Call Categories vs Libraries

Hey Stephen,

Call Categories are one of my favorite features to use for clients from an analytical perspective. 

This feature allows you to group a specific type of call together. A great example is wanting to view interaction stats for a Disco call vs a Demo call, you'd create a category using either call title, CRM stage, dialer disposition, etc to segment the call types and see how stats change depending on the type of call your reps are hosting. I have a few clients who love to do this for pricing calls to see how confident their reps are when they talk about pricing - looking at things like longest monologue and patience. Some others have used Call Categories as a way to segment interaction stats for top performers vs bottom performers 😉

You could also create a stream using a call category as a filter. And while yes, you can set a call alert using the category, a stream/library folder is still more permanent if you are looking to build an on going knowledge resource.

Worth pinging your CSM if you want to brain storm how to leverage call categories more!

Hi Stephen,

Wanted to follow up on Shayna’s answer with a few additional details that be helpful to you or future readers of this post.

First, from a terminology perspective I want to underscore what Shayna alluded to which is that Call Categories are a highly useful, highly customizable filter option in Gong that can be used in searches and streams as well as in the Stats section. That being said, the two functions that are often compared to one another are Streams and Saved Call Searches.

Second, there are a few unique features of Streams that contribute to them possibly being the correct or incorrect solution for a particular need.

1. As far as notifications are concerned, streams only evaluate a call when it is initially processed which means that some attributes such as comments, scoring and any of the CRM based “XX-Now” filters will be less useful. Saved call searches on the other hand can fire daily or weekly which allows things that happen after some time passes to factor in. 
2. Streams offer the unique opportunity to get personalized content. Instead of each manager having to set up a saved search for their team’s calls in late stage deals where a prospect mentions a competitor, a single personalized stream (often created by enablement or another central leader) to which all managers are subscribed would serve up each manager calls of this nature that were hosted by their team. 

Thanks again for posing this question and contributing to the community!

Is there a way to hashtag or self-categorize an account in a manner that allows tracking? I would love to have the ability to run a report that shows % of calls that are technical requests vs formal sales demos etc. Thoughts? 

Hey Matthew,

I’m not sure I 100% understand what you’re trying to accomplish but I’m fairly confident that there’s a way to achieve the outcome you’re seeking. Where I’m specifically unclear is that you mention hashtagging or categorizing accounts but then running a report on calls so I’m not sure what level of data you’re looking to aggregate.

Looking at things from a capabilities perspective, you can certainly hashtag in the comments of a call and then search by that hashtag on the Conversations tab. You can also add a filter for a specific account if you’re looking to see where that hashtag came up within that account. If there is titling consistency for the meeting invites for these two types of calls, you could search by call title on the conversations tab to find calls of each type. If not, you might use a tracker or smart tracker to identify calls based on conversation areas/talk tracks that are unique to that type of call. You always have the ability to export a csv of the search results if you’re an admin and if the trackers do end up being the best way of differentiating the two call types, you might also consider using the initiatives section (within Insights) to visualize this data.

Hope this helps!