When running a call center, it behooves you to check your CDRs (Call Detail Records) from time to time.
These are not full scripts of entire conversations, but rather, a stored log of information about every phone interaction between your call center agents and your customers. Typically, the details include details like the dates and times of each call, its duration, the cost, the phone numbers involved, and whether it was an inbound or outbound call.
Keeping such logs is considered an industry standard practice for many reasons, though the one reason that might interest you the most is that your CDRs contain critical performance metrics that can measure how well your business is doing and show you where it can improve.
5 Surprising Things You Can Manage With Call Detail Records
At their most fundamental level, CDRs can help you understand your monthly phone usage statistics for billing purposes. They also serve to illustrate aspects related to your system capacity (such as your average call volume), and you can even take a look at your various customer segments to gain basic marketing insights.
Still, savvy managers understand that this data can be used in a variety of other creative ways. For instance, digging into your call logs can provide you with a wealth of real-time information that can directly impact vital growth metrics like agent productivity, system efficiency, and service quality. Likewise, CDRs can even offer insight into the performance trends that support better staffing decisions and the adoption of next-generation technological tools.
Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to growth and improvement, and CDRs can be a gold mine of information for making every interaction count—as long as you know where to look and how to use it.
Below, we’ve identified five of the most surprising areas where this data can help guide your long-term growth and success.
1. Advanced System Automation
Call center software has come a long way in improving the processes that once required an agent’s time and attention.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, for example, can answer customer calls and guide them through a series of self-service menu prompts by speaking out options and answers as the caller navigates to the right department or help resource. At the same time, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) technology can keep agents from getting overloaded (and prevent customers from experiencing long wait times) by automatically sending incoming traffic to the next available agent.
Together, both of these processes can drastically reduce the total handling time that your agents spend per call while also promoting a better customer experience. Meanwhile, your CDRs can offer clues that point you toward the best way to implement these tools into your business.
For instance, if you are seeing particularly long call times or a select handful of agents fielding the bulk of incoming calls when others are available, it’s probably time to adopt some automated support programs.
2. Improving Customer Satisfaction
Although your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores can signal whether callers are finding your online resources to be helpful and if they are getting what they need from interactions with your agents, these scores aren’t the only place to go for such insights.
For instance, higher-than-usual call volumes in your logged CDR data can also indicate that callers are not finding your self-service online tools to be sufficient. If you check for call center KPIs (key performance indicators) like average hold times and average handle times, you may find a string of particularly long calls can greatly affect a customer’s experience of your service.
Of course, such data might suggest the need for a deeper dive into specific agent interactions to discover if enhanced training or improved agent support resources could be the answer.
3. AI and Predictive Applications
Gone are the days when agents had to dial customer phone numbers for minutes or even hours on end. Now, tools like predictive dialers use AHT and other predictive metrics to estimate when the next agent will become available, queueing up calls on their behalf.
But this is just the beginning of how AI and ML (machine learning) can help managers—and they’re already improving call flows and providing agents with in-depth customer information to personalize each conversation.
When you’re ready to add these tools to your call center, your CDR data can provide insight into which tools might be most helpful for your specific business. After the implementation of these tools, your call records will continue to be a great resource for monitoring whether these system features are working optimally.
4. Agent Retention and Success
It’s no secret that agent burnout is an ever-increasing issue for call center managers. The ongoing process of hiring and onboarding candidates often diverts time and energy from quality assurance and other crucial tasks. Nevertheless, adequate staffing is essential to ensure that your staff is capable of providing the best customer experience possible.
Recognizing relevant patterns in your data—such as periods of heavy call traffic—can lead to more strategic staffing decisions in the future. It can also significantly boost your workforce management (WFM) efforts.
In particular, call duration data can give you an idea about which specific team members or agents require extra support or training. Similarly, it can also tell you if it’s time to beef up your agent support tools with better call scripting or a more intuitive CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software.
5. Pinpointing Growth Opportunities
Most business owners already know that the phone numbers recorded in their call logs reveal relevant customer insights. Area code information, for example, can highlight your current markets and geographic reach. This same data can help you identify additional target markets so you can generate fresh leads in adjacent and similar areas.
Your CDRs can also help you coordinate more effective call campaigns. By monitoring all incoming traffic while the campaign is running, you can evaluate how well your efforts are being received. Plus, if you need to make any adjustments, the data will be there in real time to guide the success of your marketing efforts.
Limitations of Call Detail Records
Your call records are just hard data, so in order to make sense of the numbers, you must take a variety of factors into account. At the end of the day, the outcomes you want will directly affect which numbers matter.
For instance, if your goal is to improve CSAT scores, or to assess agent efficiency, or to discover opportunities for upselling, then you’ll have to adjust which segments of data you’re going to examine.
Of course, identifying the relevant data is only the first step. After that, you then have to make sense of the numbers by recognizing patterns, cross-referencing with other pertinent analytics, and drawing conclusions from the connections between variables.
Let’s pretend, for example, that you’re concerned about your FCR (First Call Resolution) rate because your data revealed multiple occasions in which the same customer has called back more than once.
This could suggest an issue with FCR, although it’s also possible that several calls were dropped during that same time period due to a phone service or internet outage. Alternatively, the customer may have called back to ask completely unrelated questions. To get to the truth, you’ll need to gather more intel.
Finally, keep in mind that most conclusions you might draw about things like agent performance, call abandonment rates, and other KPIs will require a closer look. That said, your CDRs will always be a good starting point from which to look for relevant patterns. From there, you can follow any smoke signals until you find some more concrete answers regarding your everyday and long-term performance.
Call Detail Records Best Practices
Just as the call center industry has developed its own set of best practices for managing growth, there are also some established methods for approaching CDR data.
Don’t Analyze in a Vacuum
Every data point is the result of a nuanced set of circumstances and can potentially correlate with several outside variables, so you should avoid taking the numbers at face value. Start with the raw report and search for relevant interrelated factors that may help you paint a more realistic picture.
Take Advantage of Modern Tools
Online programs can be a manager’s best friend when it comes to recording various types of call center data beyond baseline CDRs and making connections among them. Some of the best call center software has tools to provide a visual analysis of your KPIs and other success metrics, and many of them do so via one, intuitive user interface.
Follow Proper Security Measures
If you’re going to store customer contact information, it’s your responsibility to use it ethically and safeguard it from cyber threats. Be sure to follow the commonly accepted principles of data management and stay compliant with any industry rules and regulations. These measures can include implementing the latest information security measures to maintain customer confidentiality and prohibiting any abuse of data, such as spam calling.