Calls, emails, and tickets flow into your business from customers needing help; it is easy to handle each as an independent incident or opportunity. A constant barrage of work to do. This is what leads you to hire administrative staff, maybe for the first time or maybe to grow a team to meet the demand. After all, you have to take care of your customers. How often are you evaluating the data these inbound interactions are generating? Whether you are a plumbing business or a SaaS company, your interactions are giving you valuable data points to take your company to the next level.
There are simple systems for tracking this easily available, but getting them into the system is key. A good phone system and a Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM), minimally configured, can do the trick in tracking your most basic Data. Your minimal data points to always capture are Who, When, and Why.
If you are old enough to remember landlines, you likely took a message for your parents or a sibling. Keeping a notepad and pen by the phone was commonplace for this purpose exactly. If you answered the phone and it wasn’t for you, you took down who the call was for, who was calling, A way to get in touch with them, what they wanted, and ideally timestamped it. It took a few lines of chicken scratch to get the full message to the proper person to return the call. So antiquated and simple that the answering machine was invented. In business, there are tons of solutions to direct calls to the right places and even transcribe messages, timestamping and matching contact records. So easy, yet so many organizations get this key function wrong.
There are an endless number of data points that can strengthen your team’s ability to maximize the value of inbound customer actions. That is what makes it so hard, endless opportunity to do really cool and innovative things, but nailing the basics is imperative. Without that, all extra collected data can be rendered meaningless.
The 3 W’s of Basic Customer Call Tracking
Who
Who is calling seems easy enough. You may have caller ID and can consider the job done. If you never want usable data, 100%. Making this data useful, that is more involved.
We want to capture the customer, who can be a business or person, depending on your business, but this interaction. needs to be attached to an account. Whatever your verification method, attaching to an account holds immense value. Maybe the person isn’t your Point of Contact. Good! You just identified a potential user. Maybe they aren’t associated with that account at all. Great! You may have just logged a breach attempt with usable data. Maybe it was just your normal contact person calling to ask a question. Awesome, you just logged a (hopefully positive) customer interaction, giving you insight into their use. There are not necessarily any bad calls, but if you are not logging them to an account, they are lost in the fray and easily become simply a metric of how many calls you took with no ties to their value.
Tracking your conversation on an account level combines all calls from all potential points of contact and starts to give you a cost analysis of your customers. Knowing the amount of work an account is is very valuable when you can pair that against revenue. For example, a customer who pays $1,000 that only calls once and does not require much assistance is likely much better than a customer who pays $5,000 and takes up 20 hours of your employees’ time with calls, requests, and complaints. These numbers at the time of renewal, or your budget review, can set you as a manager and your organization on a much more secure footing.
So the account tie is critical, but the people on an account can be tricky. Some CRMs make this simpler than others. Some make it impossible. Unless your CRM makes adding different kinds of contacts to an account easy, having a customer database or software that lives outside of your sales process is probably your best bet. Customer support software can excel at importing user and contact lists for all known contacts on an account and keep track of permissions (I am talking to you, SaaS companies). They also generally make it easy to quickly add contacts if you need to on-the-fly; that way, you can easily associate that contact should they call in again. Strong processes or automation are key in managing your list of customer contacts. I would never suggest that a 100% match rate is the goal. Wrong numbers, non-customer calls, people calling from payphones (Ok, maybe not that one) all happen. High 80% is normally a good goal for associating calls with accounts, depending on the model.
So who is calling? You really should have the account, the person reaching out, and the contact information at least.
When
Timestamps are easy and everywhere, when you talk to someone, either by phone, text, or email. That timestamp says a lot about your relationship. How often do you talk with your customers? Do you even know? If you are not following the rules of capturing the “Who” information, probably not.
Customer neglect can be a problem. In business, we often see customer interaction as a net good thing. When a business grows and doesn’t speak clearly and consistently with customers, it can turn for the worse. Inconsistency and lack of note sharing create very poor customer interactions, it harms the credibility of the representative working with the customer at that moment, and it isn’t necessarily their fault. That customer in a moment of need isn’t talking to Bob or Janet from support; they are talking with your company. An Identity that supersedes the actual person on the line. All the past wins and misses are tallied and put on that one employee. If you always have bad service or cannot fix problems, the customer is already geared up for that to be the outcome, regardless of Bob and Janet’s responses.
If you have 3 departments, say sales, accounting, and customer success, calling to collect on a past due bill. They call the decision maker, accounts payable, and the primary contact to try to collect. Finally, someone in the customer’s accounting team calls in as well and talks to someone in support about an issue with payment. The customer likely knows that numerous calls were made, with different tones and reasoning. All saying something slightly different, and now a randomized support representative is left with the task of sorting all that out and helping the customer take action. Without call records and notes, the poor representative may have no idea the journey that it took to get where they are. They will be forced to deliver a canned, impersonal response and become equally as frustrated due to the lack of information on hand to do their job well.
Over-outreach is the dark side of not tracking your interactions. Everyone receives more emails than they can realistically manage every day. That is why we have the ability to auto-categorize things, designate what is important, and send egregious communications to spam automatically. The truth is, very few business products, even with frequent use, require constant communication. At some point, too many emails mean none of them get read. Too many requests to “check in” become annoying and unproductive. If you are tracking your cadences, then you may be able to dial in that perfect balance.
One of the favorite metrics I used for communication cadences in a previous life in SaaS Customer Success was aimed at customers who hadn’t interacted with anyone from our company in the last 60 days. Not sales, support, or billing. They were the ones who got assigned someone to personally check in. I always used support as a metric. We had an awesome support team that had top CSAT scores. I wanted customers to utilize them as it showed how knowledgeable our team was and how our team was part of our offering and very valuable. So, no questions meant they didn’t get their monthly dose of our infection knowledge. Those were the customers I knew we needed to engage.
Creating positive customer engagements is about finding the right cadences for outreach, but most importantly, making interactions valuable. Sharing information to ensure that everyone who interacts with customers can help with at least the basics and know what is going on is critical to a productive call, whether outbound or inbound. Attaching timestamps to accounts that encompass all interactions helps everyone create more informed, positive customer interactions.
Why
“How can I help?” or some rendition is normally one of the first things we say on the phone when answering a call in the world of business. A more polite way of saying “Why are you reaching out?” or “What do you want?”
It may sound crazy, but your customers may not always know why they are reaching out to you. Like when you go to a doctor, you may have symptoms and have a pretty good idea of the cause and even the treatment, but there are a lot of details that you may be missing. Your headache may not be a virus, but your eyesight. Your runny nose and cough may not be a cold, but allergies to an obscure weed that just bloomed nearby. There are cures for the symptom, but the cause may take further analysis.
Phone trees and AI routing are great for getting someone where they need to go based on a self-diagnosis, but can’t help us diagnose the cause with enough accuracy and frequency to act with full confidence. Many times, especially in technology, issues are discovered by customers. It takes a pool of users reporting the same issue multiple times to tip off the product and development teams that something isn’t working quite right. In my experience, that pool of users who are the first to discover problems is a short list. Do you know who yours are? Whether you do or not, creating a reason for the interaction should be parsable by anyone with access to a spreadsheet and a pivot table.
How do you make things simple? A finite number of reasons for the interaction. If you can keep it in a list less than 10, even better. Your incoming calls will likely fall into one of 3 basic types: Questions, Incidents, and Assistance. They sound simple, but let’s cover those first.
Questions are exactly that, a question that they need answered about the product or service. Think “How do I….” type questions. These are questions that customers should be able to answer themselves through help resources, FAQ pages, or a Google search. Don’t get me wrong, it is good they are looking to you as a resource, but these are low-level questions.
Incidents are problems. These are things that are real issues or failures. They require attention, responses, resolution, and maybe even apologies. Sometimes you can break these out into incidents and problems based on your product and needs, but identifying when you had to step in and make fixes is very important to track.
Assistance items are things that your team is required to help with that a customer can’t do themselves. Maybe it is changing products or billing items. Maybe it is adding licenses that require sales assistance, or maybe a tech has to make manual adjustments. Tracking these items can be revenue items or a cost of doing business, but tracking is important.
Tracking these 3 types of items helps you better focus your attention. Too many questions, build a better resource center. Too many incidents, maybe check in on Quality Control. Too many Assistance items; it may be time to look at self-serve options. None of these are indicative of a problem, but crucial to the visibility of incoming items that need your attention. They are the levers you can pull on and identify patterns in behavior to start taking control of your customer engagement.
More granular information may be key here as well, though. If you have multiple product lines or common items in each category, it only strengthens the process to expand on the finite list to allow for more actionable solutions. For example, you can add additional tags to each primary reason. If someone reaches out with a Question, what is it related to? Are they asking questions about the product, billing, or contact information? All these can be sub-categories ready to track. The important thing to remember is to keep your lists of tags as small as possible. More than 10 or 15 quickly becomes too much to manage, and when it is too much to manage, it won’t get done right or at all. Think hard about the smallest possible lists you can have that cover the majority of your cases. There is no shame in an “Other” category.
Lastly, you need to be the one defining these reasons, not the customer. Furthermore, never tag the interaction until the end. Like the doctor example, your customer may not know what they want or need, and there can be many twists in the diagnosis phase. If you like data, you can get the customer’s reason for reaching out and compare it to the tags your team assigns. The difference is always surprising and entertaining.
Configuring your intake process requires thought and intentionality. The real trick is to start as simply as possible. Where this process most commonly fails and breaks down is by implementing too much at one time. It requires work from the people on the phones to make this work, and data entry and call logging in high-volume environments is a very difficult change if you are not doing it today. Transparency helps this, though. The data is valuable and a lot of good for the organization and the people on the front lines can come out of it. Data-driven decision-making is powerful, and creating actionable data is the first step.
I don’t believe there is a true shortcut to excellence here, so I encourage sharing the findings as soon as possible in this process. Highlight the missed data entry points, not to scold, but to show the potential. Show what kind of interactions you are having with customers and how they improve with data. Bring in real cases, case studies, and testimonials internally and externally as things improve. This is a people-driven solution for better communication; you have to communicate the value to the people involved. Everyone wants to do their work better. No one likes bad customer calls. We can do better. We have the knowledge. We have the technology. We must have the courage to do things better.