The Hidden Benefits Of Call Tracking

What is call tracking and why should you care?

We all hear about call tracking but nobody dives into why it’s so important.

It is such a powerful tool that you absolutely, positively need to use.  

In this post, I’m going to give you the reasons why you should use it, and the call tracking system that I use personally (Analytic Call Tracking).

Take all the features and benefits I summed up in this article and using them in your sales pitch.  It will differentiate you from other people selling the same SEO or lead generation service.  

The WHY of Call Tracking:

It gives a TON of insight about the customers and the market.

Being able to listen to actual phone calls helps give you a pulse on the industry.

It can help you find out things like:

Services you should be offering – If you keep hearing customers ask for a service over and over again, it might be a good sign that you should offer it.

Frequently asked questions  – Chances are, the same types of questions are going to keep popping up over and over.  This can allow you to train the staff to field the questions in a way that ends in a sale.

Frequent complaints – This can be powerful for a business owner that isn’t answering the phone himself. This is a way that the owner can try to improve his service by getting easy accessible feedback.

You can find out how the customers speak – When you speak in the language of the customer, you’ll connect with them easier.  Use this to your advantage in your marketing.

It’s quality assurance for your staff that answers the phone – The person who answers the phone call is the gatekeeper to your business.  A reception could be doing a terrible job handling customers and cost a business a lot of money.  How would a business owner even know this unless they had an easy way to listen to the calls? You could even use this to compare the performance of the staff to see things like which staff member had a higher phone conversion rate.

Proving an ROI

It’s easy to track where the leads are coming from.  One can use a different tracking number for each marketing campaign or marketing channel.

You can listen to every single call to track the names of customers that appointments were set with.  You can then follow up with the business owner to see if they closed on the customer and for how much.  This allows you to measure the exact dollar amount you are bringing in for that client.

It can even get more granular than that.  Use different phone numbers for each marketing channel to track their effectiveness.  This allows you to figure out the 80/20 of your marketing efforts.

If you have a client paying $500 a month for SEO, you should be able to prove that they are getting their moneys worth.  What better way to show accountability than actual phone call proof?

It’s super affordable – in the US, it’s as low as $1/mo per phone number, and a penny per minute

Find peak calling hours – You can determine what times have higher call volume.  This allows for adjusting hours of the staff to help with the increased call volume.

You can pre-screen potential lead generation clients

I always check on the first few leads I send lead generation clients.  If they aren’t good at closing, your leads aren’t going to be worth as much to them.

Let’s say an average customer is worth $1000 to the client.  Potential client A closes 40% of the leads.  Potential client B closes 20% of the leads.

If you sent the same 10 leads to both potential clients:

Client A – 10 Leads X $1000 Avg. Customer Value X 40% Close Rate = $4000

Client B – 10 Leads X $1000 Avg. Customer Value X 20% Close Rate = $2000

Who do you think will find your service more valuable and will stick around?

You can help find bad habits of your client:

  • A sales that said he would give an “honest quote” and it came off as everything but honest
  • A business owner that explained his services in detail at too high of a level and bored the customer to death.
  • I noticed some businesses don’t answer calls that aren’t local area codes.  I’ve asked several of them why they don’t, and they always say the same thing.  They think it will be someone trying to sell them something.  Here’s the problem: it might be people that aren’t local to that area or have recently moved.  These potential customers are using google to find a service provider.  They can’t get a referral from a friend when they don’t know anyone in the area.  By not answering non local area codes when they call in, they are throwing away business.  A lot of business owners don’t realize that.
  • Another common thing is business owners assuming that a person will call back or leave a message.  This is also a bad thing to do for SEO based leads.  These people want someone to solve their problem.  They will just move onto the next business if one doesn’t answer the phone.  This is especially important for businesses that are more urgent in nature.

THINGS TO WATCH OUT FOR:

Whenever I buy a phone number, I always google the phone number in a couple of different formats.  For example, I would search for the numbers like this”(999) 999-9999″ or “999999999”

By doing this, I can see if anyone used this before.  I’ve made the mistake of not doing this before and got unrelated calls.  It’s a total pain in the ass.

If someone built citations to this number, it can hurt future SEO efforts.  You do not want a dirty number.

The Call Tracking System that Local Client Takeover uses and trusts

Mark, Brian, and I all use Analytic Call Tracking (ACT) for our calling platform.  I’ve tried several different call tracking systems, and ACT was the best by far.  It is a self hosted call tracking that integrates with Twilio.  You don’t want to put it on cheap hosting though, I use Liquid Web to host mine after dealing with several headaches from Hostgator.  It is $99/mo for the dashboard, but it’s worth every penny.

**Disclaimer – There are affiliate links for both Liquid Web and ACT in this post.  We wouldn’t ever recommend something that we didn’t personally use and trust.**

Blacklisting Calls

ACT makes it easy to block spam calls.  You can create a master list of numbers to block for all of your call tracking numbers.

White Label Branded Dashboard

It’s easy to look a lot more professional to a client when you can provide a dashboard that they can log into.  You can create a username and password where they can access only the numbers you choose.  They can see all the call data from within the dashboard.  You can also setup email alerts for call notifications.  This will send an email with an MP3 recording of a phone and the phone number.

calling-tracking-number-dashboard

Automated Invoicing For Clients

ACT integrates with Paypal and can send out automatic invoices.  This is a pretty neat feature.  For example, you can set it to bill $70 for every call over 30 seconds.  Or you can also set it by phone codes.  This is where a you manually tag each phone call.

automated-invoicing-for-calls

You can setup advanced call flows

This is a huge benefit and is convenient.  There’s a couple different things you can do with incoming calls.  Analytic Call Tracking makes this easy to do.

advanced-call-flows

(This is a screenshot of the advanced call flow screen in ACT)

Round Robin – This allows you to rotate calls through several different numbers.  This is useful when you have a lead generation site and many clients.  You can set it up to send 10 calls to Company A, and then 15 to company B.

Ring Multiple Numbers – This feature will make the call ring on multiple phones.  The first phone to pick-up gets the call.

Set Business Hours – With this, you can set it to ring a landline during a certain time period, and then forward to a person’s cell phone after that.

IVR Menu – This is an audio menu that a caller can listen to when they call in.  An example of where this would be useful is a business that offers commercial and residential services.  You could set it up where the caller presses 1 to be connected to the commercial department, and 2 to be connected to the residential department.

You can record calls for later reference – It’s easy to miss important customer details while on the phone.  Being able to access recordings of the calls is helpful.

And a lot of other cool features that I didn’t even touch on.