Determining Good Calls From Bad Ones

Call tracker service providers will boast the ability to track and recognize all inbound phone calls, whether they're from your offline ads or online. However, in order to really make the most out of call tracking, you must find out what metrics your provider is using. A lot of marketers will focus on the wrong metrics and think that they're doing everything right.

The following is a list of all the bad metrics that you should avoid in your analysing customer transaction and what are the good metrics that you should be optimizing to find out the quality of your calls:

Bad Metrics

• Call duration - This is a traditional concept that thinks that is the inquiries exceeds the two minute mark, it is a good call and we should focus on that. Anything that is under two minutes should not be bothered with. This is about the worst metric to measure quality. In today's world, people are in a constant state of rushing. Everything should be done fast, without a minute to spare. That two-minute call could be generating a sale without you knowing.


• Number of calls - This should be fairly obvious. Not all transactions will generate sales. However, an increase in calls could be seen as a success in your campaign but only 30% of all those will be sales calls. The rest would be only inquiries and the like.


• Answer rate - Having a receptionist to answer in less than five seconds all of the time does not really indicate anything. It just proves that you've hired a really capable employee. This is not something to bother looking at in call tracking. If your inbounds are being picked up longer than 5 seconds, then you should really reconsider your receptionists.

Good Metrics

• Number of appointments - You should focus more on appointments booked on each call. Appointments have greater chances of being converted to sales. This is especially true in service and the automotive industry. You'll have a higher opportunity to sell if you have people come in and talk about your product in depth.


• Number of conversion - Of course, it's the sales calls that are the most important. Focus on transactions that will actually lead to a sale or a conversion. By analyzing only those calls, you will get better insights on what your customers want. You'll understand better by tracking conversions than by tracking invalid or only inquiry calls.


• Customer experience - Focus on calls where the customer actually got in touch with someone who could help them. Transferring or connecting customers to a qualified employee who could help them in a short amount of time should be an important metric in analyzing quality of calls. There are two aspects in this, the percentage of customer being connected and how long that process took.