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You’ve put a lot of planning (and money) into your phone system and now you want to know how it’s working, if it’s working.
You chose your cloud PBX provider, you slaved over your IVR, and finally, you trained your employees on the system.
In many cases, the first time a business owner turns over some control of his company to someone else, is the first time he hires someone to answer the phones. In many ways, that is the most nerve-wracking moment you experience in business, the moment someone else is speaking for your company.
This feeling never really goes away, because you know how important the phones are. In fact, handling them well is a real asset, and not handling them well can be fatal!
That’s where today’s cloud-based phone systems are such an improvement. The guessing game is gone; from the moment a call hits your call center, you can follow its progress in real-time and listen in at any point in the call.
The Post-Installation Phone System Checklist
- Is your Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) working?: It’s imperative to ensure that calls are being routed to the right person and department at each juncture of the phone call. The programs with your ACD manifest themselves in one of two ways. The first is a programming problem. The calls are not getting to the person you’ve directed them to. In this case, you need to get your tech team to work on the problem. If it’s sending to the person you named, but it turns out that you want those calls to go to a different person, you might revise your call tree and share it with the tech crew. They still have some work to do, but it’s a different kind of work.
- Visualize calls in real-time with progressive call flow: The interfaces that offer this (and Phonexa is one of them) will allow you to “see” your calls from the moment they hit your call center and see how they’re progressing through your system. You can check out operators and departments without barging in, plus you can see the analytics of this call in real-time.
- The IVR: Is the IVR filtering calls as it should? Are callers remaining with the calls? Are you having hang-up issues? If so, where within the phone call? Your IVR is helping you in several ways, depending on your business. It’s acting as a filter in the affiliate network business, with callers being “filtered” to particular vendors based on pre-set criteria. It’s also a time saver, cutting down on hold time for the caller and also allowing operators to handle more calls because the IVR recorded much of the necessary information. This allows the operator to hit the ground running. You need to test out your IVR after it’s been installed to make sure calls are being directed as you wish and, most importantly, if the customer has a problem during the IVR process, can they get out and find the help they need?
- Are operators confident with the system?: You should take advantage of call barging to listen in on a conversation live to insure that the operators are handling the calls properly.
- Analytics: Where are the calls coming from? Your last step is to gather your analytics to see where your calls came from, your conversion rate and what keywords were “key.” There is a lot that happens to your incoming phone calls. There is a lot interaction between interfaces, databases, computer hardware and software. In many ways, your work on a new phone system really begins once it’s installed.
