How Call Monitoring Can Help Sales Managers Improve Sales Call Quality

In a business world dominated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology, it can be easy to forget one simple and incontrovertible truth. People want to buy from people. Customers want to build a solid business relationship with a salesperson to be comfortable with their investment. 

Person-to-person sales are most often driven by sales phone calls in this global economy. If you are a sales manager, empowering your team to deliver high-quality customer service through sales calls is crucial. These calls provide an opportunity to establish a connection, understand your customers' needs, and communicate the value of your product or service. High-quality sales calls allow your reps to build those strong relationships that lead to conversion.

So how can you ensure that your team has a quality call, every time? Enter: call monitoring software.

Call monitoring can help you optimize team performance, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive business success. In this blog, you’ll learn how call monitoring technology, combined with sales coaching, helps sales managers improve sales call quality.

What is Call Monitoring?

Call monitoring involves listening to and evaluating live or recorded phone conversations between your sales reps and customers. The goal is to assess and improve the quality of the interactions. Call monitoring allows you to ensure that every sales interaction aligns with your quality standards, compliance requirements, and company policies. 

Most call monitoring tools automatically create and save a recording of sales phone calls; they might record all, or just a random sample. The best call monitoring tools will allow sales manager to save time and provide efficient call coaching, via features like call transcriptions, keyword tagging, call scores, and sentiment analysis.

You can use recorded calls as training materials for new employees. You can also provide targeted feedback to enhance the sales performance of seasoned sales reps. This personalized guidance helps your agents refine their skills and address areas for improvement.

In addition, call monitoring offers valuable insights into customer preferences, concerns, and feedback. This information can improve your sales process and the overall customer experience.

5 Types of Call Monitoring

Call monitoring comes in various forms, each serving distinct purposes in evaluating and improving the quality of sales interactions. Here are five different types of call monitoring.

Call recording and review

With call recording, sales managers review calls after they have taken place. Recordings enable you to analyze each call when it's convenient. This allows for a more comprehensive evaluation. You can listen to calls repeatedly and gain more detailed feedback. You can also replay conversations with your sales reps, providing direct coaching. 

Speech transcription and summary

Busy sales leaders need quick insights and time-saving technology. To that end, many call monitoring solutions provide speech-to-text transcription, converting spoken words into written text. This feature makes it even easier to review and analyze individual sales calls. 

Some tools also generate call summaries that provide a condensed overview of key points discussed during the sales conversation. This can be particularly useful if you don't have the time to listen to an entire call. With the summary, you can quickly understand the main points covered. These essential benefits save you time and enhance your sales call coaching efforts. 

Speech analytics

Speech analytics uses technology to analyze spoken words and audio data in conversations. Advanced algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) work together to help sales managers  understand, interpret, and derive meaningful information from spoken content. Specifically, these analytics tools often provide insight into customer sentiment; in other words, whether the call was positive or negative. They may also provide insights into key metrics like average call duration, talk time, and call outcome. These insights help you make informed business decisions. 

Keyword spotting and alerting

Call monitoring tools may provide a wide range of live monitoring functionalities. One of the most effective is real-time keyword spotting with alerts. This lets you identify high-priority words and phrases during a sales call. When the tool spots a keyword or phrase, the system generates an alert to notify you in real-time. 

With live keyword spotting, sales managers can identify opportunities and touchy subjects while the conversation is happening. This allows you to step in and coach the sales rep to change the context of the conversation, mention a promotion or upgrade, or deal with any issues yourself. 

Choose keywords that are relevant to business objectives or customer concerns. The data collected can also contribute to data-driven insights, allowing you to refine sales call strategies and scripts. 

Categorize voicemail versus live conversations

Call monitoring can identify the difference between a voicemail and a live conversation. Both kinds of calls are critical to your success because both can impact a sale. By monitoring both voicemails and live conversations, you can ensure that service standards and communication quality are consistently maintained across all customer interactions. It provides a holistic evaluation of each sales rep's performance and identifies key customer trends.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution, Calldrip’s call monitoring tool includes all five essential functionalities. Powered by AI, the software provides call recording, transcription, and summarization. You'll receive sentiment analysis and scorecards for each sales call to enhance your coaching and training efforts. Even better, newly released call categorization features make it easy to identify voicemails versus phone calls and evaluate the efficacy. 

5 Benefits of Call Monitoring

Today's tech solutions are often hit or miss, requiring an investment in time, resources, and budget that can be substantial. Your job is challenging enough. Call monitoring software should offer only benefits, not challenges. And it must be worth the investment. If you're wondering whether call monitoring is right for your team, here are the five benefits you should expect from investing in a call monitoring solution. 

Improve individual performance

Call monitoring lets you objectively evaluate each employee's performance by listening to live calls or reviewing recorded interactions. This process helps identify the individual's strengths and areas that need improvement. You can use these insights to provide targeted and constructive feedback. You can also design focused training initiatives tailored to each rep's unique requirements. Your team will learn from each call they make. They can implement feedback in subsequent interactions and gradually refine their skills. Call monitoring enables a cycle of continuous improvement, driving long-term business revenues and growth.

Several of Calldrip’s customers using the Monitor solution applied their AI-generated improvement recommendations to boost their sales appointments by 70% or more! 

Gain visibility into overall business performance.

Call monitoring provides a micro and macro view of sales performance. In other words, you can monitor performance at both the individual and team levels using customized KPIs. Some common KPIs to track include conversion rates, call duration, response times, and revenue goals. 

You can also use call monitoring data to set performance benchmarks and track the team's progress toward achieving sales goals. 

Benchmarks can include more than KPIs. They can also include customer satisfaction, script adherence, and call sentiment. This aligns individual and team efforts with broader organizational objectives. With Calldrip's Monitor solution, we'll roll up your entire team's performance into a business-wide scorecard to track performance over time.

Optimize sales scripts and processes

Call monitoring allows you to identify scripts or parts of scripts that are the most successful in driving sales. By analyzing successful calls, it helps you understand what resonates with customers. Those insights can help you refine your sales scripts. You can identify areas where customers need help understanding or perceiving messages positively. It can also highlight what aspects of the script are resonating with customers. 

Call monitoring also helps identify common objections and concerns customers raise so you can better address these objections. This analysis can get very granular, gauging customer reactions to specific phrases, questions, or offers. 

You can also use call monitoring to ensure your sales reps adhere to scripts. Consistency in messaging is crucial for building trust and conveying a unified brand image. Call monitoring helps enforce this standard.

Enhance customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is critical to any sales team's success. 93% of customers will repeat business with companies that offer excellent customer service. The perception of good customer service starts even before the first sale is made. 

Call monitoring can improve customer satisfaction by providing insights into individual customer needs. It also reveals how your sales team meets those needs. Use these insights to create a positive customer experience by tailoring interactions to meet customer expectations. Call monitoring ensures your sales team follows your company's service standards and best practices.

Boost sales team morale and motivation

It’s important to position a call monitoring tool as a way to foster a sense of teamwork and collaboration, not to single out poor performers. It can provide positive reinforcement to your team and create a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

Use call monitoring to identify and recognize successful sales interactions both individually and as a team. Highlighting individual and team achievements cultivates a positive and motivating environment. Offer positive reinforcement to sales reps by acknowledging well-handled calls. This recognition boosts confidence and inspires sales reps to keep performing well. 

Call monitoring promotes collaboration. It encourages team members to share insights from monitored calls. This encourages peer learning and a supportive team culture. Align individual performance goals with broader team and organizational objectives using call monitoring insights. This alignment creates a sense of team purpose and motivation to contribute to overall success.

Why doesn’t everyone monitor their calls?

You may be worried about your team resisting a new monitoring tool. Change is never easy, especially for seasoned teams entrenched in their current workflow and processes. Resistance to new call monitoring software is often due to the belief that it will require too much time and money. 

In the past, call monitoring software was just an audio recording too. To use the technology, sales managers had to listen to a random set of calls, take notes, and try to pinpoint patterns that might improve call coaching. The process was very manual, time-consuming, and challenging to scale as a business grows. The tool required a significant time commitment to implement and use. And, the software was expensive, making the investment not worthwhile. 

Today, AI has revolutionized call monitoring software. These tools can now generate call transcripts, summaries, sentiment analysis, keyword spotting, outcome tracking, and call scoring in seconds. Personalized call coaching is simple and accessible for all teams, using specific KPIs and goals. Even better, call monitoring tools are now very affordable and straightforward to set up and use. 

Introducing Monitor, Calldrip’s Call Monitoring Tool

Calldrip's call monitoring solution offers automatic call recording and transcription. It also includes call summaries and built-in coaching insights and scorecards. Additionally, the solution offers AI-driven call sentiment analysis and notification. Every feature provides actionable insights and improvement opportunities to set your team up for success. Our clients are seeing dramatic improvements in sales performance when they implement call monitoring and sales coaching into their day-to-day sales process. In addition, Monitor is just one tool in Calldrip’s fully integrated, AI-powered suite of conversational sales enablement solutions. 

See how Calldrip's Monitor can empower your business to make the most of every phone call: 

The Last Word

Call monitoring is instrumental in elevating the customer experience, refining your team's skills, and measuring individual and overall sales performance. It is a valuable tool for maintaining consistent, high-quality interactions with prospects and nurturing a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Ultimately, call monitoring software will contribute to the success of your sales team.

If you want to optimize your team's performance with AI-driven data and solutions, the first step is to explore a call monitoring solution like Calldrip's Monitor tool. Schedule a free demo today.