What is Call Disposition: Everything You Need to Know

When you embark on a self-imposed adventure, you can take the time to produce everything to bring it all together. You can have unlimited incoming Internet calls to annoy where to dispose of them and to record the history of the conversations. How do you want to be a caller for a customer who is spending time at home in their informal sweatpants drinking vodka?

Documenting the outcome of every call, whether inbound or outbound call, is critical for call centers. Call disposition codes help you organize this data in a meaningful way, keeping your entire call center team on the same page, improving your follow-up process, ensuring compliance, and providing insights to drive improvements.

Let’s delve into the main topic, Call Disposition, without any further delay.

What is call disposition?

Basically, Call Disposition refers to a tag that represents the outcome of a call to gain valuable intelligence. With the help of call disposition, a sales manager can optimize their sales process. To improve teams’ sales process, there are different disposition metrics. For instance, a high number of call dispositions indicating disconnected numbers may suggest that a sales representative’s lead list lacks accurate prospect information.

Good call center software tools, such as most customer relationship management (CRM) software, should have a call disposition function of some sort. Typically, you have the flexibility to customize these tools and the categories to meet the specific needs of the individual call center or call centers you are managing.

How does call disposition work?

When you make phone calls, you need to keep track of what happens on each call. 

After concluding each call, it is important to consider several questions. Where did the lead originate from? Did the customer show interest or disinterest? Is there a need for a follow-up? Was the incorrect number dialed or was there no response received?

As a member of the inside sales team engaged in outbound call campaigns, it is essential to address a series of inquiries following each call diligently. These include confirming a successful connection with the intended target, identifying the need for subsequent follow-up actions, specifying the necessary steps, ascertaining the line’s availability, and ensuring the accuracy of the contact details. 

Rather than manually documenting and organizing these details onto lead or contact records subsequent to each call.

When working with a CRM system, it is highly beneficial to establish call dispositions as a picklist. This feature enables the dispositions to be associated with a particular lead or contact record. By doing so, these dispositions can be effectively leveraged for generating reports and displaying them in dashboards. This method provides the ability to track call outcomes in real-time, allowing for the identification of trends that can be used to shape sales and marketing strategies.

Advantages of call dispositions

Let’s delve at the specific advantage of using call disposition codes in call centers and how it can enhance your call center operations:

I. Reduce manual tasks for call center agents

Remember to use call center disposition codes to make it easier for your customer service and sales teams. Instead of writing out phrases like “Requires follow-up” or “Appointment scheduled” every time, agents can just choose the right option from the disposition codes. This way, they can quickly record the call’s outcome and move on to the next interaction.

II. Ensuring the whole team is aligned

Remember to use the call disposition function. It helps keep your call center team informed about the outcome of every interaction. This ensures everyone is clear about the calls handled by the team.

III. Enhanced call center management and reporting 

Tracking call disposition codes can greatly streamline the management of your call center by offering important insights and enabling you to assess key metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) critical to your operations.

IV. Precious data and comprehensive insights

It’s important to remember that call disposition offers incredibly valuable data for your business. Since all outcomes are categorized in a standard way, they are easy to quantify and measure. As a result, call disposition analytics can provide a simple overview of the number of positive and negative calls.

Best practices of call disposition

Implementing effective call disposition practices can greatly enhance customer experience. Here are some best practices for call disposition:

1. Engage your team in the code list creation process

What has to be taken into consideration is the fact that call dispositioning can dramatically improve the situation for your agents. However, it is vital to ensure that the agreement of call disposition categories is reasonable especially when identifying their qualities. If a center has few disposition codes, it is unlikely that a great deal of pertinent data will be gathered, whereas if it comprises numerous codes, the process of call categorization will be too time-consuming or agents will start choosing codes at random.

2. Keep a balanced number of call disposition codes

However, it’s crucial to mention that call dispositioning holds the potential of boosting the experience of your agents significantly. However, there is a need to be cautious on the number of call disposition categories one has to develop. It is possible to have too few disposition codes and obtain little meaningful information from them, on the other hand to have too many increases call categorization time, slows agents down or even forces them to select codes blindly.

3. Educate your team on the proper use of codes

Proper definition and rules concerning the use of disposition codes are also mandatory to prevent agents from getting perplexed and emerge as the primary guidelines for categorizing call outcomes among your teams.

4. Modify your call disposition list if needed

On your way to developing your business, you need to ensure that a call disposition list reflects the essence of your correspondences with clients and potential customers. This may entail including new disposition codes that relate to new forms of communication or excluding senior codes that do not reflect the organization’s dynamic nature of operations. 

5. Utilize disposition codes to initiate automated follow-ups

By utilizing the call disposition codes, you can schedule the follow-up actions in your CRM or you can use the integration services of Zapier. Defining concrete actions to be taken after determining call disposition codes is useful as it eliminates extra work, improves the functioning of call centres, and increases response time.

Common call disposition categories

While call disposition codes are configurable, they can be broadly categorized into the following groups:

• Must Cultivate: This call outcome shows that the lead is still interested but not ready to buy yet. This means marketers will need to continue building a relationship with them before focusing on making a sale.
• Meeting Set: The call disposition within this category serves as an indicator of the successful performance of the campaign according to the established plan. However, a low value in this context necessitates a reassessment of the campaign and an improvement in lead quality.
• Number Disconnected: A phone number could be inactive, disconnected, or no longer in service. If multiple call outcomes fall into this category, review your contact list to update the details or consider starting afresh.
• Goes Directly to Voicemail: Such a call disposition could mean that the sales reps are calling at the wrong time, which means you will have to follow up with these leads after recalibrating your strategy.

Other categories include – busy signal, connected but no conversation, request for a callback, product question, follow up X days, product question, sales objection, troubleshooting, the deal closed, do not contact, etc.

Final words

Hence, Call disposition is the cornerstone of optimizing call center operations and extracting valuable insights from customer interactions. By implementing a robust call disposition strategy, businesses can elevate their customer service, improve sales efficiency, and make data-driven decisions that drive growth.

FAQs

What is disposition code?

A disposition code categorizes the result of a phone call or interaction into specific labels. These categorized codes are useful for summarizing call outcomes and facilitating analysis and action based on the information. Each code denotes a particular outcome or necessary action and is usually predetermined and standardized within a CRM system or call center software.

What is contact disposition?

Dispositions are user-defined statuses that can be assigned to completed interactions either by an agent or by the system. They can trigger other actions, such as the scheduling of a callback, adding the contact to the do-not-call list, finalizing the record, and so forth.

What is a disposition in a call center?

Call disposition is one way to lighten the load for contact centers. Essentially, it’s a method of logging the outcomes of calls—both inbound and outbound—by assigning each a particular category.

What is the purpose of a disposition?

The disposition of a criminal record is the current status or outcome of an arrest or prosecution. Common dispositions are: Convicted, which means you have pleaded or been found guilty by a court of law. Acquitted means you have been found not guilty by a court of law in a criminal trial.