Call Recording Featured Article

We live in an electronic world with a generation that has become used to having everything they want, any time they want it, wherever they are. With that in mind, you would think that all that is required is a click on a button and you are done. Oddly enough, that is not the case.

The telephone is still a major tool in businesses, especially small to medium businesses (SMBs). According to research conducted by Google (News - Alert) and Ipsos a couple of years ago, it seems that there are business owners that still do not have websites or even a Web presence for that matter. This is where the phone becomes a vital business tool.

On the business side, including call analytics in your reports could lead to bigger opportunities. Call analytics can help to track phone leads back to their source, give you a better understanding of where to spend your advertising budget and allow you to optimize your business based on when you get the most calls. All of which are very useful parts of the big picture.

Manpreet Singh is founder and president of TalkLocal, a D.C.-based startup that helps consumers find high quality local professionals. This is the flip side of the coin for call analytics and one that TalkLocal is one measure that they use to evaluate the quality customer service and verify that all consumers are legitimate.

According to an article on Street Fight, Singh has heard all sorts of conversations from the consumer end. His small business clients are also among the 55 percent group that do not have websites, so how do they get clients? I mentioned that we live in an electronic age which, unfortunately has led to the fact that actually speaking to people on the phone is unfamiliar territory.

Being in the trenches and listening to all of the recorded phone conversations, Singh has learned some interesting facts. Possibly the most important is that business, consumers and their own customer service department has to spend a great deal of time proving their humanity. Sometimes we get so familiar with the recorded services that it becomes difficult to tell when you are talking to someone with real information.

I feel that we all procrastinate more than we are willing to admit. Everyone does it! It seems that living online has a direct correlation to procrastinating. Singh found that people who are new to technology are more likely to submit service requests weeks before they’re ready to buy, whereas, veterans lead more toward expecting immediate satisfaction for a problem that has existed for a while. We are definitely seeing two different ways of thinking.

We also live in an age where we expect to see some sort of new technology almost every day. This has led to an interesting though process, if something is too simple, there must be something very wrong with it. Me, I live for simplicity these days, after being involved with technology for more than 30 years, I kind of feel that simple is good.

Above I mentioned that adding call analytics in your reports could lead to bigger opportunities, however, you have to pace yourself. If you are only looking at immediate bottom line figures then you will most likely come off as a pushy salesperson and if I were on the other end of the call, I would probably just hang up.

Common sense always seems to be the best route to go. You want to listen to what the consumer is saying, but you also have to know when the call is going nowhere. On the flip side, you have to be able to convince your customers that you know what they are talking about and what their needs are and that you will be able to satisfy them. That would be the “showing your humanity” part of the equation. Call analytics can go a long way to helping a business, especially SMBs establish and grow.