In digital marketing practice, phone calls have become more important than ever. According to existing reports, the increase in the use of phone calls for marketing and the click-to-call rate increased by 110% from 2014 to 2019.
Additional statistics on phone calls marketing by the Invoca blog suggest that:
Phone calls convert to revenue 10 to 15 times more than web leads; 82% of marketers agree that insights from inbound calls and call experiences may reveal costly blind spots in their organizations; and in the past 12 months, 41% of organizations report having increased phone conversion rates by 25% or more.
The significance of phone calls to sales performance makes it imperative for leading marketers and sales teams to leverage call analytics software to gain data-driven insights into phone calls performance and enables you to enhance customer experiences and improve call conversions.
In this blog, we have provided a comprehensive overview of call analytics, its definitions, how it works, and why salespeople and marketers need to measure it.
Table of Contents
- What is call analytics?
- How does Call Analytics Work?
- Benefits of call analytics
- What Type of Data does Call Analytics Collect?
- Examples of Call Analytics Report
- Different Call Tracking Methods
- Features of Call Analytics Software
- Popular types of Call Analytics Integrations
What is call analytics?
Imagicle
Call analytics is the AI-backed sales and marketing tactic of collecting and measuring inbound call tracking and recording data for further analysis.
Usually, call analytics tracks calls data like the Call Tracking data which includes the caller’s name, phone number, and marketing source that prompted the call e.g. from Facebook ads, Google ads, Email marketing campaigns, etc.
It also collects Conversion Intelligence Data from the call conversations to help sales and marketing teams determine whether the caller is a qualified lead and determine their likelihood of becoming a paying customer.
Call analytics generally provides teams with data-driven insights to drive sales initiatives and leverage calls for lead-generation purposes. Beyond this, call analytics can also make it easier for teams to measure their performance against existing industry benchmarks and develop strategies that can drive sales success.
How does Call Analytics Work?
Invoca
Call analytics is an ongoing process that involves many steps and processes to achieve desired results. It works by assigning unique trackable phone numbers to every one of your marketing channels and touchpoints.
These unique phone numbers have call-tracking capabilities that can be used to collect call data such as the caller’s profile and marketing attribution data when calls are made. With this, marketers and sales reps can have access to relevant caller data such as the caller’s name, phone number, geographic location, and marketing touchpoint that promoted the call.
After this, the call analytics solution\platform uses call recording tools to record calls and speech-to-text technology to transcribe the phone conversation. Finally, the artificial intelligence integration will analyze the transcription to identify actionable insights that can help you determine if the phone caller was a sales lead if they expressed interest in any of your products or services, and check how best they fit into the profile of ideal customer expectations and so much more.
The sales call analytics can be visualized in reports to help marketers and sales reps easily measure trends and performance and also get access to call recordings and transcription to listen to the conversations again and make human decisions.
Benefits of call analytics
Here are some of the benefits call analytics can bring your organization.
1. Improve the Quality of service provided by Call Center Agents
The use of call analytics technology enables call centers to make call recordings that can provide them insights into the quality of service provided by the call center agents when having a conversation with the customer or prospect. This call analytics data can be used by center managers to provide better training for call center agents on ways to improve their call-handling skills to help solve more customers’ needs and keep them happy.
2. Enhance Analytics and Reporting
Call analytics tools provide teams with call transcription services that call tracking firms can use to record calls from the call center and make call flow data more accessible in real-time. Call reporting features like call monitoring, call scoring, auditing, and many more can help call centers to solve customers’ queries faster while preventing unnecessary expenses.
3. Improve Call Center Agent’s Productivity
Most analytics software call recording features make it easy for center managers to determine whether call agents follow all defined call flow protocols and help them identify areas that need more improvement or tactics you should take out of your marketing plans. Data analytics can help your call center agents be more productive by using only what matters.
4. Maximise your marketing budget
Call analytics software can give data-driven insights into what works for you and what doesn’t work for you to help you understand the most effective marketing campaigns to invest in and those to eliminate. By listening again to the call recordings, you can understand your customer’s and prospects’ biggest pain points that they need you to solve. With this information, you can maximize your marketing budget on productive things.
5. Develop an effective sales strategy
Sales teams can rely on call analytics data to better understand customers’ pain points and provide you with data-backed recommendations to improve your sales success. Sales managers can leverage the call analytics data to train sales reps on the best ways to interact with customers and prospects during live sales calls and keep the sales conversation on track to successfully move the customers through the sales funnel.
6. Optimize customer personalization
Call analytics can provide you with more in-depth, data-driven insights about customers to empower sales reps to tailor personalized interactions with customers about product solution recommendations.
What Type of Data does Call Analytics Collect?
Call analytics software provides various levels of insights, based on the type of software used and whether it uses AI capabilities to analyze calls or not. Here is a list of some of the data that call analytics collects.
- The marketing channel/touchpoint, campaign, ad group, keywords, and webpage that prompted the call.
- The device used by the caller to engage with your marketing campaign/content.
- The day and time the call was made.
- The caller’s name
- The caller’s phone number
- The caller’s geographic location
- The duration of the call
- Whether they are a new or repeat caller.
- If the call was answered or it went to voicemail
- How long the caller waited on hold?
- If the caller abandoned the call
- If it was a sales or appointment opportunity call.
- What product or service the caller expressed interest in?
- The call’s lead score from the conversation is based on a scale of 1-10.
- If the caller is looking to make a purchase soon.
- If the call led to sales or appointment booking.
- If the customer experienced any issues during the call.
In additionally to the above-mentioned types of data, call analytics also provides the sales and marketing departments with valuable insights from KPIs such as:
- Lead score
- Call and hold time duration
- General Caller ID information
- Detailed transcription
- Relevant Keywords
- Marketing channel metrics
- Buyer sentiment analysis
Examples of Call Analytics Report
Here are some of the popular examples of call analytics reports;
1. Call Transcriptions
Call analytics software enables marketers and sales reps to study and better analyze call transcriptions to understand the voice and needs of the customers. By drilling into these transcriptions, you can better understand customers’ pain points, needs, and interests and gain insights into market trends.
If anything is stopping the customer from converting, such as a question, concern, or issue with your website or app, you can learn about this from the calls and proactively solve the problems to increase sales and customer satisfaction.
2. Call Tracking Reports
Search Engine Journal
Call analytics software provides you with call tracking reports showing the total number of calls and sales opportunity calls each of your marketing channels is driving. This report also shows the average lead score, call close rates, and the search keywords and website pages that generate the highest calls from the qualified sales lead.
3. Call Agent Performance Scorecard
SlideTeam
Call analytics software enables you to question and score your sales agents’ calls based on your criteria to determine their call-handling performance. From this report, you can give your agents fast and immediate feedbacks that they can implement to improve their performance as well as use call transcriptions to identify their mistakes in real-time and use them to train them.
Different Call Tracking Methods
Here are the different methods used by the call analytics software to track calls.
1. Offline Call Tracking
This call-tracking method allows you to receive a tracking number for every offline marketing channel you wish to track. Examples of these channels include a flyer, magazine ads, billboards, posters, etc.
Each time a person calls the tracking number, the call is then forwarded to your specific destination number which helps to report on caller information and record the call if necessary. This offline reporting can also show you how many people are from a marketing channel using the tracking number.
2. Marketing sources call tracking with DNI
This tracking method allows you to assign a call tracking number to each marketing source you want to track. The call analytics software then reports all calls from each marketing source with detailed information about the lead and call recordings.
For example, if you want to know how many calls you get from your Facebook ads, you would buy a tracking number that will be linked to your Facebook ads such that when you receive calls from Facebook, it triggers this tracking number.
3. Automatic Call recording
With this call tracking method, the call center can either manually create calls to track customer/prospects interaction or simply just answer the call or initiate a three-way call with the call center agent and other party involved in that particular call.
4. Event Tracking
This method uses an event or occurrence as a trigger to record calls for example if a website visitor enters their phone number on a contact form or during the checkout of an e-commerce order, this may be recorded as a call from that person waiting for confirmation or ready to make more purchases.
Features of Call Analytics Software
The following are some of the prominent features of call analytics software.
1. Call recording
This is usually one of the most important features called centers and organizations look out for when choosing call analytics software because it allows agents, marketers, and salespeople to record calls for training and quality assurance purposes. Call recording enables teams to formalize their call-handling processes and help managers identify the strengths and weakness of their agents or team members.
2. Monitoring tools
Call analytics monitoring tools are used to automatically send alerts to call center agents or managers after specific events such as call quality scores dropping below the expected amount, call durations lasting longer than stipulated, or call abandonment rate rising. Beyond this, monitoring tools can also be used to monitor key metrics and make improvements where necessary.
3. Lead Qualification
Lead qualification features enable call centers and sales and marketing teams to record the number of calls from individuals from different marketing sources to determine whether they are qualified leads that are likely to make a purchase or not.
4. Quality Assurance
Call analytics software provides call centers and marketing and sales teams with information about the total number of calls answered per minute. This information with call recordings enables them to understand call peak times to forecast and improve staffing and improve call agents’ scheduling.
5. Quality Scoring
Call analytics software can be used to record call quality and help agents monitor their daily performance to help them understand how their performance affects the company’s overall call quality scores. The call quality scoring feature enables tracking software to provide in-depth insights into factors that influence call handling success and give real-time feedback on performance.
Popular types of Call Analytics Integrations
Integrating call analytics into Google Ads can help you accurately measure ROI, optimize campaigns and keyword bidding tactics as well as personalize experiences to acquire more customers at a lower cost per conversion.
Adding call analytics into Google Analytics helps you get more accurate reporting on consumer behavior trends, activities in your call channel, and the value of calls from each source.
3. Facebook and Instagram
Buffer
Integrating call analytics into your Facebook ads manager (which controls ads on Facebook and Instagram) can help you view how well your Facebook and Instagram ads are driving phone call leads. From these reports, you become well-informed about the lead that drives more conversions and allocates your budget accordingly.
Integrating Call Analytics into Sloovi Outreach
Sloovi Outreach is an all-in-one CRM platform that enables your sales teams to smash sales targets, reduce costs, and improve sales productivity by tracking your daily sales workflow, creating customized and intuitive reports, scheduling more meetings, and prioritizing leads with dynamic Smart Views.
By integrating call analytics into Sloovi Outreach, calls made by sales reps to the leads via Sloovi can be recorded for quality assurance and pain point identification to help the reps better understand the lead’s needs and problems to develop a better strategy on ways to solve the problem. In addition to this, call analytics will also enable sales professionals to qualify leads and provide better services for them.