Meeting Intelligence for a Phone Call
The conversations that never make it into the CRM.
Before You Begin
- A way to capture the call — a recording, or notes you can write up
- Consent from the other person to record, where you are recording
- An understanding of the retrospective route
A phone call is the hardest conversation to capture and often the most valuable. There is nothing for the Observer to join — no link, no room — and your phone is busy being a phone, so the mobile app cannot record it either.
It is still entirely possible to get the full intelligence from one. There are only two steps: capture the conversation somehow, then give it to Zyntro as a retrospective meeting.
The capture step is the one that needs a decision, because how you do it depends on your phone, your jurisdiction and how much the call matters.
Steps
Decide how you will capture the call
Zyntro accepts a recording, a video, or text. For a phone call the realistic options are:
- Your phone's own call recording, if it has one. The most faithful record, and the simplest when it is available.
- A second device recording the room while the call is on speakerphone. A voice recorder app on a laptop or a spare phone works well. Put it close to the handset.
- Your own notes, written up straight afterwards. No recording at all, and still useful — more on this below.
Whatever you use, you need to end up with an audio file or some text.
Ask, at the start of the call
On a video call the Observer appears in the participant list and effectively announces itself. On a phone call there is nothing to see, so the only disclosure is you.
A sentence is enough: do you mind if I record this so I can take proper notes? People almost always say yes, and it is far better than the alternative of them finding out later.
Create the meeting
If the call was already on your calendar as a Phone meeting with the contact attached, open it from CRM → Meetings. Once it has ended and produced nothing, the Recover Meeting Intelligence panel is at the bottom of its screen. Skip to the next step.
If the call was not on your calendar — which is most calls — go to CRM → Meetings → Retrospective and build it. Give it a title, the date, the time it actually happened, the timezone, and set the location to Phone-call.
Add the person you spoke to
Search your contacts and add them. This is what connects the call to their record, and it is the step that makes the whole exercise worthwhile — without it you get a summary and nothing reaches the CRM.
Adding both parties also tells Zyntro to separate two voices in the recording, which matters more on a phone call than anywhere else: a speakerphone recording with both sides on one channel is exactly the case where speaker separation earns its keep.
Supply what you captured
Pick the matching source:
- Audio Recording for a recording — MP3, AAC, M4A, WAV, OGG or WebM, up to 60 MB.
- Text Transcript for notes, or for a transcript from any other service. Any format works.
If your phone or another service produced a transcript for you, use that: it is the cheapest of the three routes and the most accurate, because nothing has to be interpreted from audio.
Decide whether the other person hears about it
The Suppress attendee notifications toggle controls whether the attendee summary goes out for this meeting.
On the recovery panel of an existing meeting it is already on. On the Retrospective screen it is off, so if you have attendee summaries switched on, the person you called will receive a written recap from you.
For a call you have just finished that is often exactly right. For one from three weeks ago it is not — suppress it and send something yourself if anything is needed.
Process it
Choose Process Meeting Intelligence. A pasted transcript is usually done in a minute or two; audio takes longer depending on length.
The call then behaves like any other meeting: summary, debrief, highlights, action items, the contact's record updated, and a follow-up reminder if you have that switched on.
Result
The phone call is now a meeting in Zyntro, on the contact's history, with everything a recorded video call would have produced.
The practical difference this makes is on the contact record. A business where the real conversations happen by phone otherwise has a CRM built entirely from emails and forms — which is a record of the easy interactions rather than the important ones.
Tip: Notes written up straight afterwards are worth more than you would think. If recording was not possible, open the Retrospective and paste in what you remember, written as what was said rather than as bullet points: he said the current contract runs to March and the main problem is the reporting.
It is the cheapest of the three routes, and a summary, action items and a follow-up built from five minutes of recollection is dramatically better than a call that leaves no trace. Do it in the ten minutes after the call, while you still remember the specifics.
Info: A phone meeting never gets an Observer, and that is not a fault. There is no link to dial into, so the Observer is never scheduled and the meeting will say so. This route is how phone calls get intelligence, not a workaround for something that failed.
