3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

Call monitoring can be an invaluable tool for any situation in which customers and businesses communicate via telephone. In recent years, businesses have discovered ways to leverage call monitoring in completely new ways, like enhancing programmatic advertising. In many cases, these use cases require call monitoring to get even more granular than ever before. But there’s still plenty of value in more traditional call monitoring methods.

Doug Kennedy, president of the Kennedy Training Network, recently made this essential point in a post on Hotel News Resource. Using the hotel industry as a case study, he starts out by examining the way in which the hotel industry has embraced online channels.

With so much focus on ‘click to call’ and other mobile and/or Web-based channels, it seems that many hotel operators see voice as a dying channel, one that only out-of-touch grandparents use. And yet traditional voice bookings tend to generate “notably higher” ADR or average daily rate, one of the core indicators used to measure the operating performance of a hotel. There’s also the fact that many clients who book a room online tend to call to with further questions.

But the major argument in favor of voice channels for hotels is that call monitoring can be used to solve common customer pain points. Indeed, Kennedy does just this in his article. By listening in to clients’ call monitoring systems, he was able to break down callers into four basic categories—over-informed (or misinformed) callers, overwhelmed callers, value-driven deal seekers, and multi-tasking callers—along with the best strategies for dealing with each.

Over-informed callers tend to focus on reading online guest reviews and social media postings, good and bad. The best way to convert these callers is to train your reservations agent to be somewhat proactive with their concerns by asking “are there any questions I can answer for you such as about our location or amenities?”

Overwhelmed callers tend to be confused about the options they have seen online and will likely have specific questions about room types, locations, amenities and views. These callers can be addressed with careful attention. After identifying their reason for travel, focus on providing these callers with needs-based recommendations.

Value-driven deal seekers are the customers that have spent some time hunting for the best rates before calling. These customers need to be engaged in a real conversation, then immediately offered a secure booking.

Finally, multi-tasking callers are those callers that seem to be doing something else while booking a hotel room. These callers need to be handled as quickly as possible and much of the traditional sales process can be skipped to quickly secure a reservation.

These are the kinds of insights that can be gained through call monitoring. Best of all, these insights can be gained right away without complicated processes, just a willingness to listen.