The success of a business is often directly related to the health and performance of their communication facilities. Many companies deploy call accounting software to analyze call activity, reconcile invoices, control misuse/abuse and perform corporate roll ups. Traditional call accounting metrics often fail to measure system performance and customer experience.
Cradle to grave logs can be leveraged to harvest more insightful communication information including ring time, transfers, hold time, conference and talk time. These granular statistics allow communication managers to maintain, fine tune or upgrade communication facilities. Most call centers would be oblivious to system bottlenecks, hardware failures and improper call handling without cradle to grave call accounting.
Effective use of cradle to grave reports allows organizations to analyze:
Call Handling – By studying cradle to grave and call history logs, communication managers determine number of transfers, hold time and talk time. These metrics can be traced for every customer contact from the start to the end of a call. This ensures that the handling of all call activity can be examined and verified to meet corporate service level standards.
Quality Assurance – For most businesses, it is imperative that agents adhere to the company gold standards in customer care. An effective cradle to grave solution will provide a mechanism for managers to listen to call recordings and/or voice mails. This will allow them to address customer complaints, fine tune corporate policies and provide additional training to agents.
Workforce Management – Skill set-based cradle to grave and call history reports empower communication managers to track call volumes, geographical distribution, service levels and resolution types. This allows them to monitor efficiency and make informed decisions on staffing requirements during normal business hours, seasonal changes and peak hours.
Hardware Configuration – Reviewing the frequency of abandoned calls, ring time and call lengths can uncover system failures, ineffective hardware configurations and peak hour bottlenecks. This information can be transformed into concrete decisions about hardware performance and migration strategies.
A seasoned unified communication management solution must address the comprehensive needs of communications managers. A robust application that includes cradle to grave analysis, historical call center reporting, call recordings and voice mail playback, real time agent/queue dashboard in addition to traditional call accounting should be deployed (on the desktop or more flexibly in the cloud). The proper monitoring of these metrics will maximize communications technology investments, improve customer satisfaction and increase the bottom line.