How to Measure Whether Your Phone Coverage Is Working
Most businesses judge their phone coverage by how the month felt. A calm month and a quiet month feel the same from the inside, and only one of them is a result.
Here is how to get an answer you can trust, using numbers you already have.
Pick the measures before you change anything
This is the whole discipline. A measure chosen afterwards will be the one that moved, and you will have learned nothing except which number to quote.
The four numbers that are already in your phone system
Calls that went unanswered during opening hours. The clearest signal that the desk is at capacity, and the easiest to act on.
Calls arriving outside opening hours. Tells you whether an evening arrangement is worth having at all, before you pay for one.
Voicemails returned, and how long it took. A voicemail returned two days later belongs closer to the unanswered pile than the answered one.
Repeat calls from the same number within a day. Usually someone who did not get through the first time. A number that falls when coverage improves.
The two that need a decision rather than a report
What happened to each captured call. Not how many were captured. A capture that nobody acted on is an expensive voicemail.
How many inquiries turned into work. The only number anyone actually cares about, and the slowest to move. Give it longer than a month before reading anything into it.
Take a baseline you did not choose
Two weeks before the change, and the equivalent two weeks after. Not your best two weeks, and not the ones you remember. Whatever the system says for the period that happens to be there.
If you cannot pull a clean baseline, say so and start the clock now rather than reconstructing one.
Read the gaps, not just the totals
A total tells you the size. The gap between two numbers tells you where the problem is:
- Many calls answered, few inquiries progressing, means the handling is losing them, not the coverage.
- Few calls unanswered, but repeat calls high, means people are getting through to something that is
not helping.
- Captures high, actions low, means the queue is not being read.
Each of those needs a different fix, and the total alone points at none of them.
What not to measure
Anything you cannot act on. Average call duration is interesting and rarely changes a decision. Number of calls answered is a vanity number if none of them progressed.
An honest caution about attribution
If you change three things at once, you will not know which one worked. Change the coverage, hold everything else, and accept that a month is a short window with real noise in it.
Where we sit in this
We can tell you what arrived and what happened to each one, which covers four of the six numbers above. The last two need your side of it, because only you know whether the inquiry turned into work.
If you want to see what the reporting looks like, start at kepply.com.