How Aircall Uses Aircall: Tips Tricks From Those Who Know Best

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Aircall is a versatile phone system adored by small-but-growing sales and support teams.
And ya know who fits that profile?

Yep. You guessed it. Aircall is the ideal Aircall customer.

Not only do we engineer, optimize, sell, and troubleshoot the product, we also use it on a daily basis for our support and sales operations.

For this post, I spoke with representatives (tributes) from our customer success, technical support, and sales teams. And while they all have unique workflows and approaches to the product, you’ll see a few features that are universal favorites.

Patrick — Customer Support

A customer support veteran, Patrick has supervised support teams in a variety of industries. Here at Aircall, he heads our North American support and troubleshooting operations. This guy eats, sleeps, and bleeds Aircall-green (#4AC420).

Here’s a little bit on how he uses Aircall, personally.

Part of what makes the digital revolution so great is the ability to work remotely (obviously). How do your workflows change when you work from home? Do you use the mobile app for this?

It’s strange to say, but nothing really changes when I work from home. I guess that’s a good thing? I almost always have my work laptop with me, but I can pull up the Aircall admin dashboard from any computer. I’m always monitoring the working-status of two or three Aircall integrations, and this would be very difficult on mobile.

So do you ever use the mobile app in your workflows?

Oh, definitely. It’s almost always when I’m on-call but I know I’ll be away from my computer for an extended period of time. I’ll check in on incoming calls when I’m out to lunch. And also for outbound calls, especially when there are urgent inquiries.

Just as an example, I’ll go through help tickets once or twice on the weekends when we don’t have standard hours. If I see something that needs to be solved quickly, I’ll hop on a call and get it straightened out. The mobile app is really useful in a crunch like that.

Do you use the call tagging feature?

All the time. We actually have mandatory call tagging turned on for support-related calls. This ensures we know exactly why our customers are calling. If I see any patterns emerge, I’ll know something might be wrong and I can look into it or escalate to the product team.

How do you troubleshoot the common problems?

If I see a recurring issue, like three or more of instances in a short timeframe, I’ll listen to specific call recordings to figure out what might be going on. A lot of times the fix is simple, but if it requires help — maybe from our engineers — I’ll add another appropriate tag and forward it to them.

How do you use the analytics dashboard?

I use analytics to track our missed call percentages. My dashboard tracks the number of inbound calls on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. If I see any trends, like or strange spikes, I’ll try to use this information to plan staffing.

I’m also looking at the activity among specific agents. If I see someone’s taking more calls than everyone else, I might try to adjust routing to be more fair.

The reason for each missed call is also important. Calls can be “missed” for a lot of reasons; some are preventable. I can see if a call was missed because there was no one to answer the phone, if the call was abandoned during the IVR tree, or if it was abandoned in the first 10 seconds. That last one usually means it was a wrong number.

Olivia — Customer Success

As our Head of North American Customer Success, Olivia is a scientist and evangelist, promoting retention, adoption, and engagement. In essence, she’s in charge of keeping Aircall users happy and heard.

You’re always there to make sure customers get the most out of Aircall. What feature do you personally love and recommend all our customers take advantage of?

I personally use, and always recommend, using the live-feed feature in some way. For teams, it’s really great for keeping everyone accountable and reliable for their responsibilities. You can see exactly what your team is doing.

And I’m always pushing for mandatory call tagging. This is a really great way to see why your customers are calling, so I recommend it for most of our customers.

Internally, we have a lot of different tags to separate each type of issue, but even if small teams just tag calls as “good” or “bad” it can offer a lot of insight into where you can improve. It can also really help us troubleshoot any issues you might be having.

What Aircall feature could you not live without?

The live feed.

Okay then! To rephrase the question, what’s the coolest “new” Aircall feature — either in terms of tech-advancements or usefulness?

I’d still say [the coolest feature is] the option to make call tagging mandatory. It’s very subtle, a lot of customers don’t see it, but it’s very customizable and you can do almost anything you want with it.

How do you use analytics in your workflow?

I use analytics to double-check that everything is integrating properly. For example, our support team uses the Zendesk integration for help tickets, so I’ll make sure every so often that the number of tickets created is the same in both platforms. I’ll also look to see that the call tags are being used appropriately.

For our own internal purposes though, I usually create visualizations through Periscope using our API and webhooks.

We push data from our API into Periscope, and what happens then? Can you describe that process a little more?

Sure. So every call that happens using Aircall can be considered an event. Once an event is created, all the information along with it is tagged — duration of each call, average call time, the recording, who answered the call, et cetera.

These are all considered webhook events, which are then pushed to Periscope using a one-way integration and compiled into visuals and charts so we can easily see what’s going on. I got help from our Data team on this one, but it was a routine project for them!

Joe — Technical Support

VoIP can be a tricky business. The good part for Aircall users is they don’t have to deal with the headaches associated with handsets. Configuring networks, dealing with telecom carriers, and troubleshooting poor connections are all taken care of…

By Joe, our technical support engineer.

His knowledge of Aircall’s inner workings makes his use of the platform especially revealing.

As the lead for technical support matters in the US, I assume you need to be ready for anything. How do you make sure things are always running as smooth as possible?

The mobility of Aircall is huge. When I’m working from home, as long as I’m in front of my laptop, I can troubleshoot just as easily as when I’m at the office.

The app is also big for me. I check it every once-in-a-while on weekends to make sure there aren’t any urgent customer requests. If I do see one, I’ll call them immediately and get to the bottom of things.

Is there a feature you use that you think Aircall customers should use more? Something that’ll make their workflows more efficient?

I’m a big fan of warm transfers. I work closely with the tech support team in Paris, and even with the support team here in the US, so if I’m about to transfer a call to them, it’s really useful to be able to speak with them first. I can give them context, let them know what the customer has already told me, and help them take the call with confidence.

What’s something that makes your life a whole lot easier that you’d also recommend to customers?

Setting up QoS [quality of service] on their routers. Not many customers know we can help them with this, but I can actually reconfigure their routers to make sure they always have enough bandwidth for phone calls.

We have this set up on our network here at Aircall, so all our calls are really clear. It makes the concept of an ‘internet phone’ a ton more reliable.

Anything else?

Mandatory tagging. A lot of customers want to track their analytics and make improvements, especially larger call centers, but making sure all the calls are labeled makes this way easier.

The mandatory tags add a few seconds of extra work for reps, but it makes a huge impact later on.

Is this your first technical support role?

No, it is not.

How has your workflow changed from your previous support roles?

Oh, everything I do goes through Aircall. It creates a lot less work for me, especially with our Zendesk integration. Whenever I’m working on a ticket and a customer calls in multiple times regarding that ticket, all that action is logged to the same source. I don’t have to do any extra “manual labor.”

In my past jobs, I had to compile all this information myself. That meant finding the call recording and basically transcribing it. Aircall pushes all this into a single Zendesk ticket and drops a link to the call recording right in there.

What’s something hilarious that everyone who calls any support number should know?

If you’re on hold, the agent can’t hear you, at least not with Aircall. But a lot of times, agents will just mute their line when they’re looking for information or discussing an issue with a coworker. But we can still hear what you’re saying!

Antoine — Account Executive

Antoine is an Account Executive. He demos Aircall to prospective customers and acts as a knowledgeable guide through their first few months using the product. His journey with Aircall began as an intern before being promoted to Sales Development Representative (SDR), and finally to his current position.

How does the sales team stay organized throughout the customer relationship?

Call tags really help us out. I don’t use them so much anymore as an AE — it’s more of an SDR thing. Basically, they have targets of how many calls they need to make per day, let’s say 50 calls. We want to know what happened on those calls. Was it busy? Did it connect? Did you leave a voicemail? Were you able to connect with the right person? Were you blocked by a “gatekeeper”?

This is super useful when we look back on the analytics and breakdowns.

Speaking of, how does the sales team use Aircall’s analytics features to improve workflows, etc.?

The analytics really come into play when it’s a “numbers game.” Again, it’s not really something that factors into the AE’s work, but as an SDR, we can pull activity reports, call volume, and other data points that help us make decisions.

Like what kind of decisions?

Well, we can look back at a particular day, for example, and say, out of 50 calls you had 5 connects, you spoke to 10 gatekeepers, and you left 12 of voicemails. Then, we’ll look at how this data evolves over time.

If there was a specific day where you had an exceptionally high number of connects, we’ll say, okay, what made that day so productive? When we take a deep-dive we might see that the majority of calls were placed in the morning, and we can adjust workflows accordingly.

But we also use the live feed to make quick decisions. If we see an SDR is on an important call, we might hop on to give them advice or guide them through the process.

You’re talking about call whispering. Does that ever get distracting for the SDR on a call?

Ha! Yeah, in the beginning, it was a little strange, but now we have the listening feature set up so it presents a banner notification to the SDR on a call. When they know we’re listening, it prepares them to receive advice in down moments. And there’s always Slack if they’re in a rhythm. We don’t want them to lose focus.

What Aircall features specifically improve your workflows?

When working in Salesforce, it’s great to use the click-to-dial feature. It’s like — you see a number, you click it, and it’s dialing. Boom. I find that really helpful.

And that short amount of time really makes a difference?

Yeah, again, when I was an SDR and had a ton of numbers to call in a day, the physical act of dialing would add up. Plus now, with the Salesforce integration, that number and conversation is automatically added to the appropriate profile. I can place a call, tag it, and add notes.

I guess that’s a two-part answer: Click to dial, and the overall Salesforce integration.

When you conduct demos, what Aircall features do your leads find most impressive?

That’s interesting, I think people are usually most impressed by the live feed. I was talking to a guy the other day who was telling me how everyone at his company is using cell phones. They can’t track anything, nothing is recorded, they have no idea about call volume or anything. When he saw the live feed, he really got excited. He didn’t know that level of insight was possible.

And also, it’s not really an “Aircall feature,” but the simplicity of the product really impresses people. Like, it’s not a huge deal in terms of functionality, but the fact that we have a dialer that looks like an actual phone really puts people at ease. It’s familiar and a great starting point for learning about other potential features.

In Conclusion

Aircall can be used in a number of ways by multiple departments.

The two main takeaways of these interviews, however, seem to be:

1. 1. Turn on “mandatory call tagging” to help with analytics and troubleshooting

2. 2. Learn about integrations that can accelerate workflows and reduce busy work

For examples of how other companies are using Aircall to transform their customer relationships, check out our customer stories page.

Published on May 11, 2018.