Bart Delgado, Managing Director at Software as a Service vendor Akixi, considers the use of call analytics and offers a simple metric that could prevent lost revenue and retain customers.
What is the one basic metric you would implement in a business to save them money and or grow their revenues?
Bart Delgado (BD): There’s a simple equation I often quote.
Average Order Value x Number of Missed Calls = Lost Revenue
Today we have to fight for every order, every customer and every sales opportunity so if you are not measuring the number of calls that your organisation fails to answer each day then perhaps you are not cut out for a life in business!
Not only will callers stop calling you; they will call your competitors and it is likely that the first one to answer the call will get their business instead of you. So, if you are only measuring the number of calls your organisation answers, rather than the number of calls your organisation receives, you have no idea what potential revenue you are missing out on.
And without income everything else is just froth.
So are we information rich and knowledge poor? And once we have fixed the missed calls problem what other factors should we be looking for as a priority?
BD: Analysts are in broad agreement that the size of the digital universe will double every two years at least, a 50-fold growth from 2010 to 2020. That’s a lot of data and the key to business success lies in transforming it into actionable insight.
There are a number of ways to unlock its potential starting with the ability for companies to rapidly analyse it at the point of delivery - and at scale.
Businesses also need to ensure they are gathering the right data on which to base management action; to put it another way, they need to be asking the right questions.
For example, if they want to develop new products and services they need to know what their customers are thinking – what they are happy with and what they are frustrated by.
And what about having the data on the purchase funnel - understanding your customer acquisition process from awareness through to purchase, as well as the rate at which your company loses customers over time – and why!
Today, we are more aware of data compared to a few years ago – there’s a lot of information available and as ever, people don’t know what they don’t know.
Should gaining insight in to how your company is performing be a complex, time consuming and expensive process?
BD: None of the above. You saw how easy it can be to turn lost calls in to additional revenues and reduce customer churn at the same time.
We know that on average estate agents lose 50-60 calls a week and that doctors’ surgeries lose thousands. Two totally different commercial scenarios – both providing poor customer service and one losing a lot of money.
And here’s the thing. With cloud-based analytics, many suppliers will let you try before you buy so you can see immediately what your losses from unanswered calls are. You just can’t get that kind of service from a CPE solution supplier.
Lower overheads, time zone flexibility, and flexible working hours have made remote contact centre workers a trend for 2018. What are the key tools/applications that remote workers need to be effective members of the contact centre team?
BD: Cloud is an ‘any time, any place and any device’ service so web or app-based tools align perfectly with a remote workforce.
Anyone can now whip out a smartphone app and see a real-time wallboard of their company’s calling activity and take management action to rectify any shortcomings at any time, even from the beach whilst on holiday!
In the past, you just couldn’t do this without the nightmare of a set up, and from a mobile phone? – highly unlikely.
Today it is so vital that management teams are able to measure and manage staff performance wherever they are located and cloud-based applications make this possible.