As 2025 winds down, IT, sales, and support decision makers and managers are entering one of the most important planning cycles of the year: translating twelve months of communication data into operational decisions.
The shift toward data-driven CX is no longer aspirational. McKinsey & Company notes that 57% of service leaders expect call volumes to increase by as much as 20% over the next one to two years. This means businesses must prepare and optimize their voice strategy on a large scale.
And in a world where voice remains the most critical channel for high-stakes conversations, the insights hidden in your call records matter more than ever.
Whether you manage distributed sales teams, run a global support operation, or handle regional compliance for multi-country voice networks, your call data is one of the most reliable predictors of what your customers need from you next year.
With Custom Reports and AI Call Insights from United World Telecom, teams can turn raw call activity into meaningful guidance for 2026 planning.
Below, we break down five practical ways to use year-end call data—such as CDRs, transcripts, sentiment scores, and AI-generated summaries—to inform strategy, coaching, staffing, and customer experience improvements in the year ahead.
Why Year-End Call Data Matters Across Every Department
While consumers are increasingly open to non-phone channels like chat, email, and even social media, live phone support continues to play a critical role across every generation. Even as digital adoption rises, customers still turn to voice when they need clarity, reassurance, or fast resolution. For businesses, this highlights a crucial need to understand your call traffic, trends, and content.
Year-end reporting isn’t just valuable for managers and stakeholders; it’s a valuable asset across departments. Sales leaders use call summaries and transcripts to understand which messaging resonated across regions. Support managers rely on sentiment trends and CDRs to spot recurring issues, staffing gaps, or routing inefficiencies.
Product teams can identify feature requests, emerging customer needs, and friction points that appear repeatedly in conversations. Even marketing and operations teams benefit from understanding call drivers, customer expectations, and patterns across markets.
When each department reviews and analyzes call data through its own lens, your organization enters 2026 aligned, informed, and better prepared to execute on shared goals.
1. Get a Comprehensive View of Past Year’s Call Activity
Year-end reports can be strategic inputs when you know what data to look for. When you export your Call Detail Records (CDRs), call transcripts, sentiment scores, and summary reports from your United World Telecom dashboard, you are capturing the communication patterns that shaped customer journeys throughout the year.
These datasets help answer questions that matter for next year’s strategy:
- Which regions drove the highest inbound volume and why?
- What time windows experienced the highest call traffic?
- Which teams handled the highest volume and which needed support?
- What product or service categories triggered the most negative sentiment?
Through the control panel, you can manually analyze Call Activity reports or generate Custom Call Reports for more focused visibility. Filter by:
- Date range
- Call direction – inbound or outbound
- Phone tags – tag your phone lines for different regions or departments in advance to see granular performance
- Completed calls only
- Missed calls only
These insights give you a clearer view of coverage gaps, training needs, call routing efficiency, and the customer issues that dominated the past year. Use these reports to make operational plans and adjustments with measurable data instead of relying on anecdotal insights.
2. Turn Transcripts and Recordings Into Training
Instead of archiving transcripts and call summaries, turn them into next quarter’s training material. AI Call Insights makes it easy for managers to review customer-agent conversations at scale, without manually auditing hundreds of calls.
Recordings and transcripts help you:
- Identify phrases used by customers and top-performing agents
- Pinpoint common pain points or obstacles customers face
- Spot friction points in scripts or IVR menus
- Surface policy or service misunderstandings or knowledge gaps
- Build scenario-based training modules for new hires
For sales teams, transcripts reveal which talking points resonate across regions and which objections require new enablement content. For support teams, they capture the wording that leads to faster resolution.
This call data is easily accessible in our AI Insights dashboard (for customers who have this feature turned on). View sentiment scores, summaries, and transcripts for all calls. Use our keyword search tool to further filter your call activity to see more granular data.
Starting the new year with transcript-driven training ensures teams are aligned before Q1 volume picks up.
3. Use Sentiment & Summaries to Optimize CX and IVR Flows
Sentiment analysis helps managers and agents understand the tone and emotional context of customer interactions. When aggregated across thousands of calls, sentiment trends offer a blueprint for program-level improvements. Sentiment data can reveal:
- Surges in frustration tied to billing periods or product launches
- Declines in sentiment after a service change or outage
- High-performing agents who consistently defuse difficult situations
- Issues with product or feature messaging and capabilities
- Confusion triggered by IVR menu options, outdated routing paths, or agent incapabilities.
Pair sentiment with AI-generated call summaries and you get a condensed, high-value view of what customers actually experienced this year. You can dig further into negatively rated calls for a deeper understanding of how or where interactions fail.
These insights can guide updates to training, staffing models, escalation paths, IVR flows, and even product messaging in 2026.
4. Schedule Report Exports Before the Year Ends
Global teams often run into a familiar challenge: last-minute scrambles to gather data for year-end reviews. Scheduling call reports ensures that leadership has the metrics needed for Q1 forecasting and budgeting. Ideally, you generate and schedule these reports before December closes. In your report, you can include:
- Call activity (inbound and outbound) to analyze regional traffic and call outcomes
- Call duration to understand the effectiveness of your voice channel
- Sentiment scores to benchmark team performance
- Call summaries to consolidate themes without reviewing every transcript
- Call costs (inbound and outbound) to determine the ROI of sales and marketing campaigns
- Phone tag filters to view call reports for specific phone lines or regions.
Having this data in advance builds alignment between support, sales, and operations teams before new year changes roll out.
5. Build New Initiatives With AI Call Insights
Year-end data is only powerful if it turns into action. AI-driven Call Insights—call summaries, sentiment, transcriptions, and keyword searches—make it easier to translate call activity into operational decisions.
Here’s how forward-looking teams can use these insights to prepare for the new year:
- Plan staffing and scheduling: Identify peak hours, seasonal spikes, and under-resourced regions.
- Refine scripts and enablement: Build new scripts based on real customer dialogue across markets.
- Optimize routing and IVR: Update menus, reduce loops, and shorten time-to-resolution.
- Enhance QA and coaching: Develop measurable scorecards and recognize high performers.
- Strengthen global consistency: Ensure teams in APAC, EMEA, LATAM, and North America follow the same playbook.
With distributed teams and rising expectations for reliable and responsive support, AI Call Insights help global businesses operate with greater precision and consistency.
From Raw Data to Real Outcomes
Closing out the year with high-quality communication data gives your organization a strategic advantage heading into 2026. Export your reports, analyze sentiment, review transcripts, and identify patterns across your global operations. When combined with AI Call Insights, these data points help you make smarter staffing, training, and workflow decisions, so you can improve customer experience, boost efficiency, and support your teams with clarity.
If you’re ready to strengthen your global support strategy for 2026, your year-end call data is the best place to start. Explore our Custom Reports and AI Call Insights features to see how we can help you get the most out of your call data. Want to learn more? Connect with our experts or chat with your account manager today!