Welcome to issue #7. In last month's issue, we explain how technology can sharpen your customer service and personalize your marketing. This month we discuss how to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

    The KPI trap

    While all businesses need to monitor Key Performance Indicators, some KPIs are just a fish story.

     

    "I think I need to increase my advertising budget," said the fish store owner. "Maybe if more people knew about my promotion, I would get more new customers."

     

    "Are you getting new customers?" asked the consultant.

     

    "No, but the promotion is going great."

     

    "What is it?" inquired the consultant.

     

    "I’m handing out free gold fishes. I figure I’ll make money selling tanks and fish food."

     

    "Are you giving away many fishes?"

     

    "The promotion is a big success. I’ve given away over three hundred in the last 2 months," responded the fish store owner. "Mostly to customers of the store next door that sells cats."

     

    The fish store owner in this story is a victim of bad Key Performance Indicators (KPI). KPIs measure progress toward organizational goals and assist in making financial and operational decisions.

     

    In some ways, the fish store owner was applying KPIs correctly. He knew exactly how many fishes were given away and in what period of time. This KPI is specific, achievable, measurable and time bound.

     

    However, giving away free fish is neither results-oriented nor tied to strategic business goals. By merely looking at the number of free fish distributed, the owner erroneously concluded that the promotion was valuable and that it needed advertising support.

     

    More appropriate KPIs would have been "How many new customers have I attracted this quarter with this promotion?" or "How much additional revenue has this promotion generated this month?"

     

    Whenever you create a KPI, always ask the following questions:

        • Does it measure something that is specific, concrete and quantifiable?
        • Does it refer to an exact period of time?
        • Is it realistic?
        • Is it directly related to a strategic business goal?

     

     

     

  1. Telephone Metrics

    What do doctor offices, airlines and real-estate salesmen places have in common? The telephone is critical to their success.

     

    Telephones are the Central Nervous Systems of most businesses. Whether you sell flowers or headhunt CEOs, telephone activity can hugely impact the bottom line

     

    Take the common problem of missed calls. Virtually every company is in the business of customer service. Answering as many calls as possible and doing so promptly is key to converting leads into paying clients as well as retaining old customers.

     

    One way of measuring progress towards the goal of improving customer service is to monitor the total number of missed calls on a monthly basis. Like any good KPI, it’s quantifiable, time bound and tied to a specific goal.

     

    FreedomVOICE Systems lets you easily track this KPI. Missed Calls Reports tells you how many calls were missed and when they were made. It even shows how many were missed by which mailbox. This lets you transform a company-wide KPI into targets for individual staff members. Each employee can be evaluated on how many calls they missed.

     

    Another strategic goal for most companies is keeping overhead costs as low as possible. Since personnel are a major expense, how can a company reduce its KPI of missed phone calls, while keeping staffing at a minimum?

     

    FreedomVOICE supplies Employee Scheduler, a user-friendly interactive interface which allows you to determine staffing needs with surprising ease. A simple click-and-drag tool lets you see how variations of employee schedules affect the missed call rate. This is especially valuable for scheduling vacations and holidays.

     

    Other valuable reports provided by FreedomVOICE include:

        • Call Analysis –Tells you how many people called during a certain time.
        • Staff Performance: Status Report- Who is logged in to answer calls and when.
        • Review Calls-How long do individual calls last? Who are they talking to?
        • Call Recording- For purposes of quality control and training, listen to recordings of past calls.

     

     

     

  2. Marketing metrics and your telephone

    Ever wonder how effective your marketing campaign is? The answer is in your voicemail system.

     

    The effectiveness of a promotional campaign can be difficult to quantify, an essential quality of a valid KPI. You could ask a client where they heard about you, but they don’t always remember, the staff sometimes forgets to inquire, and the whole exercise distracts from the main purpose of providing a commercial service to the customer. Internet promotions are easier to measure, but many business people have despaired of tracking traditional advertising media.

     

    Since many leads come to you by telephone, your voicemail system can be an effective instrument for measuring your marketing efforts. Suppose you placed the same promotion on bus benches, magazine ads, newspaper classifieds and your web page. Use the same 800 number on all advertising, but list the mailbox number of 82 in the bench ads, 83 in the newspaper and so on. By examining which mailbox gets the most calls, you will know the source of your leads and can determine the best use of your advertising dollars. You can even run a mailbox report to see how many calls went to each mailbox.

     

    For some business, this isn’t practical since all mailboxes are dedicated to individual staff members. For tracking the effectiveness of advertising, many choose to use different toll-free numbers instead of mailbox numbers. Additional toll-free numbers are only $5 a month from FreedomVOICE.

     

    Multiple toll-free numbers can be directed to a single account and so all are managed through one WebLINK interface. This saves the labor of entering settings for an additional account. By tracking calls through the WebLINK, one can quantify the effectiveness of each advertising medium.

     

If you have any questions about how to use your FreedomVOICE system to generate business metrics, call us at (800) 477-1477, ext. 2.

Do you have any comments? Tips about our technology? Success stories? Email us at feedback@FreedomVOICE.com. We'll include the best message in our next newsletter. We want to hear from you!

Check out our new online community at TMC.net it’s full of valuable information about VoIP phone systems for the small business.

See you next month when we talk about managing business growth and consolidation during uncertain times.

Eric Thomas

All the best,

Eric Thomas

Founder & CEO

FreedomVOICE Systems

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