UC and Communications Analytics: Your Competitive Advantage

A Key Priority for Business

During this challenging year with data and analytics now accessible to all sizes of business, we’ve seen a considerable uptake in our services. This growth clearly shows the thirst that businesses have for analytics and insights.

We now have over 30,000 customers globally, up 15% since 2020.  The endpoints we monitor each month across our entire portfolio of products has doubled on last year to over 8 million, and we now process over 350,000 call recordings every day in our cloud, an increase of 43%.

The uptake in analytics has been consistent across vertical sectors. These are businesses that place customer experience as a top priority such as those in retail, finance, recruitment, and estate agents.

These same sectors have also increased their use of analytics significantly as staff needed to work from home.  They use call analytics to understand if the needs of customers are being met and to ensure staff are focused on the right things, as well as to compare performance against pre-lockdown data to ensure a consistent high level of service.

Home improvements have been popular since the pandemic took hold. For our customers in related sectors, there’s a need to be as proactive as possible when dealing with inbound enquires and ensuring regional branch services are able to meet demand and react quickly to orders. Their key focus has been on reducing unreturned missed calls, minimising churn and improving customer retention.

Some of the largest organisations such as public sector departments, GP surgeries and heavily operational businesses, have had to completely transform their communications. Again, they have relied on our analytics to ensure such fundamental changes to both inbound and outbound processes are working effectively.

Rapid Evolution

With cloud services now prevalent and everything API-enabled from the outset, it has become much easier to integrate different systems and share information between them.

For Tollring, this means we can extend our information to other data sets or bring in information from other important areas and marry it together. These full API driven capabilities extend from the front-end customer presentation through to backend services.

For example, most CRM systems are now cloud driven. Tollring currently has fourteen CRM providers that are integrated with our call reporting and recording. We can communicate with these CRM systems and empower our customer journey analytics. Everything is cloud to cloud, which makes it far easier and faster.

We are also able to combine call recording data with call journey analytics to deliver extra value and insights to the user. And soon, we will be bringing collaboration analytics into the mix.  This can only be achieved when technology has evolved with a cloud-first and API mindset.

Over the next five years, advances in predictive analytics will enable us to understand what might happen because of a recent event or what the patterns will look like going forward.  The AI mindset is also developing. AI is a very exciting area across many different disciplines. It will certainly become far more embedded in services that Tollring brings to market in the future.

Where is the Opportunity for the Channel?

With the increased adoption of tools like Microsoft Teams, resellers and MSPs will need to improve their understanding of these tools. It is still very early days and there are a multitude of apps on the horizon associated with Teams and other unified comms applications.

The new area of collaboration analytics is a big opportunity yet to be exploited.  It will enable a business to see their performance across their whole organisation rather than just one aspect.  By combining information from different areas of a business it will enable a business to understand itself, its staff, and its customers much better.

After having been talked about in the channel for many years, the single pane of glass providing a full overview of a business is now a reality.

We are also seeing that much of the channel is still in ‘problem solving mode’ rather than going to customers and offering advice on how to move a business forward proactively.

Many resellers are still not focusing on understanding what their customers need, or advising on gaining a measurable return on their recent migration to cloud services. This is an opportunity for resellers and MSPs to talk to their customers about what that business requires to deliver a ROI and what technology refreshes are needed.  These are proactive conversations with a trusted advisor and a business analytics mindset.

Another big opportunity is around the call centre feature sets aimed at smaller and medium sized businesses that do not carry an enterprise-level price tag. This is a new market that will enable business users to achieve a significant return on investment.