s seat by giving you access to valuable insights into your callers. Take a look at Switchvox’s Reporting and Analytics features to learn more.