Technology may be adapting, but phone calls are not dead. More customers are gravitating toward different means of business communication solutions, such as texting and live chatting. But if your business offers interactions over traditional business telephone, it’s worth it to track call analytics. It’s important that your phone interactions with customers are as effective as possible. A call logging system should easily track various KPIs for you.

Here are the call analytics you should track:

 

 

Call Analytics: The Metrics That Move Your Bottom Line

Your customers are still reaching for the phone, but the number isn’t what it used to be. Calling isn’t dead though. 65 percent of customers prefer to use the phone for self-service. And 60 percent of small business customers prefer to interact with brands over the phone.

So the way the customers want to interact over the phone isn’t going away, it’s just changing. For example, more than half the customers in each age group wish businesses would reach out over text instead of calls for things like appointment reminders. So if you don’t make those dials count, you could lose customers. These metrics will make sure your outbound and inbound phone calls are still an asset to your business.

 

Call Source

how does dni work
Source: CallSource

Call source refers to the SEO or PPC marketing campaign that drives your customers to call your number. As with any element of your business, your various phone lines need some promotion to get them in front of your customers. You’re likely to post your business numbers on various channels — Google, social media, web referrals, etc… Putting money into various campaigns boosts the presence of your phone numbers to the right demographic.

Some of these channels are bound to be more successful than others. So by implementing source-level tracking, you’ll know which campaigns to invest your money into, with a little help from dynamic number insertion (DNI). It’s a functionality in which a unique tracking number, so in this case, one of your business numbers, is tied to an ad source. This can help your organization analyze customer’s behavior online.

Studying this behavior will help give you insight into what types of leads are the best for your business, along with the number of calls that come in from each source. This information can also help you run successful A/B tests. If you’re looking to boost the numbers from one channel, DNI can help you to compare the performance of each.

Tracking the call source can provide you with other important details. Your tool may give you insight such as the customer’s number, date and time the call was received, the caller’s name, and their city. If the customer frequently calls your business, your software may have the ability to track all inbound and outbound numbers associated with that caller. This information can help to inform other real-time analytics that is important to your business.

 

Call Volume

Tracking your call volume is just what it sounds like — this metric will let you know how many calls your business is fielding. It may seem like a simple metric, but it’s incredibly powerful. Seeing how many calls come in will prove which marketing campaigns are working. You can see these results immediately. Most of these tools should give you the ability to track call volume, as it’s a very basic and important analytic.

One of the key pieces of data that this analytic will reveal is the patterns of calls coming through. You can learn which day or time of the day the majority of customers are placing calls to your business. That can give you enough insight into how you should be staffing your support team.

Customers hate being put on hold. In fact, an AT&T study shows that 60% percent of callers left on hold in silence hang up. Long wait times can cause you to lose business. If you track your call volume, you’ll pick up on those important patterns to ensure your customers don’t have long waits on the phone. Happy customers will lead to a better customer experience. In turn, that will improve your customer retention.

Call volume tracking data can also give you insight into which campaigns are working for your business. If your business is putting money into one campaign and channel, your call volume is a great indicator of whether or not that campaign is effective. If you aren’t getting the call volume you thought you should be, you can put your resources elsewhere.

 

Lead Conversion Rate

Leads funnel

Source: Devrix

This software can help you to improve your phone call conversion rate in a number of ways. One such strategy is through lead scoring. These tools can help you to judge the quality of your phone leads. These tools can help you to judge qualified leads based on criteria, such as a lead’s willingness to buy your product or service. With that information, your platform can score those leads for you, so your sales teams can judge if they are worth pursuing.

Conversion tracking software can also help to reduce lead leakage, which is when a potentially viable lead slips through the cracks and is never given the opportunity to become a customer. These tools can help ensure that leads are not forgotten or ignored, but providing options such as tagging or integration with a CRM like Salesforce will help to keep them top of mind and help you with conversion rate optimization.

 

Average Call Duration

Average Call Duration (ACD) measures how long phone interactions between your customer and agent lasts. This is an especially important analytic to measure for your sales and support teams, as it will give you insight into how efficient your staff is during their calls. This is a KPI analytic that should be available with any call logging software solution that you use. Optimizing this KPI is a great way to ensure you’re increasing your close rate with sales and generally boosting your customer experience.

By measuring this number, you will find out how you can improve the effectiveness of your calls and how to optimize. The more efficient your staff is on the phone, the more inbound calls they can handle. Improving how effective your team is on the phone means you can up your customer service offering and cut costs. Keeping tabs on your ACD will also help for internal purposes, as it can give you insight into how changes in team procedures are working.

But effective and efficient calls don’t always equal short calls. In fact, longer calls are generally associated with higher-quality leads. The idea behind that is that a potential customer who spends a longer amount of time on the call is probably more interested in coming on as a customer. It’s expected that if your agents’ calls are short, they’re not getting the necessary information across. This isn’t always the case, but a good idea to go with.

You can keep your agents at the call duration you want by setting a benchmark that your agents should strive for. You can consider combining a number of different metrics to help you settle on a number. Keeping track of the average call duration will allow you to see if your staff is reaching this benchmark, and what you might need to change to get them there.

 

Revenue Per Successful Call

This analytic is a measurement of how your sales team is doing to increase your organization’s sales. This will be a key metric to track if your organization offers multiple products or services. It’ll specifically tell you how much an individual call is worth by calculating the ability of your sales representatives to convert leads into a sale. You can calculate this by dividing the revenue from sales calls by the total number of successful calls. This KPI should be easy to track with a call logging system.

This call tracking analytic is important as it is a direct indicator of how profitable members of your sales team are. This can also help you to judge how skilled each of your sales team members is, as it measures how efficient they are at cross-sales and up-selling potential customers.

The performance of the KPI is closely related to pricing privileges and deductions, special offers and various promotions that are active at the moment the calls are performed. If you assess the relationship between this number and the service levels your organization has in place, you can make comparisons of competing market opportunities.

 

Percentage of Calls Blocked

Calls blocked

Instead of blocking specific numbers from contacting your business, this refers to the number of callers who received a busy signal when they attempt to contact your business. You can find this rate by using the formula below:

(Calls that do not reach call agents/Total incoming calls)x100

Keeping tabs on this call tracking analytic is important because it’s a direct indicator of any shortcomings your company has, whether it is with your technology or lack of staffing. For that reason, this is a metric you want to remain low. The higher your percentage of calls blocked is, the higher the chance that you’ll miss out on helping customers and talking to leads.

Long wait times are incredibly frustrating to customers, as that’s considered to be poor customer experience. One poor customer experience is enough to turn off potential customers from your business. In fact, InsightSquared reported that 58% will never use the company again after a negative experience.

A call blockage rate of 5 percent or under is considered to be a good standard to strive for. If tracking this number shows you that your percentage of calls blocked is too high, there’s a number of strategies you can utilize to lower this number. But overall, the key takeaways are that you need to ensure your contact center software is up to snuff and your team is adequately staffed to handle an influx of inbound calls.

 

Phone Call Time

This should not be confused with call length. This refers to the actual time of the day that your customers call you. This metric is very important for your ad analytics. Odds are that you are placing various ads on various social media channels to promote your business’s phone numbers. This KPI can offer insight into whether or not your ads are getting through to your customers.

Call analytics and tracking systems can pinpoint the source of your call. Finding patterns in the time of day that your customers call will show what time your customers are most active. There’s a correlation here that can indicate if your ads are reaching your customers at the right time of the day. If one of your marketing channels is not seeing a high volume of calls, you can study your call time and change the ads to run at that time.

Similarly to tracking the percentage of calls blocked, keeping tabs on call time can help you to judge if your teams are adequately staffed. Getting ahead of your staffing needs will help you to make sure that customers don’t experience long wait times when they call you — and a happy customer is always better for business.

 

Marketing Analytics Software Integration

Finding a call tracking solution that is compatible with marketing analytics software would be a huge benefit to your business. Marketing analytics tools enable you to manage and evaluate your marketers’ performance. You likely post your phone numbers on various channels, so this could be an efficient way to see if your marketing efforts surrounding those channels are efficient.

One such page you likely post your phone number is your business’s landing page. These pages typically include forms that can allow you to capture your website visitors’ contact information. These pages are one of the more common ways to initiate a call with a new lead, as people tend to fill out those phones to request a call back, typically in the form of a software or service demo. It’s an easy first step into converting a lead to a new customer.

While it might not be an obvious jump, keeping track of your page performance is an important call tracking analytic. As many customers are prompted to call businesses through websites, some call tracking solutions include landing page optimization in their offering, such as CallRail. This part of your webpage is designed to encourage a customer to take a singular action, so a well-designed page can encourage them to make calls to your business.

 

Cost Per Call

This call tracking numbers measures how much it costs your company to handle one single call. This metric is highly valuable to customer support and call center teams, but it has nothing to do with the actual support offered. Instead, it’s an indicator of how efficient and cost-effective that team is.

You can measure the cost per call in one of two ways. If you’re looking to measure the cost of your calls, divide your call center’s operational costs by the total number of calls in a given period of time. If you want to see the cost per call for a given agent, take the salary of the agent who handled the call and divide it by the number of calls they made during one hour.

This KPI is important, as it will ensure your call center is staying within budget. This number can also help to inform you of any necessary budget changes, as it shows you how much it costs your team to get work done. Of course, you must spare money for operating costs, but it’s always ideal to make sure that cost is as low as it can be.

Various software tools can help you to reduce these costs. For one, utilizing a VoIP phone system instead of a traditional PSTN will cost far less money to operate. Call monitoring software can help managers make sure their team is making the most of their time on the phone with customers. Finally, using a powerful call center software solution can help you to streamline operations and call center technologies into one platform.

 

First Time vs Repeat Callers

Every caller is important, but it’s important to separate which callers are first-time callers and which are repeat callers. Your number of first-time callers and repeat callers will divulge different, but equally important call data to your business. The volume of first-time callers you receive is an important metric for your sales team to keep track of, and the number of repeat callers is important for your support team.

Keeping track of first time callers is an important metric to follow since it represents potential new business for your company. Tracking the source of these first-time callers can inform you of which marketing strategies and campaigns are successful.

If you isolate these numbers, phone call analytics software can help you study the online behavior of those potential customers. With that vital information at hand, you can offer a more personalized customer experience, which will give you a better chance of converting that lead.

First-time and repeat callers should be handled differently from one another. After multiple interactions with your company, customers who are repeat callers can be routed to the same account manager or support representative. It’s important to note why those repeat callers are making additional calls.

If customers are repeatedly calling about the same or similar issues, it’s time to reassess your first call resolution rate (FCR). There are multiple strategies available to improve your FCR, such as implementing a self-service knowledge base. You can also keep track of repeat callers through various analytics tools.

 

Call Completion Rate

Call completion rate, also referred to as answer seizure ratio, refers to the number of customer calls that are successfully connected to your business. You can find this number by dividing calls completed by the number of calls attempted and multiply that by 100. This number can be impacted by customer behavior, such as if a caller hangs up before reaching an agent. Network congestion and busy destination circuits can also make a difference.

As you want to reach all customers and leads, you want this rate to be high. You can aim to raise your call completion rate by increasing the number of calls your business makes.

 

Conclusion: Increase Revenue and Customer Satisfaction with Call Tracking Analytics

According to the Search Engine Journal, Calls to U.S. businesses from search, social, display, or other paid ad campaigns ads have grown 110 percent since 2014 — that totals about 162 calls in the US. That number has likely grown since then.

With so many calls to businesses happening on a daily basis, you want to make sure you’re learning valuable information from yours. Monitoring crucial call tracking analytics will help you get there, ensuring your driving revenue from those calls and offering top-tier support over the phone. If you’re ready to take the next step, take a look at this comprehensive guide to call tracking software.