Experienced businesses know that January, February, and March often arrive alongside a downturn in sales because they follow the largest spending season of the year. Paradoxically, this “post-holiday lull” may present an excellent time for a business’s call log history to take center stage.
The Inside Retail news site notes that reading the market and putting the right strategies in place can help businesses weather this seasonal downturn. To avoid a huge impact on performance, it’s best to prepare early, but there’s still time if you’re just now getting started.
VirtualPBX offers multiple ways you can check your business call log history to spot calling trends, reach out to missed contacts, and make the most of every call that comes to your business throughout the lull.
Basic Reporting With Call Logs
Our Call Logs feature is included with every VirtualPBX Phone Plan. It offers basic reporting capabilities to address all the inbound and outbound calls to your business.
The VirtualPBX Dashboard provides you with an overview of all the latest calls that have entered or exited your phone plan. It has filters for today, this week, this month, and custom so you can search for calls within a specific time period. The web-based interface shows you the date of the call and other details the like the caller’s ID and the call duration.
Furthermore, downloads are available for your logs so you can see additional information like the system ID for the call and so you can examine the output in a spreadsheet (CSV) format. Viewing your business call log history here can easily get you started with an examination of your holiday call traffic.
Call logs are created without any advance setup. You can access them in your Dashboard at any time and download the logs as you see fit. You may also wish to use our Zapier integration alongside these logs to see notifications immediately as calls arrive at your business.
Using Logs for Post-Holiday Metrics
It will be easy to see how many calls you have received and completed throughout the weeks and months of the post-holiday lull. It can also show you the locations from which inbound calls have come – helping you get a comprehensive picture of the traffic associated with your sales and marketing campaigns.
What’s most important during this time is figuring out how you can best serve the calls that are coming your way. If your holiday sales and marketing campaigns are still running and are driving calls to you campaign phone numbers, you will be able to see that activity in your logs. Your examination of where calls are coming from can inform whether or not you continue to use existing campaigns and where you share new campaigns.
Extended Reporting With Advanced Call Reports
The VirtualPBX feature Advanced Call Reports steps up reporting by offering customized analytics on a range of KPIs not found in our basic call logs.
Advanced Call Reports lets you create custom reports that may be viewed in a dashboard or emailed on a schedule to your inbox. It gathers information about time-based data like hold time and ring time for calls and performance-based data like the number of lost calls in a given period. Your use of ACD Queues is also logged within this system.
Advanced Call Reports Metrics
Advanced Call Reports also has commonalities with Call Logs by showing the same KPIs like the duration and timestamp of calls. You can also see important data like inbound/outbound designation and the phone numbers customers dialed to reach you.
You can use either system to track your business call log history in meaningful ways. During the post-holiday season, Advanced Call Reports can take you further toward understanding how your call traffic takes shape, especially if you have a larger business that takes advantage of ACD Queues to field calls.
In addition to tracking your campaigns, like you can with Call Logs, Advanced Call Reports can show you detailed information about how a customer traveled through your phone system, including which department they reached (through a direct line or through your Automated Attendant) and what their experience was like after reaching a call queue. You can infer detail from call duration, for example, and then speak to the agents that handled any specific call. From there, you can tailor additional promotions and customer outreach because it was easy to match a customer’s concerns to your employees who spoke to that individual.
Keep also in mind that you can filter any data point to narrow down your reports. For example, you can create a report that produces a report about a single phone number and one group of ACD queue agents who answer calls from that number. This makes sure you can see relevant data for the phone numbers you’re interested in examining without having to sift through extraneous information.
Examining Holiday Call Traffic
Think about how, as the link in the header of this article points out, your market has been affected by the lull in shopping. Nearly every industry will take a hit in the first months of the year; what matters for you is how your industry sees that affect and how it reacts to it.
Now more than ever, you may see that the interaction you have with customers is more focused because the calls you do receive aren’t powered primarily by holiday sales or promotions. Yet it could be worth your while to see which promotions worked well during the holidays to test if those same deals fare well with customers after the holidays.
Assistance from our team is always available through 24/7 web chat that can help you with call log downloads and access to information in your dashboard. We hope your look at logs will help propel you well through the lull and into an expanded market come spring.
