Take Advantage of Today's Call Analytics Solutions Enabled by VoIP

For businesses today, the variety of options available for telephony is nearly limitless. A majority of companies are using VoIP phone systems in various iterations, so they’re also having to get used to the array of options they have when it comes to solutions related to telephony, like call reporting, call recording and analytics.

Call analytics are particularly critical for an efficiency-minded business that is looking to keep costs under control, call quality high and communications up and running at all times, according to a recent blog post by Rob Scott writing for CommsTrader.

“From relatively simple beginnings, call analytics has come a long way,” he wrote. “Now, it has the ability to help companies analyze their data more accurately than ever (hence the trendy new name). Call reporting solutions connect to your phone system (also known as a unified communications platform or IP-PBX), and are software-based. They can securely collect and store the data records of all calls made and received.”

While the baseline goal of call analytics solutions is to create call data records (CDRs) for the purpose of call identification, billing and budget allocations and to detect misuse, a call analytics solution tied to a VoIP-based telephony system can do so much more for organizations. Call analytics can track and analyze historical call patterns so a contact center can better forecast and build schedules. An analytics solution can also drill down to individual agent performance for workforce evaluations. In the contact center, analytics can be sent to a wallboard to provide a “pulse” for operations at any given moment.

“Real-time call statistics can be displayed on a live wallboard, mounted within an office,” wrote Scott. “This wallboard can show real-time call activity that informs supervisors and business leaders of what’s going on in the company. Additionally, these live updates can help staff to self-regulate and manage their output based on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) set by their peers.”

Given the trend toward remote and home-based workers, a call analytics solution that supports a unified communications system can stretch to every worker using the system regardless of where he or she is located. (This is a very compelling prospect for managing a remote sales force, also).

Another important feature of today’s call analytics solutions tied to a virtual PBX are the tools that can help uncover and fight fraud, according to Scott.

“Most call reporting software programs offer the ability to detect unusual patterns in call traffic,” he wrote. “For example, long distance calls made for significant amounts of time, or calls made over the weekend when you are normally closed might indicate fraud. There are hackers everywhere and as they say, ‘where’s there’s a will, there’s a way’, so don’t rest on your laurels with toll fraud, take it as seriously as you can.”

Your options on a call analytics solution will vary depending on whether you’re using a shared, subscription-based unified communications-as-a-service or running a dedicated cloud PBX from a data center, but if the solution is up-to-date, companies can use the analytics to their fullest extent to run a better and easier-to-manage telecommunications program. 

Edited by Maurice Nagle