Call Analytics: What It Is & How Does It Work?

Phone calls lead to valuable conversations and rich insights that help you gauge customer satisfaction with your business. This makes analyzing calls important. 

In this blog post, we explore the benefits of call analytics, its use cases, and how you should evaluate the available platforms. 

What is Call Analytics? 

Call analytics tools collect, analyze, and interpret data from phone conversations, including inbound and outbound calls, to help businesses extract valuable insights. By examining patterns, keywords, call durations, and context to gain insights on how to improve customer services, strategies, and customer experiences.

It includes extracting data like:

• Call-tracking data – the caller’s name, phone number, and call’s origin
• Call metrics – call frequency, duration, and wait times
• Conversation intelligence – sentiment, context, intent, and pain points

The primary objective of call analytics is to analyze agent performance to improve communication strategies and optimize return on investment. Support, marketing, and sales teams can use these insights to identify issues impacting customer experience, optimize campaigns, and personalize customer targeting. 

How Does Call Analytics Work? 

Call analytics helps businesses understand their customers’ needs by monitoring conversations and converting unstructured data into actionable insights. Here’s a breakdown of how it works: 

Step 1: Data Collection & Processing

The software collects data from the call center system, such as call logs and recordings from customer interactions. Then, it cleans the call data and uses speech analytics to transcribe the voice data into text, which acts as a foundation for extracting insights. 

Step 2: Extracting Key Metrics

It extracts relevant information that allows for deeper insight into operational performance. This includes metrics like:

• Caller identification (name, phone number & location)
• If they are new or repeat caller
• Call hold time, duration, and abandonment rate
• Any issues occurred during the call
• Average handle time
• First call resolution 

Step 3: Analysis & Insights

The software analyzes call data from the following aspects:

» Descriptive – Highlights the current performance

» Diagnostic – Identifies why issues occur

» Predictive – Forecasts future call volumes

The supervisors can proactively address bottlenecks, enhancing caller experience through these insights.

Step 4: Reporting & Continuous Optimization

Call analytics produces detailed reports offering insights on agent performance, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency. With detailed reporting and continuous monitoring, you can make data-driven decisions to fine-tune strategies and optimize customer service. 

Types of Call Analytics

There are three types of call analytics providing unique insights:

1. Historical Call Analytics

The tool analyzes historical call data to identify the root cause of past issues, patterns, trends, and gaps in service performance or customer experience. With historical analytics, you can benchmark contact center performance over time and identify the reasons for both positive and negative impacts. 

2. Real-time Call Analytics

It monitors and analyzes live calls to assess call activity, quality, compliance, agent performance, customer behavior and satisfaction. It provides real-time updates on key metrics and alerts supervisors on performance issues detected during live calls. 

Real-time monitoring allows agents to take corrective actions in real-time to improve customer satisfaction promptly.

3. Predictive Call Analytics

The tool uses data analysis and machine learning algorithms to predict future call volumes and trends. Analyzing a large volume of historical data identifies correlations, patterns, and predictive indicators, helping you adapt contact center operations to meet anticipated demands. 

Key Metrics in Call Analytics 

Businesses can track various metrics to analyze the performance and quality of their contact center calls. Here are some popular ones to track:

• Call Duration: It’s the length of time a customer spends on the call
• Call Abandonment: It’s the percentage of calls in which customers abandon the call before connecting to an agent
• First Call Resolution: It’s the percentage of calls resolved on the first call

The metrics to track and their interpretation can vary, depending on your business goal. For example, longer call duration may be a negative sign for customer support departments since it indicates slow resolution. However, for an outbound sales team, longer calls could be a positive pointer.

What Features You Should Look For in Call Analytics Software?

When looking for a call analytics platform, evaluating the features augmenting its analytical power is important. Here are some key features to look for:

1. Call Tracking

This feature allows you to monitor and attribute phone calls to specific marketing campaigns and channels. This helps identify high-performing marketing efforts, enabling you to optimize resources, refine customer engagement strategies, and improve lead generation. 

2. Sentiment Analysis

Modern call analytics tools come with natural language processing and machine learning capabilities that can detect the customer’s tone and identify the customer’s emotions. Agents can use these insights to adapt their approach according to the caller’s mood. 

3. Speech Analysis

Speech recognition technology converts audio data into text, which helps agents identify common keywords, phrases, or recurring issues. The tool also gives insight into call intent and context to help refine service strategy and approach. 

4. Dashboards

A customizable dashboard provides a clear report on key performance indicators, giving supervisors quick access to real-time actionable insights. 

5. Dynamic Integration

The platform should seamlessly integrate with your business ecosystem, like CRM, marketing, sales, and support platforms, to ensure a consistent data flow. 

6. Scalability & Agility

The call analytics software should automatically scale up and down with the fluctuating data volume and operational demands. It should be agile, adaptable, and capable of handling high-volume campaigns without compromising performance. 

Exotel is an AI-powered communication platform that offers robust call analytics capabilities. It offers real-time performance insights, sentiment analysis, and integration so you can identify patterns and recurring concerns to improve contact center operations. 

How You Can Utilize Call Analytics in Your Business

Call analytics insights can help you more than monitoring and tracking call performance. Here are some business aspects where it can provide valuable outcomes: 

» Optimize Marketing Campaign: Call analytics helps you monitor which marketing channel or campaign drives the most calls. With this insight, you can identify the origin of best leads and allocate resources efficiently to maximize ROI. 

» Segment Target Audience: The analytics provide caller demographic and behavioral data, helping you understand various audience segments. Based on the data, you can tailor messages and personalize interactions, increasing satisfaction and lead conversion. 

» Enhance Customer Service Training: You can identify repeat callers and recurring issues from call recordings, which can help you tailor training programs to effectively address common concerns, prevent repeat callers and enhance FCR. 

» Generate Leads: Call analytics can track high-quality leads by analyzing call duration, intent, and sentiment. It allows sales teams to prioritize high-value leads with targeted follow-ups.

Benefits of Call Analytics

Here are some key benefits of call analytics for businesses: 

» Improved Customer Experience: The tool helps you identify & address customer pain points, sentiment, and recurring issues in a timely manner, enhancing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. 

» Increased Sales: By analyzing call patterns and customer behavior, you can identify high-quality leads and help the sales team prioritize value-adding prospects to improve lead conversation rates

» Better Marketing Campaigns: Call analytics software can track which marketing channels drive quality inbound calls, allowing you to optimize marketing spend and maximize ROI

» Proactive Issue Resolution: With predictive analytics, you can forecast potential issues before they escalate, allowing you to take proactive actions

» Data-Driven Decision: Call metrics, sentiment analysis, and performance insights in real-time can make informed decisions to optimize and adapt business operations

» Enhanced Employee Training: Call analytics software monitors call performance and helps track employee’s skills and expertise. The insight helps you develop personalized training programs based on the agent’s skill level.

How to Select the Right Call Analytics Solution For Your Business?

Selecting the right call analytics solution provider is an important step; here’s how you can do it: 

• Define your business goals
• Evaluate potential vendors
• Assess UX and support
• Look for integration capabilities

Define Business Goals 

Outline the business challenges and the key performance indicators you aim to analyze and improve with the call analytics software. This will help you compare the solution’s features and identify the best fit. 

Evaluate Potential Vendors

Shortlist the vendors offering all the features you need to meet your business goals and fit your budget. Then, you can evaluate them based on these points:

• Is the platform HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA compliant?
• What is the accuracy rate of the speech-to-text transcription feature?
• What metrics does the platform analyze?
• Can it allow agents to see the call transcription?
• Does it integrate with other business tools like marketing and sales?

Assess UX & Support

Look for an analytics platform with a user-friendly interface and easy employee onboarding. The solution should also offer round-the-clock support and assistance. 

Look for Integration Capabilities 

The call analytics solution should be compatible with your existing software, like your CRM, marketing and sales tech stack, to ensure smooth workflow.

Unleash the Power of Call Analytics with Exotel

Call analytics empowers businesses by converting audio data from customer conversations into actionable insights. It helps identify gaps in operations and improves customer experience and employee performance. However, it is important to select the right solution that aligns with your business needs. 

Exotel is a leading communication platform for contact centers that offers AI-powered call analytics to provide businesses with actionable insights into real-time customer interactions. It helps you:

• Monitor live calls to ensure compliance and service quality
• Analyze conversations and identify sentiments to manage escalations effortlessly

Want to see how AI-driven call analytics can help you listen to customer’s concerns? Book a demo today. 

FAQs

What is the Difference Between Call Analytics & Call Center Analytics?

Call analytics evaluates phone call data, including KPIs like sentiment, customer behavior, caller intent, and content, to extract actionable insights. Call center analytics focuses on evaluating metrics like call volume, agent productivity, and wait times. 

What is the Role of AI in Call Analytics?

AI offers automation in call analytics, which enables real-time speech-to-text transcription, sentiment analysis, pattern analysis, and predictive analysis, reducing manual effort and increasing analytics accuracy.