CallTracking

One of the most valuable tools any business can utilize is CallTracking. My preferred vendor is CallRail because of their fair pricing, clean UI, and robust integrations with an easy one-click install. Why is it so important? Going back to Attribution, many media companies will take credit for a phone call based on the length. Google Ads, for instance, will assign a conversion credit for any call that lasts over 60 seconds and is initiated from a search ad. The problem is that there’s not enough evidence to prove the value of the campaign or caller without listening to a recording of the call. Did they buy something? Were they already an existing client? Were they solicitors? Or was it a machine calling to notify you that your Google My Business profiles were not showing properly? And furthermore, is Google counting that last call as a conversion? The list of possible reasons for the call is vast. As advertisers, we care about all calls that come from ads, but it’s important that we only calculate those true “new customers” into our total cost-per-lead, cost-per-sit/cart add, and cost-per-sale. In addition to attribution, it is shocking how many phone system errors occur during transfers, leaving the customer in a black hole of endless rings and voicemail opportunities lost due to filled mailboxes or other settings that just happen. Call listening gives us the ability to address those issues as well as ensure our clients have the ability to retain customers, rather than pushing them off to another competitor.

It was a sunny day in 2017 when a client called, “The marketing isn’t working.” I pulled up his last monthly report and replied, “Well, that’s strange; I’m looking at an overall growth in forms submitted and calls over the previous month.” We went back and forth for a while, and the bottom line was that the leads were not turning into sales. In our line of work, it’s easy to blur the lines between sales and marketing. The job of the marketing department is to generate quality leads, and then it’s the sales team that is responsible for closing the loop. The problem was that neither the agency nor the client had a full picture because once the lead was generated, we didn’t know why it didn’t convert. Was it a bad sales experience? Was the lead of poor quality? And in the case of a phone call lead, there were simply too many unknowns to, without a reasonable doubt, take credit for a call that lasted over 30 or 60 seconds from a tracking number.

After some fretting, I called the client with a solution, “How would you feel if the agency listened to your inbound calls so we could get the full picture on the lead quality?” He happily agreed. At the time, we were using Twilio for call tracking, but it didn’t provide an easy way to qualify calls, leave notes on customer service interactions, or tag recordings with relevant services our clients provide. All in all, the reporting left a lot to be desired. I started researching alternatives and stumbled upon CallRail. The client agreed and we opened an account, ported all the existing tracking numbers over, linked all the third-party integrations, and added a dynamic number to the website.

A dynamic number is a pool of numbers that are swapped for visitors. It helps determine what path a customer took to make the call, whether from an ad on Google, Facebook, or Microsoft, among others. The reason for this is that by showing a unique number to each visitor, we can collect all kinds of valuable information. Who clicks when, from where, and what they’re looking for are all valuable points that can help drive future decisions. Beyond the basics: callers’ number, name, location, device used, length of call, and if it was missed or abandoned (under 15 seconds), we can collect detailed information about the customer’s journey, including the URL of the page the customer called from, any keywords they searched for in Google, the name of the paid campaign (and ad group) the customer called from, and most importantly, the source of the traffic. This is critical because, although you may have a tracking number on a campaign, that does not mean the customer called that number. Here is a common example. Let’s say we’re advertising for a car dealership online. In Google Ads, we have a tracking number for Oahu, one for Maui, and one for Kauai, and each is linked to the location-specific campaigns as call extensions. Although we didn’t dive into site extensions in our search chapter, both Google and Microsoft paid campaigns contain several assets, or potential extensions, to increase your results, including sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, location extensions, image extensions, pricing, reviews, as well as the popular call extension, which we’re talking about now. It is recommended that advertisers use as many as possible to increase Search Impression Share (and Click-Through Rates), but it is up to the search engine to pick which, if any, they show with your ad and will run what they believe, based on the customers’ browsing behavior, has the highest likelihood to generate a click. It makes sense, right? That’s how they get paid! This means that sometimes your call extension will show, but it’s not guaranteed. For those ads that do run with a call extension, the customer may pick up the phone without clicking on the ad first and call the company (and we love when this happens because then the advertiser doesn’t have to pay for a click!). In this example, our tracking report would show that the customer called the tracking number “Oahu Ad Extension” with the source of Google Ads. But what if they didn’t call the number from the ad but rather first clicked through to your website? Wouldn’t you agree that the credit should be attributed to your Google Ads, even if they called a dynamic number on your website? I would. In CallRail, they make this path easy to identify by showing the source of the call as Google Ads and the number they called as one from the dynamic pool. The same is true with other types of online media, such as Facebook, Google My Business, etc., and this information helps marketers understand the customer’s online journey and assign credit to the appropriate source.

Sadly, this does not work for traditional media. For example, let’s say we were running a TV commercial and created a tracking number called “TV spot”. Well, it’s common that a customer won’t take the time to write down the number and instead, after seeing the spot enough times, will go to a browser and search for the company by name before clicking through to their website organically (hopefully you are not advertising on your name in a Google/Microsoft intent search campaign). Now the only way to assign your TV commercial credit would be by listening to the phone call and adding a tag for “TV,” “Radio,” etc. if the customer mentioned the spot or promotional message. Tags can and should be used so that business owners can quickly assess any bottlenecks that are preventing them from converting more calls into customers. Tags will vary depending on the industry, but customer service, technical phone issues, solicitors, internal job inquiries, partnerships, and service not offered should apply to any business. One of the limitations with CallRail is requalifying a customer. The software allows for a thumbs up or thumbs down to “qualify” the caller a single time (a thumbs up turns that call a dark green color to indicate first-time conversion). Then every time the customer calls back (forever), that green thumb will shift over to the customer’s name, and instead of showing up as a Qualified Lead in the reports section of CallRail, they’ll be identified as a Qualified Call, regardless of whether or not they are calling for an additional or new service from the company The problem with this is, let’s say I’m a retailer and I sold a customer an Aloha shirt once. Now that same customer calls back to make another order. Well, I want to take credit again for that specific transaction over that period of time because, as a marketer, that shows I’m doing my job and that I am a valuable asset to the company I am generating leads for. It’s irrelevant to me that they bought something in the past. Our goal is to measure clients’ current marketing spend and sales from that promotional effort. To overcome this, the agency adds a tag for ‘repeat customer’ as well as other details on the purpose of the call and reports back to the clients weekly during our status meetings. And boy, have we heard it all!

After we started our first listening campaign, it didn’t take long to figure out the reporting issue: the client’s phone system was failing in more ways than one. We identified two problems. The first was that if the receptionist was on a call already, the phone would ring and she could answer by placing the customer on hold, but then after a period of time, it would drop the call. The second issue was that during transfers from reception to sales, they simply didn’t connect all the time. We determined that if the person was on the phone already when the transfer came through, it wasn’t going to voicemail and just kept ringing and ringing, resulting in a lot of dropped calls and unhappy customers. I was floored. No wonder the numbers weren’t adding up, and how long had this been happening?! If we hadn’t been listening, how long would it have taken to figure it out, if ever?! That’s when we rolled out CallTracking to all our clients.

And we really have heard it all. Another of my most vivid memories was from Hilo Hattie. It was over the holidays when we started to hear a strange message for callers trying to leave a voicemail. There was no welcome message saying it was Hilo Hattie, but rather just a phone system default “Leave a message beep,” leaving customers really confused. At first, it was hard to determine the issue because not all the callers encountered that strange voicemail. After some data digging, I determined it was based on the time of day. Something had changed in the VPN (virtual private network) software based on the client’s office hours, resulting in anyone calling before 8am HST not making it into the call flow logic; they were, essentially, rejected. The problem was that we were sending MailChimp Time Warp promotional emails with the goal of hitting customers’ inboxes at 6am, meaning that shoppers in the East Coast were calling us at 12am and Pacific at 3am, you get the idea. The amount of phone system issues we frequently encounter, coupled with bad customer service experiences, make the agency’s CallListening service one that we started to mandate for our full-retainer clients. Just too many things can and do go wrong, so the question is, why risk it?

That then brings us to the topic of A.I. and the ability to use scripts and tags to indicate the caller’s reason. It is still essential that a person monitor the calls that CallRail’s automations, also known as keyword spotting, mark because robots can’t read tone (at least not yet in mass applications). I could say the same word, and how I say it can drastically change my intention. To reduce the amount of labor necessary, this can be a useful tool for businesses that receive hundreds of calls per day to identify calls that require human review.

Another important topic with regard to call tracking is privacy. Many states mandate that the customer be informed that the call is being recorded, and some states, like California, require that both parties understand this customer service and the customer themselves. Call monitoring is a tool that can and should be used to assess a customer service agent’s ability to communicate with customers with great efficiency, demonstrated knowledge, and care. Those are the three factors that will determine whether or not a company secures a lead or makes a sale.