Telephone calls to businesses are booming, which is largely due to growing smart phone usage. Consumers are using their smartphones to get in touch with companies straight from search results, paid ads, emails, and web pages.
What’s more, studies have shown that inbound calls convert to revenue 10 to 15 times more than web leads – making telephone calls a highly sought after lead.
With greater importance being placed on phone leads, more companies are starting to realize the power of call tracking to help them optimize their wider marketing campaigns to drive more calls.
Call tracking software helps marketers track leads and sales back to marketing source, optimize ongoing campaigns, realign spend in profitable channels and close the attribution loop.
However, for many businesses, the true ROI from campaigns cannot be measured simply by the number of calls generated, but rather by the new accounts and revenue generated by their sales team. That’s why more organizations need to harness the power of recording and scoring their inbound phone calls.
Although call recording might seem like an old-school technique, there’s more to it than just training and legal purposes. It’s helping many businesses generate more qualified leads and is increasing the chances of enquiries converting to revenue and helping marketers to grade and pinpoint their most profitable leads almost instantaneously.
Here are five reasons why scoring and recording telephone calls is an absolute must for marketers:
1. You’ll Gain Real-Life Customer Interaction with Your Brand
Call recording is a tangible piece of customer interaction which records emotion, human responses, customer questions and highlights sales objections.
Listening back on recorded calls might help to highlight pinch-points in the sales process or common questions that keep cropping up. For example, a customer conversation might highlight an important part of the transaction process is missing. Or your customers may not be sure of your returns policy.
Savvy marketers can use these insights to improve your marketing messaging and craft collateral content that can overcome these objections and obstructions, helping to ease the path to conversion for more prospects.
If you find that the same concerns are being voiced by customers who get in touch, it might be worth creating a landing page on your site which addresses the key concerns and most asked questions, this will help to reduce any confusion before the phone call.
2. Link Calls Back to Sales Performance
Linking calls back to sales performance is crucial for businesses where telephone calls are their highest form of inbound response. Being able to analyze the effectiveness at this point in the sales cycle is incredibly valuable for improving both sales operations and conversion rates.
Proactively listening to calls, grading their quality and attributing them to the right medium can seem quite tedious, but employing someone to do this can help you to improve performance across the board which will pay off in the long-term.
To gain an insight into sales performance track your calls and then analyze a time frame by breaking down enquiries via different departments. This will show you which departments are turning more leads into sales and where others might be falling short.
For example, a business with many different departments might not be routing calls correctly which could be leading to dissatisfied customers and lost sales. A study by answer-4u found that on average, 85% of missed phone calls will not call back – can your business afford to lose that many leads?
Permission granted by Answer-4u to use image.Why not take a look at a period of your inbound calls and see how well they were handled? You might find that calls from your most qualified lead generating channel aren’t being handled correctly by one department compared to another. This will show you that either the operations need realigning or that a particular department requires further sales training.
3. Understand Which Channels Generate the Most Qualified Leads & Improve ROI
Call tracking software can give you crucial marketing response information, from which marketing generated the phone call to which keyword triggered a click to call advert. Listening to and scoring calls allows you to take this vital insight one step further — by attributing the most qualified and strongest leads back to the marketing source.
By reviewing the best leads from your scored telephone calls, you will start to build up a picture of which channels are actually generating high-quality sales calls.
For example, a recent automotive call tracking case study highlighted how a UK car dealership could delve deeper into their recorded inbound sales leads and see exactly where their most valuable calls were coming from:
Permission granted for use by MediahawkThe automotive dealer, FJ Chalke, found that online classified sites and manufacturers’ websites were driving more leads than PPC ads where they had been spending a lot of their budget. Armed with this information, the car dealership was able to allocate their marketing spend much more effectively by focusing more on advertising on the classified sites.
However, the greatest benefit was that they were able to focus on areas of marketing where they have the most control and at the least cost, such as their website and the manufacturers’ websites.
4. Improve the Customer Experience
Attracting customers and driving leads to your site and sales team is only one part of your overall strategy. Once the lead gets in touch with your sales team this is a valuable opportunity to win them over and close a sale.
Call recording is absolutely paramount for this part of the sales cycle. After all, if you’re driving telephone calls but not converting them to sales, you can narrow down any problems to this part of the sales path.
Having someone listen back to your telephone calls might seem intrusive, but actually, it can highlight whether staff require additional training to improve their sales technique.
5. Implement Better Call Handling Procedures
If you think about how many inbound calls a busy organization has per day, how many of these are effectively routed? If calls are going unanswered, cut off or are taking too long to transfer to the right person, it frustrates a potential customer and can drive people away.
Take a snapshot of your week’s inbound sales calls. Look at how long they take to be answered and whether they are transferred to the right person. For those that are answered after a longer period of time, you might find that leads went cold or weren’t even followed up.
Figures show that 30-50% of sales go to vendors who respond first, so if you neglect to follow-up any leads and let calls ring out, you could be sabotaging a large chunk of your revenue.
Analyze your data — how many calls go unanswered, how many are transferred to a team member who isn’t at their desk and a message is taken? What proportion of those leads actually goes on to convert? I’d put a very large bet on not many.
Implementing a better call handling process can put an end to missed opportunities.
In Summary
For a busy sales team, knowing which leads to follow-up with more quickly can make all the difference in profit margins.
Once calls are scored, based upon a company agreed value system, marketers are able to categorize responses based upon the different types of calls, such as sales lead or customer service enquiries. This allows marketers to put all of their efforts into chasing the most valuable leads.
Featured Image: Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com
