How to Analyze Call Tracking Data For Your Business

Phone call tracking is an often overlooked digital marketing tool. When it comes to analyzing call tracking reports and results, most companies don’t use it to the fullest.

If you aren’t using phone call tracking already to track your online marketing efforts, then head on over here to learn more about how to track calls from your digital marketing channels.

If you are using phone call tracking, but simply look at the total number of calls in aggregate as the definition of success or failure, then this post is for you (and so is this post from Avinash Kaushik). Don’t feel bad though – you aren’t alone.

To reap the benefits of call tracking data, you may have to commit to changing your system for tracking data. You may have to adjust some things with your customer service team or your CRM. You may also need your sales team to provide greater feedback after their conversations with prospects.

6 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Call Tracking Reports

As competition increases online and via mobile, getting the most out of call data and the leads they bring in is imperative. After all, it’s usually much easier to sell to someone when you are on the phone with them, as opposed to sending them an email. Here are some ways to help you take that next step toward analyzing your phone call tracking data instead of simply reporting on it:

1. Take advantage of every call tracking system feature
2. Make phone call analysis part of your digital marketing process
3. Update your lead records in real-time
4. Eliminate short call lengths
5. Use tags and lead scoring
6. Consider integrating a lead predictive tool

1. How to take advantage of call tracking system features

Start out by making sure you are taking advantage of all of the features within the specific call tracking system that your business uses.

Call recording is probably the biggest feature that can help you with call analysis. Recording the leads that come in via phone can be helpful for a number of reasons, most importantly posterity and evaluation of your call data. There are instances where not recording phone calls is the right business decision, but that just means you may have to adapt your process to help yourself in the long run (see #3 below).

Other features such as call whisper can be turned on to alert the call recipient that the lead came from a specific marketing source (note that call whispers don’t work with automated IVR systems). You can also set up automated email alerts to trigger a next step and analyze call recording data.

2. Why you should make phone call analytics part of your process

The reality is that you need to make call data analysis part of your process. You probably already do some quick analysis with form submissions to separate leads from spam, so just adapt to the new norm with phone calls as well.

Create a call tracking report that allows you to differentiate between quality phone calls and spammy ones, such that you can track your progress in terms of improved lead-generating quality over time.

As marketers, many of us get lost in the reporting stage because those numbers look better. The reality is that we are being judged on the outcome of the leads so we need to do our best to track leads through the funnel as best as possible.

3. Why you should update your call data records in real-time

Have the person that handles the inbound leads and phone calls also keep tabs on which calls are received via tracking numbers versus those that are not and update your records in real-time. This at least helps you cut out robocalls, sales calls, wrong phone numbers, and people that use Google instead of typing in your URL. Add some fields to your CRM, bookmark your call tracking tool login, create some tagging to be able to sort the calls, rate the calls, etc.

If you get into the habit of doing that after each call and making it part of the process instead of an additional process then it becomes habitual, quick, and easy. For those that have a CRM with API import abilities, that can speed this process up greatly to meet your needs as most call tracking tools have that ability.

4. Why your call tracking shouldn’t track short call lengths

If you want to cut down on the number of calls you receive, you can cut out call lengths shorter than a specific time frame.

For example, if your IVR system takes at least 20 seconds before someone is connected to a live person, it makes perfect sense to exclude calls under 20 seconds when tracking phone calls since you know those aren’t leads.

5. Why you should use tags and lead scoring with call tracking

Tagging the leads you receive and utilizing lead scoring can be incredibly helpful when it comes to future forecasting and analysis. However, lead tagging and scoring need to be fully incorporated into your process in order to be effective.

Not every company can implement the same process based on the volume of phone calls. That is why you may want to consider various ways of internally tagging the calls; for example, Leads vs. Sales Calls vs. Forwarded Internally and so on. You can also implement your own rudimentary lead scoring numbers to help you prioritize which calls you are going to listen to or further analyze.

6. Why you should consider a predictive analysis tool when call tracking

Many call tracking systems have some sort of predictive analysis tool or can be paired with a secondary tool.

Based on the words used, length of call, back-and-forth nature of the conversation, etc., these tools can suggest whether or not the calls were conversations vs. abandoned calls vs. wrong numbers. At that point, if you are listening to all of the call recordings you have at least narrowed down the call log dramatically, similar to #4.

In the end, these are simply some ways to help you save time and get to more meaningful data that can help us make better-informed decisions.

The outcome of these efforts can be tremendous: attributing better value to each channel’s marketing efforts, learning about conversion rates online vs. offline, improving the lead generation and sales process, as well as improving the customer service channel. Not only that, but it will also make you look good to your boss because you are able to create better forecasting models for growth potential.

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