Most of the major call tracking software providers allow users to record the phone calls generated by an ad campaign. It may seem unnecessary or daunting at first, but what happens in a call is just as important as the rest of the standard call tracking metrics.
Here are just a few lessons we’ve learned from recording clients’ inbound calls:
Don’t pour cold water on a hot prospect.
Is your sales staff responding to customer questions properly? Are you losing business because your receptionist lacks phone skills?
A physician client of ours realized that his front desk workers responded to appointment requests on Wednesdays with “The doctor doesn’t work on Wednesdays.”
The patients are inconvenienced and might assume he’s on the golf course. In reality, the doctor teaches a class at the local medical school and works in the university’s clinic on Wednesdays.
Nobody likes voicemail. Especially people ready to give you money.
Are your voicemail prompts confusing? Some voicemail systems present too many options for callers when all they want to do is leave a message and get a prompt call back.
Again, this physician client’s voicemail prompt included a lot of “happy talk” that the caller presumably already knows. By cutting out the jargon and promising a quick response, callers stayed on the line to leave a message more often instead of hanging up.
All calls are not created equal.
Lumping all phone calls into one category is dangerous. Some traffic sources will drive high call volumes but may not be resulting in actual sales. Unless the contents of the calls are analyzed, a marketer may assume that all calls are converting equally.
In practice, we’ve seen some traffic sources with high call volumes are largely generating calls seeking support from existing customers. These can include search keywords with brand-name keywords or retention marketing campaigns. Make sure you can differentiate between sales and support calls to properly attribute revenue and conversions to the right source.
Automated transcription can help.
Check to see if your call tracking vendor offers human or algorithm-based voice transcription and analysis. These features are making their way into the market and can dramatically lower the time investment required to analyze hundreds or thousands of phone calls.
Mongoose Metrics, Marchex and Century Interactive all have different approaches to this problem. Look for more innovation and differentiation in this space to make call tracking more accessible to marketers.
Your turn
What have you learned from analyzing inbound phone calls? If you are not currently recording calls, why not?
CC photo credit: robotbrainz on Flickr