Video conferencing and meetings have now become a part of everyday life. Concepts like remote teams to work from anywhere have introduced a brand new work culture in the 21st century, to a point where 58% of companies globally resort to video conferencing or online meetings every day. Yet the operational efficiency of such an ecosystem relies on efficient communication, and that’s where an efficient call coach comes into play!

What’s a call coaching?

Just as it sounds, Call Coaching is a process of building your cross-functional teams to communicate effectively and efficiently. It’s a process that not only monitors the call but also provides analysis, summaries, and helpful feedback. It’s an interactive and systematic process that can give drastic output over time. These coaching processes can be documented with standard documentation or an online flowchart maker.

Traditionally, Call Coach experts help organizations to implement effective communication strategies manually by means of training sessions, instructions, and guidelines. However, manual coaching has its own limitations when compared to a software-based call coach. Call coaching software provides features to look after different aspects of any meeting without any errors or human limitations.

Common communication gaps and challenges in calls

Often organizations overlook the importance of call coaching and proceed with online meetings without prior training or instructions. Lack of team coaching can result in given challenges:

Lack of consistency

Untrained professionals will communicate through the meeting as per their own mannerisms and judgment if they are not well-trained. Such communication creates inconsistency in communications leading to loss, misunderstanding, and gray areas. 

Unavailable guidance and support

In a fast-growing organization, the dynamics are trickier as roles can change frequently, and new members keep joining. Having your sales and customer support on the same skill level is difficult without providing guidance and support. Especially for sales and customer support staff, having communication guidance can make things easier for new reps.

Extended meeting time

One of the major impacts of improper communication is unfocused and complicated conversations that result in extended client meetings and unproductive sales pitches. Having a clear agenda, effective flow, and well-defined meeting etiquette can make meeting far more productive.

Loss of important information

If you are a professional who daily deals through online meetings, you would know the pain of losing/missing important areas of conversation. Once in a while, such a communication gap sets wrong expectations for clients and can result in extensive time to make up for the loss.

Unfulfilled agendas

Imagine having a discussion with more than ten attendees where an hour-long discussion ends without a clear call to action. Such kind of unproductive meetings can often result in unidentified loss of the company’s investments. On the other hand, productive meetings are the key element to any operations when communicating with a client or a coworker.

Lack of directions to improvise

There is no way to judge how online meetings progress across the organization without monitoring, reviewing, or rating them. Without any such feedback, there is no way to improvise sales or support call conversations for better output.

What is software-based call coaching?

Software-based call coaching can provide a handful of advantages over a manual call coach. Call coaching SaaS (Software-as-a-service) applications can offer reporting, automation, and monitoring through their integrations with video conferencing tools. Such tools can add value to the existing software ecosystem of the company without any additional hassle.

Unlike manual efforts, the software solution is consistently always in play. Allowing organizations a persistent watch and direction over their online meetings, always coaching calls. Organizations can be confident about their productivity efforts by using a reliable team coaching solution.

Why do we need software-based call coaching?

There are several challenges and limitations of manual call coaching efforts. However, software solutions have several advantages over manual exercises to overcome those limits, as given below:

Continuous execution

A software-based call coaching solution is not limited by any hours of work or days of operations. Such a platform can deliver timelessly as and when any company employee needs it to. Every meeting would be treated consistently. The platform’s support, monitoring, and feedback features will remain in action continuously and timelessly. 

Availability of assistance

Any online meeting can need instantaneous support or guidance. However, manual guidance is limited to certain instances and time slots. Every user can’t get simultaneous support with manual coaching. However, software solutions are scalable and can support your teams through any hour of need.

Automating coaching activities

Coaching activities are not limited to instructing several times. They also include monitoring, reporting, rating, and providing feedback. A call coaching SaaS product can take care of all these steps without any manual assistance or guidance.

Measurable outputs with KPIs

Often online meetings are not analyzed objectively. It is hard to analyze and improve conversation practices during meetings without any measurable performance index. A platform for call coaching can take care of it by providing a clear measure of different areas and aspects of the call.

Identifying weaknesses accurately

Monitoring and measuring can give organizations a glimpse of any red flags or potential weaknesses. An ideal coaching tool would provide a discrete outlook to identify and eliminate such weaknesses. It can even help every employee on the individual to improve their online meeting discussions.

What does a call coach do?

Communication is a fundamental element for any business, internally and externally. Especially with remote work culture, how cross-functional groups and customer-facing teams communicate is more important than ever. Addressing such importance, call coaching is meant to help organizations strengthen their communication practices.

There are several ways through which an ideal call coaching tool helps companies be perceptive, productive and generate higher ROI:

Sentiment analysis

Understanding their sentiment is one of the most important insights during a sales call or customer meeting. Knowing how the customer feels and reacts can allow your team to improvise their communication. However, it is more challenging to understand clients as deeply through online meetings.

Therefore, many call coaching tools use Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to understand sentiment over an online meeting. It allows customer support teams to resolve disputes while helping sales professionals deliver value to clients.

Transcript on the go

Manual transcript to document and trace the discussion is no longer feasible with such a large number of meeting taking place simultaneously throughout the day. Instead, call coaching tools can act as an extra layer to understand clients’ communication with the help of their transcription efforts.

Intent analysis

During a sales call or meeting, there are numerous indications that buyers drop for sellers that can help understand their intent. For example, a call coaching tool can depict the intent of the buyer to understand if and when they show any interest in buying the product.

Such alerts guide sellers to slow down and allow buyers to understand that particular product and make a decision.

Call Summary

Accurately summarizing the call is productive for all the attendees. Call coaching can even help summarize the call to support users by easily minimizing and descending hour-long discussions. Such platforms can provide an entire overview and summary for client meetings within a matter of minutes.

Meeting feedback

Analyzing every online meeting or video conference is impossible by manual means. However, a call coaching solution can listen to every discussion and provide feedback or a rating based on customer response. This measurable rating or score can help professionals to improve their performance through practice and feedback.

Clear call-to-action

Call coaching tools can ensure that teams are able to cover their entire agenda effectively. By the end of the call, a coaching platform can provide all responsible members with a clear set of instructions or a to-do list.

Such a feature sets a clear common expectation for every party as they become aware of their individual roles. It can also lead to quick conclusions and conversations as everyone is aware of their roles.

Analyzing keywords

If you have attended many calls, you would know that clients often use similar kinds of keywords and expressions throughout the meeting. To keep track of such repeating words or sentences manually is not viable or practical. However, a coaching tool can keep track of such keywords and how often they are repeated so that the users can get a word cloud of the most important words from their clients.

Talk ratio for vales & customer support executives

The talk ratio is defined as the ratio of customer support executives talking over the call against the whole conversation. Talk ratio analysis from call coaching tools allows the company to look after the performance of every sales and support executive. Therefore, it finds any potential weaknesses and can train the particular professional where they lack.

Exporting meeting statistics & reports

It is possible to keep track of every single online meeting without any proper tool to document it. Call coaching software can help companies get an overview of how many remote meetings took place, the average feedback rating, the average talk ratio of sales reps, and buyers’ sentiment.

There are different call coaching solutions available in the market. Each of them covers its unique set of features and functionalities for companies. One such example of a call coaching tool is SmartKonversations which caters to many of the listed features on a single dashboard, making the job easier for you.

The benefits: why the next-generation workforce opts for call coaching?

89% of companies rely on different video conferencing solutions. Such a massive share of organizations using online meetings is a glimpse of what the next-generation workforce be like. The futuristic companies already have their set of employees working from different ends of the world. However, in such a case, the quality of call communication is of utmost importance.

Here is a list of 5 different benefits of deploying a call coaching solution in your organization:

1. Higher return on investments

The cost of sales professionals, account executives, marketing teams, and generating prospects is a big investment that every company has to be willing to make. However, it is important to keep a strong watch over how this investment is paying off. A call coaching tool can maximize the output of a company’s executives.

Effective communication over online meetings can have direct implications on higher sales and more revenue for the business, making call coaching implementation an easy decision for vice presidents and CXOs.

2. Better customer retention

Effective communication and understanding of the client are helpful in resolving queries, addressing any dissatisfaction, and improving the customer experience. Call coaching solutions can help improve those areas, resulting in higher customer retention statistics.

3. More productive sales teams

How your team invests their time at work is how your money is being invested. Stretched meetings and meeting overlaps due to extensions can make your sales and customer support teams less productive. It doesn’t just affect the individual performance of the representatives but can change the trajectory of the company’s growth.

4. Efficient training exercises to improve

Once you can see how every individual team member is performing, it is easier to dig deeper to understand common barriers and challenges they face. Such laser focus insights can make training easier, making employees more capable than ever.

5. Strengthening business based on customer feedback

Businesses are built over a period through customers’ reactions, feedback, and even criticism. Call coaching solutions can go one step deeper to understand your customer’s responses and concerns. By analyzing those hurdles, one can improve their business operations, policies, and even the market placement to implement a customer-centric business model.

Summary

It is safe to assume that online meetings are going to be part of our lives from now onward. Moving forward, they might be even more influential for businesses. Therefore, it is important to prepare ourselves and our business process while we are adapting to it. Call coaching solutions can help organizations with that as their single-stop go-to strategy to make the most out of their online meetings.

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