A business is more than numbers, profits, and corporate jargon. It involves people, rather exists for people. And for humans to work in tandem, impeccable communication is integral.
With a growing business, the scale of your operations also grows at an unprecedented rate. When so many people and processes are involved, it’s easy to lose track of communication and strategies for effective management.
It’s important to take a step back to re-examine your workday, thoroughly and accurately.
Communication audits help you gauge how your employees are performing and engaging with the clientele. This is why they are fast gaining popularity as an essential business practice. We’re here to make your job much easier. Read on to learn more about communication audits and how Acefone’s online portal can equip you for them.
Let’s start with the basics.
Understanding communication audits
Through a communication audit, you can assess how your brand is communicating with all the stakeholders—including how you portray your image, goals, and values.
Just like financial audits are considered integral to organisational performance, businesses are realising the importance of communication audits as well. You should regularly check if all your processes are in order and how well your conversations are doing in order to retain efficiency.
What can Acefone’s portal do for you?
All your communications managed in one place.
You can monitor performance in real-time and analyse detailed reports based on regularly collected metrics using Acefone’s online portal. Here’s what your dashboard will look like (depending on the aesthetic you prefer).
Acefone portal light mode
Acefone portal dark mode
As you can see, you can track different kinds of data in one place. From live metrics to summaries and reports, all your data is managed efficiently and securely on the online portal. On the dashboard, you also have ready access to FAQs, News/updates and video tutorials. Therefore, agents can easily look up relevant information at any time to allow smooth-flowing conversations with customers and partners.
Let’s explore the Acefone portal a bit more:
By going on the “Users” section, you can check all employee information using your phone system. You can access their names, extensions, license, login status, extension status (available or away from desk) as well as their minutes usage.
You also have the option to browse through different categories to check on how your services are faring.
Next, if you go to the Integrations section on the services menu, you’ll find that you can check what integrations you already have, as well as what apps are available for immediate integration.
These applications allow your agents to have more informed and contextual conversations since they can have access to customer history and vital partner information. You can ensure a consistently high quality of service by equipping your staff with powerful tools.
But the real ‘Belle of the Ball’ for your communication audit would be the reports section of the portal. Extremely useful analytics and metrics are collected in real-time by the system and collated to form meaningful reports. You can derive insights from this portal effortlessly to conduct your audit and incorporate the findings into your business strategies.
Through this menu, you can navigate to reports for different kinds of metrics. Let’s look at Call Detail Records as an example:
Just type in the DID (direct inward dialling) number, dates, and time for generating a report. Not only will you be able to see all the details of the calls in that time period, but you can also download the recordings and/or voicemails so as to not miss a detail.
Similarly, you can track SMSes, real-time calls, and categories of different analytics. You can also generate scheduled reports and have them directly sent to your inbox.
Tips to perfect your communication audit
So you now know what a communication audit is, and how your portal can give you relevant insights to conduct it successfully. You’re almost there.
But first, let’s discuss some important tips and practices to follow for auditing.
1. Check on different aspects of your communications
Determine the scope of your audit. Your company’s communication is not limited to conversations with customers. Every message your brand puts out—on different avenues—is involved in curating your image and therefore, dictates your success.
This includes your social media posts, YouTube bio, and even your email subject and footer lines!
The audit should cover all of your messaging so you can identify how many consumer touchpoints you have, and how well they’re performing.
2. Evaluate your past and recent performance
Using analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs), you can assess how your communications have fared recently. Gather all the relevant data and make sure it answers burning questions, like:
- What is the message that we want to convey? Did we do it right?
- Did we connect with our target audience?
- Did we cover all the channels?
- Do people still have questions or did we communicate all that was required?
- Did we keep up with our focus, for example: were we customer-centric or employee-centric?
- Are our insights and reports accessible easily?
So on and so forth, make sure you have a list of questions that your audit needs to answer. Keep reviewing and updating this list with changes in your brand’s goals, processes, and recent events.
3. Plan and collect reviews from your stakeholders
The most important step of assessing how your performance is faring is by asking the people who are actually involved. They can give more insightful and contextual answers that numbers or different metrics cannot.
Therefore, you should conduct regular surveys and invite criticism and feedback from customers, employees, partners, and anyone else who interacts with your messaging.
You can use bulk SMSes or voice broadcasts with IVR options to collect different kinds of data from a wide audience simultaneously. This data will be stored on your online portal and compiled into meaningful reports.
4. Keep testing
Every business works differently and has differing needs. It’s not that easy to determine what works best for you—since it won’t be the same as what worked for someone else (or even for you at some other point in time).
Therefore, you need to conduct A/B testing of your communication strategies and analyse the results. It also makes sense to create a mock plan that takes into account your collected data, feedback, and other factors. This may not help you strategise completely, but it forms a blueprint that can be further developed.
5. SWOT analysis
We’ve often heard this term in relation to business management. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This method involves the analysis of these 4 factors for any business.
It’s important to take an unbiased approach and identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as what opportunities arise and what threats you may face. Sometimes, hiring a third-party auditor or expert can help you find gaps that you looked over. After all, a fresh pair of eyes is always beneficial.
Conclusion
As we’ve mentioned before, communication is integral to business success. You cannot determine how well your brand is performing if you don’t conduct regular checks. A communication audit is the perfect way to track your progress and fix bottlenecks for better results.
Acefone’s online portal is a strong medium for conducting audits of any scale. You can access all the information you need, and more—in an easy-to-understand way.
To learn more about our tools and get started on your cloud journey, simply call us on 1888-859-0450 or send an email to [email protected]. Our dedicated agents will be right with you.
Diksha is a junior content writer at Acefone. As a tech-lover, she aims to bridge the gap between tech articles and non-savvy readers. She’s equally interested in pop culture and worldly affairs. And in her free time, you can find her with her nose buried in a book or discovering new music for her chaotically diverse playlist.
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