How to Stay In-Tune with Customer Needs When Using a Call Answering Service

Missed calls mean missed opportunities. However, you also need your team to focus on mission-critical tasks. With the rise in robocalls and spam, it’s harder than ever to hit that balance. 

Using a call answering service is a great solution that ensures you never miss a call again, but your team can do what they do best without having to spend all day on the phone. But how do you stay in tune with your customer needs if you’re using a call answering service?

The good news is that the right answering service doesn’t come between you and your customers. These professionals can answer calls, take messages, forward them to the appropriate party, and more while also providing you with critical insights into your customers’ needs. 

Why you need to understand customer needs

Too often, business owners and decision-makers assume that they’re meeting their customers’ needs simply by offering the products or services the business provides. That’s only true to a certain extent. 

In some cases, those products or services may not completely address the underlying need. In others, customers may experience challenges or problems related to the product or service they purchased and need support from the company to solve those issues. 

Understanding your customer needs allows you to deliver a better overall customer experience, reduce customer churn, improve loyalty, increase retention, enhance customer satisfaction, and even build a better business. In other cases, this can allow you to upsell or cross-sell.

The importance of call analytics

Analytics are critical for just about any business-related effort. They allow you to measure progress toward KPIs, determine the ROI you’re seeing from efforts like marketing, and so much more. Call analytics give you deep insights into customer-related data.

The call answering service you choose should do more than simply handle your business’s calls. It should also capture key data on each call, including:

• The call type – new lead, existing customer, robocall/spam, etc.
• The time of the call
• The duration of the call
• The outcome of the call (forwarded to a business extension, message taken, etc.)
• Any follow-up performed (appointment set, reminder sent, text message sent, etc.)

With the right call-answering service, you’ll have access to all of this information in an easy-to-read dashboard. Charts and graphs help you make sense of call volume-related information so you can match your budget to the seasons and times of day when you need help the most. 

Call summaries, receptionist notes, and metadata

Working with a partner that provides live virtual receptionists rather than just an automated answering service is important. This can give you access to even deeper insights about each customer, their needs, and their overall experience with your company. 

Each call should have its own summary detailing exactly what happened. This gives you access to important information like why the individual called, what their expectations were, and how the call transpired. Notes made by a professional, human receptionist can add important nuance to raw information. Still, you should also be able to access a line-by-line transcript of the call to really delve into customer expectations, challenges, and needs.

Lead qualification means less wasted time and money

Your call answering service should do more than just take messages, set appointments, and forward calls. It should be an important part of your client onboarding process. As such, lead qualification is a critical service, and it can also help you understand customer needs and expectations.

For instance, let’s say a customer calls your business, and a virtual receptionist answers. Rather than simply taking a name and number or forwarding the call to one of your team members, the receptionist can ask questions, gather information, and provide you with a full view of the caller so that you can respond to the caller with the exact information they need. 

Some of the things a virtual receptionist can help you determine through lead qualification include the following:

• Where did the caller hear about your business? This can help you fine-tune your marketing campaigns and even determine if your ads are resonating with your target audience.
• What is the context of the call? Is the call from a potential supplier or vendor? Is it from a customer with a problem that needs to be solved? This can help you identify common issues experienced by customers so that you can adjust internal processes, service delivery metrics, and more.

Call recording gives you in-depth information 

Call transcripts and receptionist notes can shed a lot of light on a situation. However, if you want all the nuance possible, you need recordings of each call. Sometimes, a customer’s tone of voice can convey immense amounts of information that is impossible to capture in text. 

With call recordings, it’s possible to determine the caller’s mood, frustration level, satisfaction level, and more. Of course, sometimes there’s just no time to listen to entire calls or sort through all the call recordings from a particular day. That’s where searchable call transcriptions come into play.

With the right call answering service, you’ll also have access to accurate, real-time call transcripts. These should be searchable by keyword, topic, and other metrics, which allows you to search through your entire transcript archive to surface call information related to your search terms. This allows you to:

• Identify calls about the same topic or problem
• Find the number of times a caller has contacted you
• Identify important trends so that you can make adjustments or fine-tune business processes

The powerful communication solution you need to understand customer needs

At Smith.ai, our goal is to empower your business and help you achieve growth and stability through professional call-answering services. Our live virtual receptionists and world-class technology allow us to provide 24/7 answering services, lead qualification, and more. We also provide call transcripts, receptionist notes, call recordings, and access to critical metrics within your central dashboard. We help you understand your customers’ needs while ensuring your team can focus on what they do best. 

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

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