Chapter 10

How are other businesses using call tracking?

Every business is different, but by and large they all tend to face the same challenges on the phone. If you were anything like them, you would probably agree that:

1. Your marketing efforts don't generate enough of the right kind of opportunities.
2. When potential new customers do call your office, they're not getting booked as often as they should.

Call tracking helps you solve both of these problems. In order to really own the phone, you need to understand which marketing channel is delivering the best leads, so you can adjust accordingly. Then you need to see how those calls are being handled, so you can maximize the opportunity coming through the phone.

Let's take a look at a how some of our clients are using call tracking to own the phone:

Dr. Kamara, a dentist in Dallas/Fort Worth, had been ramping up his marketing budget in an effort to attract more new patients. When he got started, he was spending his marketing budget on direct mail, print magazines, and the yellow pages. Then he added radio and online search campaigns to see if he could access a new audience and capture a larger segment of the market. The early results appeared positive: his phone seemed to be ringing more and his web provider told him his web traffic was up. The problem Dr. Kamara found was that he just didn't see the same boost in his bookings. After six weeks, he had added more clients, but not as many as he expected. He wasn't confident whether the money he was spending on radio ads and online search was worth it.

That's when a consultant suggested that Dr. Kamara give us a call about call tracking. We quickly provided him with unique phone numbers for his direct mail, print, yellow pages, and radio. Then we installed website call tracking on his website. After just a week, Dr. Kamara noticed that most of his calls were coming from his website and a postcard campaign for a free cleaning he had sent out. After a month, we went over his summary results, which showed him that his website was driving the most calls, but that a lot of those calls were from existing patients. We showed him that his new patients were coming through his paid search efforts and postcard campaigns. As a result, he scaled back some of his other print efforts to direct those dollars to the higher performing campaigns.

Then we focused in on how his staff was converting those opportunities. It turns out that he was missing a lot of calls on Friday and Saturday. We worked with him to implement scheduling on his numbers and send those calls over to a scheduling specialist when his office was closed. Finally, as we reviewed his staff performance reports, we saw that there was one member of his staff that was significantly below her peers in her booking rate. After reviewing her call recordings, it was obvious that there were some simple training points that needed to be emphasized to improve her phone skills. She's now one of the leaders in the office in new patient booking rate.

Today, Dr. Kamara spends less time worrying about his marketing and more time taking care of patients. He brags to his peers about his staff of confident phone experts that keep his patients coming back time and time again.

Glass Dr. had a problem. Their corporate marketing team was pumping out a lot of great marketing material that was generating a great response. The problem for Glass Dr. was that their customers generally preferred to pick up the phone and call in to schedule service, rather than use the online scheduler. Because they have hundreds of locations it was impossible to put a single phone number on regional advertising. They were already tracking their calls, so they came to us for help. We were able to provide them with a bridge routing solution that enabled a caller to enter their zip code and be directed to the nearest and most eligible store. Once the store was selected, the caller might be greeted with a second prompt asking them whether they were calling about a new or existing appointment. Then when the agent answered the call, we would play a whisper letting them know if the patient was new or existing prior to connecting the call. Glass Dr. is now able to run regional ads for multiple stores and gain valuable insight into how many calls their marketing is generating for each location, and the type of calls (new or existing customers) coming in.

Asbury Automotive is obsessed with being the best. Asbury has over 80 different dealerships and they get a lot of phone calls. After tracking calls for a while, they became determined to drive their missed call percentages down to zero. It became the rallying cry for the organization, and very quickly after implementing an IVR and hiring some receptionists, they started making progress. After a couple of months, they were answering 98% of their calls. Yeah! We did it! Unfortunately, when we started listening to those calls, we realized that the problems actually began when the call was answered. Even though they were answering 98% of their calls, they were leaving 38% of callers stranded before they were connected to someone qualified to help them. That means that more than a third of their potential buyers were not even given the chance to do business with them. They realized immediately that this was actually the metric that mattered, and we started providing regular reporting on their live conversation rates, as well as reasons for why people were being left stranded. They were able to isolate outlier stores and make swift changes to personnel and systems to correct the issue at each. They now encourage their stores to connect 85% of callers with a qualified agent, and they are seeing the returns in vehicles sold.

Abacus Plumbing is not your average plumber. They have a great service, and they want to make sure that people know who they are. They are savvy service providers and know that today's shoppers use the Internet like people once used the phone book. They had a website before most plumbers knew what a website was, and they have started to invest significantly in advertising online to potential clients. Once again, the problem for Abacus is that most of their clients would prefer to pick up the phone and talk about their plumbing problem than to submit an online form, and they had no way to connect those calls back to the online advertising that was producing them. They were using call tracking, but their provider wasn't able to give them the keyword level tracking they needed, so they called us. In less than 24 hours of their first call, they had our dynamic website call tracking on their site. Now they are able to see how people are finding their website. They know that while Google is their top referring site for phone calls, Verified Service Reports is also sending a lot of calls their way.

They manage their own AdWords campaign, and now they can delete the keywords that drive clicks but not calls, and spend more on the keywords that are delivering calls. Without spending any more on Google, they are driving more calls and booking more business because of their website call tracking!

Brown and Fox Law bills by the hour, so they need to be efficient with their time. They don't have time to log in to four different platforms to service a customer or manage their marketing budget. When we started working with them, they made one thing clear. "We don't ever want to have to log in to your site." Ouch! That's ok though. A good percentage of our clients only access our reporting and data through email or CRM. For Brown and Fox, two platforms were important: Google and Salesforce.com. First, we got their website call tracking integrated into Google Analytics and Google Adwords for their ad agency, so they could see the calls their ads were producing right in the Google platforms, and utilize their existing reporting to calculate their ROI. Next, they needed their calls to show up in Salesforce so they could manage them there. No problem! We're experts at third party integrations, and Salesforce is an easy one. We'll take the data and come find you where you live. Brown and Fox have made huge gains toward owning the phone and they don't even know their password for our site!

Royal Tucson thought they were doing great! They were a pretty high performing dealership that was doing some call tracking, and were posting some good numbers every month. Not long ago, a vendor partner of ours hooked us up with them to do a three week test. The idea was to see if we could take a high performing dealer and make them better in just three weeks by introducing some new metrics. What's the most important task for a sales agent to execute on an inbound call to a dealer? Invite them into the store! So the metrics that we suggested for Royal were simple. Appointment request percentage and firm appointment set percentage. We started reviewing their calls and reporting on those two things. Then if someone did call the store about buying or leasing a vehicle and didn't get invited in, we would shoot a missed opportunity alert to a manager via email with the details. That's pretty much it. An awesome thing happened. The managers immediately fell in love with the missed opportunity alerts. They started calling these people back and saved seven deals in the first week! Then after word got out that the sales agents were being graded on whether or not they asked for and received a firm appointment from the caller, the sales agents started doing it on almost every call. From week one to week two, they nearly doubled the number of appointments set without any change in marketing. Royal was a high performing dealership that got even better by owning the phone with the introduction of two simple metrics.

Those are just a few examples of how companies are using call tracking to own the phone and drive more business. What is the problem that you are trying to solve?

• Introduction: Call Tracking 101
• Chapter 6: Website Tracking?
• Chapter 1: Why Do I Need It?
• Chapter 7: Will It Affect My SEO?
• Chapter 2: What Does It Do?
• Chapter 8: What If I Get A Lot Of Calls?
• Chapter 3: What Else Does It Do?
• Chapter 9: Arguments Against Call Tracking
• Chapter 4: Is It Right For Me?
• Chapter 10: How Are Others Using It?
• Chapter 5: What About Outbound?
• Chapter 11: Getting Started