TL;DR:
- If you want to get better data and set up better processes for your customer service team, customer call tracking is the way to go.
- From call source data to call performance data to call recording data, customer call tracking provides valuable insights into your customer experience and customer journey.
- By using customer call tracking to fill gaps in your performance data, your business can tangibly improve its ROI.
Call tracking isn’t just about knowing where your inbound calls are coming from. Yes, that’s important information — but what matters most is how that information improves your overall marketing strategy and customer experience.
The right call tracking system can help you increase your marketing ROI, improve sales success, and raise the bar for your overall customer experience. Let’s dive into how customer call tracking works, and what you should look for in any call tracking solution.
What is customer call tracking?
If you want to get better data and set up better processes for your customer service team, customer call tracking is the way to go.
Customer call tracking involves using call tracking software specifically to track and manage inbound phone calls from existing and prospective customers. This technology can be deployed regardless of whether you have one customer service rep or an entire call center.
Integrating call tracking into your customer service activities delivers a number of key benefits to your business, including:
- Visibility into the customer experience. You can monitor the role customer service is playing in the customer experience, and how it is elevating customer satisfaction.
- Documentation of common questions, challenges, strengths, and other trends. This valuable feedback can help you coach and train your customer service reps in pursuit of better, more consistent results.
- Performance insights through tracking metrics. The duration of phone calls, how customers find your phone number, and other data points can be easily logged and analyzed among other call data.
Using call tracking to fill customer service data gaps
The specific benefits and role of call tracking will vary from one business to the next, depending on their current customer service performance and their goals.
As you approach the integration of this software, it’s useful to define your anticipated use of customer call tracking. Typically, there are three big questions to ask as you develop plans for using this technology:
- What data do you want to collect?
- Who is going to use this data and how?
- What processes do you want to implement?
Let’s break this down to better understand the significance of each question.
What data do you want to collect?
From call source data to call performance data to call recording data, customer call tracking provides valuable insights into your customer experience and customer journey. Key customer call data includes the following:
- Call times
- Call lengths
- Call outcomes
- Where customers are finding your customer support number
- Which customer service reps are providing the best experience
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it represents the most common data points that businesses use to evaluate and optimize their customer service strategy. For each data point, consider how it might illuminate performance for your business, and how it might be used to drive better results, including increased customer satisfaction and customer retention.
Who is going to use this data and how?
Customer call data can offer value across multiple departments within your business. Obviously, customer service experiences the greatest direct benefit, because the insights from customer call data can inform improvements to existing processes as well as scripts and strengthen customer engagement when phone calls are initiated.
But product and service teams can also use this information to evaluate common challenges customers are facing when using your company’s products and services. If a certain feature in your platform is confusing users or generating error messages, for example, customer calls can help identify and resolve the issue.
Meanwhile, marketing and sales can use insights from customer calls, including customer sentiments and other contextual information, to improve their messaging and engagement strategies with new leads. And management can track overall customer sentiments in relationship to the entire brand, which can guide strategic decision-making over how the brand positions itself when engaging with current and potential customers.
What processes do you want to implement?
Call tracking software provides a platform for implementing a number of features and tools to improve customer engagement and optimize your marketing and sales performance. These features may include:
- Call routing to the most appropriate point of contact
- Call notes and outcome documentation for each inbound call
- Out-of-office notifications, and other prebuilt elements that improve customer communications
- Tools that support customer service during extenuating circumstances (product down time, service delays, natural disasters, and more)
Regardless of whether these features offer value to your business, they are available through an intelligent call tracking solution alongside other features and processes that play a direct role in the call tracking process.
How a customer call tracking system works and what key features to look for
Call tracking uses several tools to connect inbound phone calls to their referral source. This can be as simple as identifying that a phone call was driven by a paid Google advertisment, or it can use custom tracking numbers and dynamic number insertion (DNI) to tell you whether calls came from your website or even a direct mailing to a customer’s home.
Context is important to generating meaningful customer call insights. Key features that support this function include the following:
- Call routing and call scheduling to automate customer engagement and facilitate connections with the appropriate customer service representative
- Call recording and automation rules to automatically analyze the content of calls, including customer sentiments, possible keywords you’ve overlooked in your SEO strategy, and other valuable data from your phone conversation
- Caller context insights to deepen your understanding of your customers and their needs
- Offline tracking to connect phone call referrals to traditional marketing channels, including direct mail and TV
- Quick texts and voicemail tools to enhance your customer engagement
- Automated responses to improve lead engagement and help you retain leads who might otherwise be lost to your competitors
To leverage call tracking for everything it’s worth, this software should be integrated with both your marketing analytics software and your CRM, sharing customer data across these solutions and enhancing the quantity and quality of your data.
What sets CallRail’s call tracking apart from other marketing tools — and even other call tracking solutions — is its ability to collect data from the content of your customer calls, creating a whole new level of useful insights from your customer interactions.
Improving customer marketing ROI with call tracking software
You can improve your marketing performance only if you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your overall strategy. All too often, businesses attempt to evaluate their marketing performance without understanding the role of inbound phone calls.
By filling these gaps, your business can tangibly improve its ROI. Material gains can be realized in the following ways:
- Adjusting your marketing mix for cross-selling and upselling, and expanding the use of channels that rank high in your marketing attribution model
- Understanding how to integrate and optimize phone call CTAs in your existing campaigns
- Identifying trends from phone call conversations to create more engaging content for customers, improve services or products, or target new business branding opportunities
- Improving your ROI from phone calls (by improving missed-call response times and customizing sales scripts to better align with marketing messaging, for example)
How a call tracking system improves the customer experience
A higher ROI is a reflection of an improved customer experience. The back-end benefits your business enjoys will be balanced by parallel improvements on the front end of your business operations. Specific call tracking benefits for your customers include the following:
- Improved responsiveness through faster responses to missed calls
- Improved sales scripts that speak directly to specific pain points
- Optimized customer service scripts that foster positive customer sentiments and improve customer retention
- Insights that guide customized messaging and services that better target your customers’ needs
- Performance insights that facilitate better customer call management, including new call routing practices and call scheduling
- Call intelligence that identifies best practices for sales and customer service conversations
- Better overall customer engagement, including no more missed leads and consistent communication
Call tracking is customer-centric
Customers want to be able to reach your business by phone. When you invest in tools that improve the inbound call experience, you’re investing in customer satisfaction. Over time, you can take those data-driven insights to enhance marketing, sales, customer service, and other interactions your customers may have with your brand.
Learn from your calls and improve your customer experience. Request a demo of Lead Center today.
