The cloud has taken over the business communications sector and Gartner is predicting that cloud communications spending will grow at 3.1% CAGR through 2020. While we can discuss the benefits of how a cloud-based phone system can help different types of business, we can focus on one important detail – everything about a business phone system is now passing through the internet.
It might be a seemingly innocuous detail but if you think about it, for something – take voice for example – to pass through the internet, it has to be converted to data. This means that you have data running through systems that allow it to be tracked and accessed.
The data from a cloud phone system can provide businesses significant insight not only on how the business communicates but also on different aspects of its operations including:
Marketing and Sales
One of the easiest data to use is those from the phone number itself. If the company has several phone numbers that receive calls, they can pull up data on which one gets the most calls, which one results in the highest conversions, and which phone numbers have the most unanswered calls.
Marketing and sales can even take it further and get insight on which geographic location each phone number is getting most of its calls from. If they integrate their phone systems into customer relations management (CRM) solution like Salesforce, they can also dig deeper into the demographics of their callers including details like age and gender.
From all this information, companies can implement sound marketing and sales strategies and campaigns that are more targeted.
IT departments
Since the phone system is hosted in the cloud, it is also the IT managers who are usually tasked in handling the administration of the system. Most of their concerns revolve around how the employees use the phone system itself.
If there is something that warrants an investigation, IT managers can pull up the lists of all inbound and outbound activities during specific time frames. This includes call logs, caller ID destinations, call duration, and the like.
This will give IT departments a clearer picture about the usage of the system and what lead to the concern that warranted an investigation.
Department management
Department managers want to know the efficiency of how their people communicate. What they can pull up is the data on call queue activities and volume to get insight into how the department has been handling incoming calls.
From the data, the department manager can see the ratio of answered calls versus those that were missed. They can also investigate the average time callers are placed on hold, and even the average length of talk time required to resolve the issues that brought upon the calls.
From this information, department managers can implement policies, targets, and practices that can improve the efficiency of how calls are handled by the department.
Employee management
Like departments, managers also want to get insight on how to improve individual employee performance. And like how managers can pull up call activities and volume for the department, they can also do the same in a more micro level for their employees.
The data can be used to add insight into employee performance evaluation. They can look at his average call time, a number of calls handled per day, or even simply listen to how the employee interacts with callers. The call activity data is not the end all and be all of the employee evaluation, but it sure can add helpful information.
Also, this data can also be used to see how management can improve the performance of the employee. The call volume can and average call length can give you an idea of how much time an employee is spending over the phone. From there, you can also measure if the volume is affecting the employee’s ability to perform other tasks that is part of their workload.
With the information, management can make adjustments to make sure that each employee is getting the right amount of workload and is not overwhelmed because of the incoming call volume.
These are just some of the common uses of data that companies can gather from their cloud phone system. As they get more familiar with the available data that they can pull up from the system, they will find more uses for this information to further improve business operations.
