Being able to seamlessly and professionally handle inbound calls is critical to your organization’s success. Even in an omnichannel world where customers and donors can get in touch via email, chat, or social media, picking up the phone is still the number one way to handle questions or support issues. Monitoring your customers’ contact center experience helps ensure that your customers are receiving the care and support they need – and gives you vital data regarding where and how to improve.
The Benefits of Call Tracking Metrics
Call tracking metrics provide valuable information about customer behavior, as well as potential gaps or issues with your products, services, or business operations. They can tell you information like:
- When people are calling. This helps you appropriately staff your contact center to meet anticipated shifts in demand.
- Where a call originated from. See which channels or search keywords led to a call. Learn where to adjust your marketing spend or where additional online support needs to be provided.
- How well an ad campaign is working. If a lead gen page is sending calls your way, then your campaign is working well. If people are bouncing without calling, it’s time to make adjustments.
- Staff training requirements. If the same issues keep cropping up, targeted staff training can help ensure customer satisfaction.
- When to update call routing. The call pathways of customers after dialing in shouldn’t involve lots of forwarding and holding. If they do, you might need to adjust your system.
- What a customer journey looks like. Call metrics let you see the whole customer journey across different platforms and channels, allowing you to tailor your campaigns to meet customers where they are.
Measure These Call Tracking Metrics
There are numerous call tracking metrics you can monitor depending on your unique business case. Of these, some of the most important are:
- Call volume. This tracks the number of calls over set time periods – hours, days, or months – and can inform how many lines you need, as well as staffing requirements. Call volume can also inform whether you should reshape certain areas of your business or customer acquisition cycle to reduce inbound calls.
- Call source. This metric lets you see where calls are originating from – for example, from your Google My Business page, your newsletter, social media, or a lead gen page. You can use this to metric identify which campaigns are working well and whether there are areas that need to be beefed up.
- Call location. Knowing where people are calling from can help you spin up more contact center staff in that time zone, and inform where to increase or reduce local ad spend. If people aren’t responding to ads in a certain area, it might be worth reassigning that ad spend elsewhere.
- Call duration. Call duration can tell you a lot about the effectiveness of your sales efforts, and also your customer service ones. Overly long calls with many holds or transfers can be bad news. And very short ones mean that people are calling up with simple queries that could probably be handled by a chatbot or even a typed FAQ.
- Conversion rates. If you’re making sales or taking donations over the phone, monitor when and how those calls convert. Properly attribute your calls so that you know where they land in the sales cycle – and how long it typically takes to go from an expression of interest to a sale.
- Repeat vs new callers. Your onboarding process will probably be different with new callers vs repeat ones. And VIP callers should have their own separate experiences. Depending on your metrics, this information could be used to define where calls are routed, what kinds of scripts people are presented with, who handles specific calls – and who is in charge of following up.
Measure With a Strategy in Mind
Remember, there’s no point tracking metrics in a vacuum. Before you start tracking and analyzing, define what you’re looking to find out, and identify what success looks like. For example, you might want to focus on conversions, campaign ROI, or overall customer satisfaction. Continue to refine these as your data comes in – and as your business requirements change – so that you can create a roadmap for continuous improvement.
At ACD, we offer a wealth of call tracking metrics to empower your organization to perform at its best. Our wide-ranging call analytics together with our Contact Center as a Service software and staffing solutions can help you measure, monitor – and convert.
