How To Track Calls For Beginners Like A Boss – INFOGRAPHIC

Imagine if you could track calls like you track clicks.

Wouldn’t you like to track the results produced by individual sales reps, individual calls, or calls that come from particular marketing channels?

Once you have this knowledge, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from tunnel-vision to 20/20. The phone is often the critical junction where a sale is made or lost.

I know you’re busy, so to prevent any wasted time for you or your team, I made this guide. Below you’ll find the step by step system I use with my clients to set up basic call tracking from scratch. Also, learn how to move into advanced call tracking (known as call intelligence).

What is Call Tracking?

Basic call tracking is the use of unique numbers (generated automatically) to track the source and efficacy of your inbound phone calls. Use a different number for each marketing campaigns, and your call tracking software can measure the true results of each channel.

Advanced call tracking involves the automatic analysis of phone conversations, pre-recorded voice menus, and auto-scheduled call flows. We’ll cover that later on.

What You Stand to Gain

There are five main benefits to call tracking:

1.     Know your ROI. You’ll know for sure how much money all your marketing efforts (and investments) bring into the business.

2.     Watch the right KPIs. Forget bounce rate. The phone contains much more critical metrics.

3.     Increase call conversion. Inbound calls convert extremely well already, and by tracking results, you can run tests to optimize sales.

4.     Call intelligence. With advanced call tracking, you’ll know the full picture of every lead who winds up on the phone.

5.     Find and fix money-leaks. Uncover gaps in knowledge or skill within your staff that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Know your ROI

Time and again, businesses who try call tracking find huge discrepancies in their sales and marketing systems. You might be pouring money into something you assume is giving you a return when it’s not, and simultaneously ignoring something that’s doubling every dollar you put into it!

Without call tracking, how will you keep your marketing channels accountable? Instead of hearing a monthly tally of keyword rank, bounce rates, unique visits, and other “slightly useful” figures, wouldn’t it be simpler to see how many phone calls each channel has generated for you?

With call recordings, you’ll also know the quality of calls coming from various channels. You can find real gold mines this way!

Watch the right KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are simply metrics that matter to your business.

Many of us working in local SEO have focused on KPIs based on rankings and traffic. Not because they’re necessarily the best metrics to follow, but because it has been easiest to track them for a long time. Relying on these metrics nowadays, however, does not make sense. With the rise of personalized search and internet directories, they miss a lot of conversions.

For example, when someone searches for a local plumber and calls directly from the SERPs, you wouldn’t see that as a click-through. And yet, it could be the hottest lead you got that day! A rankings and traffic report is blind to those valuable phone calls.

Increase call conversion

Calls are highly profitable.

According to Google, inbound phone calls are 10–15 times more likely to convert than inbound web leads. BIA/Kelsey notes that 61% of businesses rate their inbound phone calls as “excellent leads,” while only 52% rate leads from the web as excellent. Most high-ticket products and services depend on phone calls to close the sale, and they’re the most important sales to be tracking!

You can only sustainably improve what you measure. When you know what’s bringing in the most calls, and how many calls vs. sales you get, you can start running tests and optimizing your sales systems. Until then, you’re in the dark.

Call intelligence

Going beyond call tracking and recording, those with the budget can also get “call intelligence” to get to work for them.

· Know how many phone calls are first-time and how many are repeated.

· Get alerted when someone who was on the phone a week ago shows up on your website again.

· Automatically assess the sales skills of your telephone sales reps.

· Track how many times a customer showed interest in purchasing, without having to sit through recordings.

· And much more.

Find and fix money-leaks

It’s time your receptionists and other call agents were accountable for their performance on the phone. It’s not about being “Big Brother” or pointing fingers. It’s about helping them improve and become masters of their job, to become an even more valuable asset to the business that pays their wage!

For example, they might have knowledge gaps that they feel too busy or too embarrassed to mention or fix themselves, leading them to stumble through customer questions and lose sales. Advanced call tracking is great at figuring out where phone performance can be improved.

As long as your workforce is happy to learn (as they should be!), then performance-tracking will be good news for everyone.

 

 

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

Test Post from MAN Digital

Test Post from MAN Digital https://man.digital

Improve your Optimization Program

We know sometimes it gets difficult to reach a point where you can say you are satisfied fully with your testing activities. But the struggle is real, getting good results is not trivial. It is planned and it requires a mature conversion model to be able to optimize the programs you have.

The question now is, how do you do that?

Lucky you, we actually have components for a successful optimization program. Scroll for more!

1. Culture arround CRO

While Spiderman said, ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’ we say, ‘with great culture, comes great process and result’. To do this, you will need an executive sponsor who believes in testing. The internal sharing of results, sharing of success and failures also helps in creating a healthy working culture in the company and the people working for it.

The organizational culture of an organization is one important part that brings profitable results. Every company/organization/multinational, call it however you want, is first born by having an idendity. This identity goes on and gets developed and evoluates in such way that every person who works in the same place has similar behaviors and beliefs.

The key in making people have similar attitudes is by engaging them. As a leader it’s a very big task which needs to be done and it needs to be done correctly.

How? Find your own culture and how you want to be represented and recognised as an entity. We all know that Apple is known for innovating constantly. Or Nike supports you to have your horizons open. It’s what this is all about. Create a culture that represents you as persons and that represents your product also. Find similarities between you and the product. Make it personal. People like emotional advertising.

Your next steps should be:

• Have an identity.
• Have a plan on how you want to use that identity.
• Have an engagement plan.
• Create a culture and make people believe in it.
• Invest emotionally and financially in your team.

2. Team

There isn’t just one man behind every successful result, but a number of them. You will need a dedicated developer, one who knows the ins and outs of the program. You will then create a custom testing team, a group of experts doing different methodologies and processes to ensure excellent testing.’

Teamwork is one of the greatest tools any kind of organization can have. Individuals are very great at their job. But individuals who work together can be excellent. You know what they say, “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.” In any process of your work, you must have in mind team work.

What you need is actually easy. To have people in your team who are great at what they do, and then find ways of making them work together.

We can give you some examples in this situation:

• Have weekly meetings with everyone from each department and discuss what happened so far and what has to happen next. You never know when the developer guy will give some great inputs to the seller guy.
• Have task force meetings weekly. Take two or three people from different areas (that complete each other and are essential to each other at the same time), and have them work in a structured way and by objectives. Having an objective in mind every week and knowing that you need to accomplish it because your  teammates depend on that is really good for increasing the responsibility in people and also increasing the conversion rates for the upcoming results of the company.
• Have feedback sessions. Actually, you don’t even need special “sessions” for that. What you need is to create this culture, that feedbacks are very important. And they are. How will you know if you are doing the correct job? How do you know if you are evolving? How will you know if you are helping your team evaluate? And so on.

We just gave you a few small tips to start with, but now you can implement in your team whatever feel right and helps with the CRO because every team has different needs and need to be approached differently.

3. Tools and Systems

There are many many tools that you can use in order to view, verify, learn about clients etc. What is next for you is to find the best way possible to do this. What is the methodology you want to use? Why is that one the good one for you? How can you put into practice what you have acknowledged?

Always start with the data, the analytics. Remember the mantra, the more data you have, the better results you get. But never isolate data, some companies make this grave mistake of not integrating their data, the voice of the customers, the offline system they get.

The cross-disciplinary teams will do brainstorming in order to come with assumptions and solutions to the assumptions. For example, who are the target customers? What are their needs? What problems could arise from these needs? How do we solve these problems?

For qualitative testing, some tools that can help are Click Tale, User Testing and others that are data driven.

4. Process

Processes are one of the best parts of the entire activity. Now you can put into practice what you’ve learnt, work together as a team according to the organization values and see your results.

The steps are actually easy when you come down to it. First is to gather the data and to develop it. There are three documents that you will need to every test:

• experiment design
• a concept
• final results.

What you can do is to put together the test idea, create a concept out of it and build the code for it. Essentially, you will need the QA script. You do this prelaunch and post-launch.

5. Strategy

There are varying strategies in optimization results.

1. Validating the results of the test.
2. Buckshot Approach, which is simply saying blind testing. Some are just oblivious to the testing tools so what they do is they test it to all the features.
3. Some others are focused on winning; they are not into the needs of the customers.
4. Know the customers. This approach is among the ones you can use. Having an insight into the needs of the customers is important. It helps in building trust, it helps in improving results.

Remember, getting good results depends on the data and how the data are being processed. Make sure that you have a great team working for you. Make it data driven for better testing!

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog