The Ultimate Guide To Call Monitoring: Tips, Tricks & FAQs

By Lucy McCormick
24 Jul 2023

7 min read

What if we told you that every single call that comes into your business, whether it’s a customer service enquiry or a sales lead, contains a goldmine of data that could take your business to the next level? Whether you want to check your team is staying compliant, perfect sales scripts, or provide better customer journeys, call monitoring has a significant impact on sales, operations and even marketing.

It’s also important to your customers, with Forbes claiming that the contact center is increasingly becoming the primary touchpoint and the face of the business.

In this blog, we’ll explore the purpose of call monitoring, outline the benefits of call monitoring, and share our tips for how to use call monitoring effectively to improve training, deflect low-value calls, and leverage data about your best leads to drive more.

Cover Image: Ultimate guide to call monitoring

Free resource

The ultimate guide to call monitoring

Get your smart guide

What is the purpose of call monitoring?

Call monitoring enables you to listen to customer calls with your agents and extract valuable data in real time that can be fed into your wider business. It’s most commonly used in contact centers to optimize performance, in ways such as reducing handling times and improving call quality.

With rich customer data at your fingertips, you can continuously optimize your call center performance. It means you can enhance the quality of your calls and deflect low-value ones by tracking keywords and conversational trends. It pinpoints common frustrations that stall conversions and helps you improve sales scripts to deliver successful outcomes every time.

It’s not just about the bottom line either. It’s about staying ahead of the competition. According to a recent survey, 75% of leaders agree the global pandemic has compressed the digital adoption timeline. As such, they're actively seeking to invest in technologies that will improve the customer journey and help them make data-driven decisions.

What are the benefits of using call monitoring?

The benefits of call monitoring expand beyond the call centre. It provides real customer-centric data that you can use for sales and marketing. Plus it helps everyone in your business become better aligned with customer needs and solutions.

Here are some of the key benefits of using call monitoring:

Capture data and insights needed to build smooth customer journeys.
Avoid hefty fines by ensuring your agents are sticking to the rules and remain compliant with regulations.
Understand the keywords that are more likely to drive conversions.
Monitor, record and assign value to call outcomes in real time.
Evolve your marketing and sales tactics based on real customer data.
Identify and solve pain points before they even happen.

A great example of using data from call monitoring effectively comes from Flight Centre, an independent travel company in the UK. They wanted to focus on promoting their tailor-made holidays, which required in-depth calls with potential leads. To maximize their profits, Flight Centre needed to identify which campaigns and channels were generating high-value calls.

Conversation Analytics enabled them to set goals based on location, intent, airlines, and even brand words that they marked as high or low value. Over 100 keywords were inputted to grade the quality of a call. As a result, they saw a 46% year-on-year increase in online phone conversions and a 44% increase in the number of high-value enquiries.

Flight Centre

Find out more

Top tips for using call monitoring

We’ve covered the purpose and benefits of call monitoring. How exactly can call monitoring be used to its full potential? Here are the top tips for using call monitoring in your business and the impact it will have:

Identify keywords and language that trigger conversions

Monitor and identify the keywords that trigger customer conversions and use these to optimize your sales scripts. If you’re able to identify keywords that drive call outcomes you’re most interested in, you can test scripts and adjust the wording to increase conversion rates.

For example, rather than saying ‘would you like to upgrade to first class?’ you might find ‘would you like more legroom?’ to be a more persuasive call to action.

Use transcriptions from real calls to improve training

Call monitoring helps you engineer more satisfying customer conversations by highlighting common pain points that cause frustration. With this intel, you can tailor agent scripts and training to deliver solutions before they escalate. You can also better assess performance, understand where you could improve the customer experience, and even isolate calls that are significantly better at upselling to gather learnings that can be shared across your call centre.

Tools like Agent ID and Agent Scorecards make it incredibly easy to pinpoint individual training needs so you can provide better quality coaching. That way, you can make sure everyone in your team has everything they need to stay compliant, perform at their best, and put a smile on customers' faces.

Get the one-pager

Get the one-pager

Use customer intel about pain points to deflect low-value calls

Your call centre likely handles hundreds, if not thousands of calls every day. Use customer intel to handle enquiries faster, minimising wait time and reducing the overall pressure on your call agents. It’s also possible to identify recurring FAQs and use this insight to deflect low-value calls by addressing them elsewhere in the customer journey. For example, if you notice queries that could easily be dealt with elsewhere, you can update your marketing materials to ensure your agents are focused on handling the calls that will convert.

Streamline the customer journey using real data

Being able to identify the finer points of conversation quickly using call categorization gives you the context and nuance that can be difficult to track when your teams are dealing with multiple customers at any one time. Feed these insights into your customer journeys and marketing strategy to create consistency across every touchpoint.

There’s always room for improvement and using call monitoring to map the customer journey shines a light on potential obstacles. Could you optimize messaging to convert faster? Are there any pitfalls in the customer journey that prevent someone from making a purchase?

Improve sales by identifying customer needs

Every good business is most interested in satisfying their customers and gaining a deeper understanding of what makes them tick is the best way to leave them feeling satisfied. Improve upselling and reduce churn by identifying needs and solutions before your customer even thinks of them.

You can also use data from call monitoring to perfect your objection-handling techniques to win back hesitant customers and transform negative experiences into positive ones.

Link high-value leads directly to your marketing campaigns

Mapping the journey clearly shows you how and where your customers interact with your brand. Whether that’s through a Google search, a targeted PPC campaign or word-of-mouth on social media, identifying your key channels is the best way to streamline the customer journey.

Analyzing calls with tools like call tracking helps you map the journey your customers take more effectively. It also means you can track ROI more accurately than ever before.

How Conversation Analytics enhances your call monitoring

Infinity’s speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, enables contact centers to capture the data needed to build smoother customer journeys, resolve issues faster, and reduce manual work involved in handling multiple calls.

With Conversation Analytics, you can evolve your tactics based on real data from your customers, instead of relying on intuition. With so much knowledge at your fingertips, you’ll be able to unearth real value and turn leads into profits.

It enables you to easily see how your contact centre is performing. This makes it one of the easiest ways to arm yourself with the insights needed to:

Increase average order value
Improve upselling
Reduce cost per conversion
Curate effective customer journeys
Reduce churn
Increase customer satisfaction

Even better, Conversation Analytics integrates seamlessly with many contact centre technologies and CRM systems, including Vocalcom. This means you can harness rich data automatically and draw links between marketing data and customer data.