How Call Intelligence Can Optimize the Caller Experience

What’s the single most important thing businesses should be focusing on today when it comes to their customers? Is it finding new ways to reach them? Tailored product recommendations? Cutting through the noise of other advertisements? Those are certainly important considerations, but the most essential consideration is delivering a positive customer experience (CX). 

If you’re unable to optimize their experience, they’ll go elsewhere. Customers have no time for companies that can’t break out of old mindsets and ways of doing business. 

What is the customer experience?

“Customer experience” is shorthand for every single touchpoint a customer has with your business and how they interact with you. From first learning your brand name to purchasing a product or service to communicating with customer service, every interaction is part of their overall experience. 

Why does customer experience matter?

According to Zendesk, 52% of customers will switch to a competitor after a single bad experience with your brand. It’s not just about keeping your customers, though. Zippia found that when companies focused on improving overall CX, they experienced an 80% jump in revenue. 

Phone calls: Critical parts of the customer experience

The customer experience is made up of many different touchpoints, but one of the most important is also often the most overlooked: phone calls. Every phone call is an opportunity to increase customer loyalty or encourage them to jump ship to a competitor. The difference is the caller experience. 

Customer calls are often less than ideal. They’re filled with problems and most callers have negative expectations before they even dial your number. Some of the most common challenges include the following:

• Confusing, impersonal automated phone systems
• Long wait times to speak to a human operator
• Continually being asked for the same information
• A disjointed experience that doesn’t connect with their history as a customer
• Feeling invisible or unvalued 

In some cases, a single phone call could be the make-or-break point for a customer’s relationship with your brand. The good news is that you don’t have to leave this to chance. You can intentionally tailor the caller experience, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. The key is to harness call intelligence.

What is call intelligence and how can you use it to optimize the caller experience?

Call intelligence is the process of tracking, recording, reporting, and analyzing data related to customer phone calls. It can shed important light on breakdowns in your system, allowing you to adjust and tailor the process to deliver positive outcomes. Some of the insights you can gather and analyze include the following: 

• Customer needs: Figuring out what your customers need is surprisingly challenging. Often, it’s not your product or service. It’s what your product or service is designed to do. Communicating that your offering is the answer to their underlying need is a key part of optimizing the overall customer experience, as well as the call experience. With a better understanding of a customer’s needs, you can address them immediately, making the caller feel seen, valued, and validated.

• Customer history: One of the biggest disconnects for customers is feeling like your company doesn’t know them, despite making multiple purchases or being a loyal customer for years. Call intelligence gives your team access to every interaction the customer has had with your brand, allowing you to skip repetitive questions and tailor the conversation to their history and preferences.

• Receptionist notes: Sometimes, historical data is not enough. Yes, you can see the customer called about this problem or to ask that question. But tailoring their current experience may require digging a little deeper. Receptionist notes give you that insight, providing context and color to your data. This makes it even easier to optimize the process while ensuring that your customer has a connected, cohesive experience.

• Actions taken: Sometimes, you just need a quick rundown of the actions a customer has taken. Call intelligence gives you that information at a glance within a centralized dashboard. You can view that based on an individual customer, or overall, which allows you to drill down into whether your campaigns are working, what strategies improve caller disposition most, and much more. For instance, what actions led to appointments being scheduled? How many calls were transferred and why? How many payments were processed? How many follow-ups were sent and what were the outcomes?

• Verbatim information: Call intelligence can also give you the exact words a customer used. Verbal information is important to ensure accuracy in future touchpoints and to tailor the overall customer experience. Call recordings and transcriptions shed light on the tone of voice, emotional context, and more.

Expert call intelligence with every phone call

As you can see, call intelligence can yield rich rewards. It allows you to optimize the caller experience, and that fosters greater loyalty and boosts profitability. The challenge is gathering call intelligence in the first place. Most businesses find it next to impossible to achieve this on their own. That’s where Smith.ai can help. 

Our virtual receptionists are fully trained to harvest the intelligence you need to unearth critical insights. They’re also intimately familiar with best practices and techniques to optimize the caller experience. Combining our virtual receptionists with call intelligence ensures that your team can focus on what they do best while we deliver the caller experience that your customers expect and deserve. 

In addition to call intelligence, we also offer a broad range of other mission-critical services that can help transform your communications, customer retention, and profitability. That includes 24/7 phone answering, lead screening and intake, spam and sales call blocking, appointment booking, and email and SMS follow-up to name just a few. It’s the partnership you need to foster growth and success.

To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai.