When you are starting a business, so much of your time is taken up just making sure it survives. In a way it’s like a flower in a garden. You plant, you nurture, you feed and you hope that a cruel climate doesn’t sweep it away. A lot of it is down to skill and judgement, and on a lot of occasions it will be down to a bit of luck too. Sometimes, situations beyond your control will be a deciding factor in success.
Once you are more established, what governs success changes, if subtly. You will have more water under the bridge at this point, and experience comes into it. As well as experience, there is also a lot of importance placed on analysis. When you’ve got the balance sheet to show you’re doing well, there will be information to show exactly why, too. It will tell you what you need to do more of and less of.
Businesses now have more tools than ever at their disposal to analyse exactly why things are going right and wrong. From the manager’s desk, they can get an at-a-glance record of what’s working and what isn’t. Who’s making a lot of calls, and receiving a lot, and who’s spending longer on calls. From this information, a lot can be decided, and business plans can be forged.
So much of what you do in business will be down to your call centre and how it operates. Within that centre you’ll have all sorts of calls: complaints, praise, orders, queries and more. The calls that come in may be from a range of sources and different phone lines. And when it comes to deciding what your business needs to do next, it can be useful to know what prompted a certain call.
This is where phone call tracking comes in useful. If you’ve recently been running a number of campaigns, the calls may rise steeply. It’s beneficial to know which numbers people have been dialling more. By being able to track every call that comes into your call centre, you can analyse how you can best focus your resources. You’ll have real-time demonstrations of what’s working and what isn’t.
The way that business monitoring software works has changed the way business is done. If you think back just fifteen or twenty years ago, it was a lot more of a step in the dark. You could run a campaign and only really know how it was going after weeks or months. These days, because you can react to situations as they are in motion, you can be a lot more versatile in how you do business.
While that brings benefits, it also brings challenges, of course. It does mean that you need to be ready to pull people from one role and put them somewhere else. But most importantly it saves you from pouring good money after bad. And in a business world which is moving so fast, that can be the difference between merely thriving and surviving.
