How call analytics is helping SMBs improve marketing and sales

Web analytics and call analytics have a lot in common. Both collect, measure and analyze data on who contacted you, what they are interested in and even what got them to use this channel. Where they differ is that recordings are a lot more difficult to parse than digital data. This made call analytics enterprise-level expensive. That’s changed and now they can be considered by businesses of all sizes.

Call analytics is essential for improving marketing, developing sales leads and proving ROI, according to Amber Callan, COO at Agile & Co., a small, inbound marketing agency in St. Louis.

“If you’re not tracking calls, you could be missing up to half of your leads,” said Callan. “I have some customers where like 90% of the leads they get are through calls.” 

The 13-year-old firm has been using CallRail’s analytics solution, via HubSpot, for many years. Callan says the data it provides lets them get a complete picture of all their marketing efforts. It does this by tracking the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by showing you which channels are driving phone calls and which keywords are generating the most leads. 

Automatic reviews and alerts

“One of my favorite features is the automation,” said Callan. “If a person says a certain word or something gets mentioned by either the caller or the person on your team, it can tag those automatically.” 

In addition to identifying high-quality leads, these systems can also track and analyze sales calls. This provides data on which tactics work the best as well as identifying areas for sales team training and improvement. 

Dig deeper: Does your organization need a call analytics platform?

“If we don’t have the calls being tracked, normally, that’s about half the story that you’re missing when it comes to attributing leads when it comes to drawing ROI calculations,” she said. “If I’m going to prove to you my value, I need to show you my complete value and that comes from all ways a customer can potentially reach you.”

The data from these systems can be integrated with that from other analytics solutions, providing a holistic view of marketing. This, in turn, helps with ad spend and targeting.

“We touch paid media systems where we can take those keywords and other things and tell you which to optimize,” said Mike Stocker, CallRail’s vice president of partnerships. “Like maybe you should change the keywords you’re buying on Google, that are really expensive, but they’re not converting to calls.”

Improve your customer experience

They can even improve customer experience. 

“I had a client where their call tree was leaving people in silence for a minute and a half and no one had any idea until we got CallRail and started doing those call work recordings,” said Callan “It’s like ‘press one for sales’ and they’d sit there for a minute and a half. “We can hear on those recordings someone going, ‘Hello? Hello?’ And then they hang up.”

Callan said fixing that issue increased ROI significantly just because people were reaching someone faster. 

So, which companies should consider these systems?

“It really depends on what your call volume looks like,” said Callan. “If it’s something where a client tells me like, ‘I maybe get three calls a month, like 99% of my stuff comes through a web form.’ That’s not someone who necessarily needs call tracking.” 

And Callan added that technological improvements in call analytics systems lowered the prices enough for any size business to look into using one.