Business Phone Systems: 3 Reporting and Analytics Must Haves

Your company is looking for a new business phone system, but what call reporting and analytics are a must have?

These are my 3 Must-Haves for Business Phone Systems

1. Reports that show geography
2. Reports that can be customized
3. Ability to Trace Call Journey

Want my recommendations on the Best Business Phone Systems to quote? Click the button below to ask me today.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. That’s going to be the theme of today’s video. Today’s video is going to be on business phone systems, reporting and analytics. I’m going to talk to you about three essential must haves when it comes to business phone systems. But before we get too far ahead of myself really quick, if you’d like a shortcut

My Recommendations

and you’d like my recommendations for the best business phone system for your company, you can watch this video. Watch all my videos. Great content there. You’ll learn a lot. But a nice shortcut is actually just reach out and contact me. Give me a call, shoot me an email. More information on that at the end of the video. It won’t cost you anything. Fantastic idea to do that. It’s actually the reason why I make these videos.

Website Plug

Also, if you’d like to do some kind of more of a self-service approach, if you’d like to search business phone systems based on certain features that your company needs, we have a really cool website. Go check out our website at Arrow Comic-Con and in the search bar type in business phone system and click on it and you’ll actually be able to search all of the major business phone systems, service providers by feature. And then you can read about them. You can place reviews on your current providers, you can read reviews, all kinds of cool stuff like that. Do me a favor. When you’re there, leave a couple of reviews. I’d really like to get more feedback for the other I.T. professionals going to the site. I really like to get the site going a whole lot. I guarantee you you’ve never seen a website like this. It’s really cool. So good. Check it out. If you’d like the more self-service option. But no matter what, you’re going to get to a point. Even if you search some providers, you’re going to need my advice.  At some point, you’re going to need to know, Hey, which of these service providers have the best reputation in the industry? what’s their pricing? What’s their best pricing? Which rep should I be talking to? And that’s where I come in. So no matter what. Reach out, by email or calling (714.593.0011) I’m happy to help.

Is your Company Pulling Reports?

So when it comes to shopping for a business phone system for your company, you know, when it comes to analytics and reporting, I can tell you what a lot of customers reach out to me and say, Hey, our company is looking for a new phone system. And I always ask them the same question. I’ll say, Does your company currently use any type of reporting or analytics for the phone system? And maybe 50% of the time, the answer I get back is no. And it is what it is. It’s understandable. A lot of companies out there just aren’t. Maybe their phone systems aren’t equipped to give them much analytics or much reporting, or maybe it’s really difficult to pull reports. It’s kind of a pain, so people stop doing it. But in terms of moving forward, I really discourage companies to think of just because you’re not doing reporting analytics today that you shouldn’t be doing it moving forward. Kind of like I said in the beginning of the video, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And the phones system is a huge key to a lot of information within your organization that you can really utilize to improve the business. So not pulling any reports really, there’s no excuse for that. You definitely want to have a phone system that you can get some great reports out of even if you don’t use them every week maybe that you can use on a regular basis.

3 Essential Must Haves

So today I’m going to go over three essential must haves. When you’re shopping for a phone system in terms of reporting and analytics, you want to make sure any phone system that you purchased for the company has these three things. In my opinion.

First Essential

The first thing that you need to make sure that the reporting and analytics portion has is the ability to give you reports of where the calls are coming in from and display that information in some type of easy to read graph. Like, for instance, if your marketing department is doing any type of marketing, you can assign a DID to different types of marketing and then see where the calls are coming in from, from those different areas. So you could say like, Hey, this ad brought more people from this area of the country or that area of the country so you can see the effectiveness of your advertising. You can also just in general see where calls are coming in from, you know, from throughout the country and the type of volume and things like that. So you want to make sure that your phone system is able to display reports on where the calls are coming from to your organization and display that information in some type of a graph or pie chart. Something very easy to see for managers who aren’t that technical.

Second Essential

The second must have in terms of reporting and analytics is the ability to create a customized report. However you want or a manager wants. Save that customized report, schedule that customized report and have it emailed automatically to whoever wants the report on a regular basis. And that’s really important when it comes to managing employees. For instance, a sales manager who wants to measure the activity on a regular basis of his sales reps, it’s just a nice weekly check in for him to get email. The report with some nice graphs, some nice, easy to read, you know, Hey, here’s how many dials every made last week, or here’s how many calls each rep received, or here’s the average talk time of each rep. And it’s something that they can look at within 30 seconds and just make sure that everything’s in line. But in order to do that, you need a report that will do all the customization be able to save that customization and schedule the reports and email them. You need all that information, but that’s must have information for any type of sales manager. You also want to be able to look at things like, Hey, did any calls come into the organization that were never answered and then never returned? No one ever called that person back. That’s something that you can see in a report, and that’s a report that you want to be able to customize and have scheduled automatically email to everybody once a week so they don’t have to log in to the phone system, pull that report manually, because if you do that, it just won’t happen.

See the problem early

These are these are very, very important statistics that managers need to know, even if they don’t do anything with the information every single week, at least they can see it every single week. And if there’s an issue, they can nip it in the bud right away as opposed to not noticing it for several months. So it’s a big deal to the business that your reports have that ability

Third Essential

and the last must have, in my opinion, is the ability to pull a report on the journey of any particular call. So what I mean by that is if a call comes into the business, you can see where that call landed, who answered it, which exact phone or user answered it, where it got transferred, went, how many rings it took for that person to answer it, who they were talking to, how long they were talking when the call terminated, who terminated the call? Was it on your network? Was it on somebody else’s network? The reason why this is really important is because so many times in a business, somebody will call in and complain and say, hey, this person hung up on me. Well, how do you know if that’s really true? The employee says, I didn’t hang up on them. Well, if you can trace that call back, you can see the journey of the call and exactly what happened in taking it even further, not only for customer complaints. It’s great for the i.t department, which is you guys for troubleshooting calls.

Using reports for Troubleshooting

So a one of your employees comes to you and says, hey, my call dropped the other day was a really important call. You can look at the journey of that individual call and see what happened. It really helps with troubleshooting so you can see, hey, that call landed on your network when you’re working at home and it looks like you had super high latency on that call. It looks like your internet connection at your house is really bad. It wasn’t the service provider, it wasn’t the handset itself. It was the fact that you had really high latency. Oh, by the way, are you on wi fi? You know, like because that is that was that call on a computer that it hit a computer that’s working off of wi fi on the second story and your router is downstairs or things like that. It can start a lot of conversations. So again, you want to make sure that your reporting and analytics have the ability to trace a calls journey both for for troubleshooting, you know, technical things or just troubleshooting customer service.

Outro

All right. I hope that helped. And hey, again, reach out, by email or call me (714.593.0011). Ask me for my recommendations. In addition to reporting and analytics, there’s a lot of other things your company should be asking about. And I know all of that stuff. I been in the industry for over 20 years. I’m a broker for all the major phone systems, service providers. So if you call me, I’ll ask you a few questions about your company’s phone system requirements and then I’ll be able to give you two or three recommendations of companies that your or vendors, I should say, that your company should absolutely include in the quotes. And I based my recommendations off their reputation in the industry and with my customers for good service, quality and customer service. Definitely something you want. Also, the feature is available. Stuff like that. And then competitive pricing. So when you contact me, I’ll get you a much better decision and a lot faster time. And the nice thing is I don’t charge you a dime for my broker fee. All any interaction that we have, you don’t even have to pay for the service providers. Pay my company, my broker fee. So no excuse whatsoever to at least reach out and see what I have to say.

Website Plug

But if you’re not quite ready for that yet and you want to do more of a self-service option, go check out our website. Aerocominc.com type in business phone system into the search bar on that homepage. And you can search every business phone system, service provider, every major one that is. And you can filter them by feature. I guarantee you’ve never seen a website like this before. It’s super cool. Once you find the providers, you can also look at those providers, see if they have any reviews and read about them, watch videos on them, all kinds of cool stuff.

But eventually you’re going to get to a point where you want some pricing or you have some more questions. And that’s where I come in. Reach out, contact me by or email or call me (714.593.0011). I love to help you. That’s why I do the videos in Oh, by the way, while you on the website do me a huge favor, leave some reviews, you know, leave some breadcrumbs for other i.t vendors or other i.t professionals who are logging on to the site and want to read reviews on companies.

Review the providers

Leave some reviews on the service providers that you’ve experienced for ISP’s business phone systems, contact center, all kinds of cool stuff like that. That would really be a big favor to me. Also, don’t forget to hit the like button. Subscribe to the channels so more people can find us and ring the bell. All right. Well, thanks for watching the video.

I really appreciate it. And I will catch you on the next one.