Brand Tracking: Using Market Research to Validate Your Call Centre Success

Businesses can gauge their success by examining the profit they’ve generated. I mean, if they’re earning money, they’re doing something right. However, globalization and remote work have brought increased competitiveness to the market.

This is especially true for businesses that can operate completely remotely, like call centers. Tracking the various metrics that can point out both good and bad aspects of a call center’s operations can help businesses improve significantly.

Brand tracking is a powerful method of understanding your call centre’s success, and it can give the business a competitive edge in the long run. Through the use of market research, companies can pinpoint negative sides of their processes and truly understand the customer.

What is brand tracking? 

Brand tracking is the process of monitoring how customers feel about your brand. It involves measuring awareness, trust, sentiment, loyalty, and similar metrics to determine how your brand appears in the eyes of the audience.

This process isn’t something that you conduct once. It’s an ongoing operation that helps your company see how the customer perception changes over longer periods. It can help businesses understand what they’re doing good or bad.

For example, the call centre implements a new phone system, which leads to slower answering times or problems with forwarding calls. If there’s an uptick in negative reviews or responses to surveys, the company will be able to pinpoint the moment at which perception became negative. 

Call centers are a unique example of brand tracking. Online stores and similar businesses don’t talk to each customer once they make an order. This makes it easier for call centers to understand the customers, but it’s also making them more exposed.

Importance of brand tracking for call centres

Call centers are often the first point of contact for many customers. The success of the call center employees might be unrealistic. For example, they could make enough sales or reach numerous KPIs, but what’s important is that the customer walks away happy from the call.

This is where brand tracking is helpful, compared to simply watching the number of calls and sales. It shows whether the customers trust or recommend your business once the call is finished. 

If you started with brand tracking, and you realize that you must optimize certain aspects of your call centre, you should explore Aircall’s business phone system guide to see whether there are some basic or advanced insights that you aren’t using.

In order to be effective, a call centre’s technology should support straightforward communication and scalability. Neither employees nor customers should experience bottlenecks in their experience. 

Key methods for market research

Once you’ve understood the basics of brand tracking and its importance, let’s move on to some of the key methods for conducting market research. Some of the methods here are basically free, while others could be executed better with the help of paid tools and experts. 

Customer surveys 

Without a doubt, customer surveys are one of the most important aspects of market research. They’re a simple yet effective way to measure customer sentiment. You can capture customer feelings immediately after the call or periodically. 

Fresh impressions could be more honest, but it’s best to implement a combination of short and long-term experiences. Frameworks for conducting surveys like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) exist.

Each of them could help harvest valuable insights, but it’s best to explore them individually and then pick the one that’s most applicable for your business. Your results should be reliable and proportional to the size of your business.

A company that has 1000 calls a day won’t benefit if it has five completed surveys in total. Tools like the sample size calculator from Attest can help determine the number of responses you need to achieve accurate, representative data across customer segments.

This prevents small or skewed results from misguiding the decision-making process. Using poor results for making changes can be completely counterproductive, making the business less successful than at the start of conducting market research. 

Social listening

While customer surveys are given directly to the company, social listening revolves around monitoring indirect feedback. It includes watching out for mentions and conversations about your brand on the internet.

For example, a heated Reddit debate could be more helpful for understanding the pros and cons of your business than survey results. Social listening provides unfiltered insights, often in real time, about your business.

Companies should track the complaints and positive experiences that customers share on the internet in order to get a better picture of their brand. It can often lead to quick insights, allowing the call centres to identify and solve issues immediately.  

Brand reviews

Depending on the type of business, customers share their experiences on platforms like Google, Trustpilot, Yelp, or industry-specific websites. These aggregated ratings are great for getting an objective perspective on your business.

Exploring these reviews can help companies understand whether the customers are, for example, satisfied with the wait times or helpfulness of the employees. However, customers aren’t the only sources for your brand.

You can also explore websites that offer insights into past employees. For example, past support personnel can outline the problems they’ve had in your company’s workflow, or with their salary. 

Leveraging brand review insights can help you take care of two problems at once. You’ll be able to solve internal problems and improve employee morale, while at the same time, customers will have a better experience. 

Brand awareness studies

Awareness studies can take a bit more time and resources than the other methods mentioned on this list. Brand awareness studies include testing how easily customers recognize and recall your brand after interacting with the call centre. 

These studies assess the emotions customers associate with your business and how recognizable your brand is. Longitudinal awareness studies can track whether certain improvements hold steady over time.

Your agents should aim to reinforce your brand’s message positively. If the studies show that they’re doing a bad job, you can explore the changes you could implement to make your brand more recognizable. 

Competitive benchmarking

Even if you’ve conducted some of the methods from the list and the results are positive, you should also explore how well your business performs compared to competitors. This involves comparing metrics such as customer satisfaction scores, online reviews, sentiment trends, and response times.

Benchmarking helps with understanding your strengths compared to competitors, but it also reveals the gaps where competitors have an advantage. With these insights, you can redefine your strategies and make significant improvements. 

Integrating brand tracking for call centre operations

Collecting the data is only a part of the brand tracking process. What’s more important is that you integrate the insights you get into the daily call centre operations. Conducting brand and market research continuously will help you stay ahead of your competitors. 

The results of brand tracking should be shared across departments, ensuring that all employees, or at least managers, understand what changes they should make in their workflows. 

Brand tracking can quickly become obsolete. For example, a competitive benchmark can become outdated if a new company with a new strategy emerges on the market. This is why it’s important to make brand tracking an ongoing process. 

Market research can be crucial for your call centre’s success

Brand tracking, or any other type of metrics and data analysis, isn’t a solution. Instead, it’s a way to get insights into the aspects of your business that you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise. It can help make successful businesses even more successful.

It can also help stagnant companies become more effective and start getting more customers. However, it’s not a magic technique that can turn any failing business successful. Smaller call centres might struggle with finding enough data to make changes that truly make sense.

Market research can be quite helpful if the company conducts it properly. It’s not as expensive as implementing other changes, but it requires time and educated personnel who will know how and where to gather data.

Hopefully, implementing this method will help your call centre get a competitive edge, and understand its audience better.