‘18: The year call tracking software came of age

2018 was a big year. No, not Harry and Meghan. Or Theresa May showing off her dance moves. For marketing teams in call-centric businesses it marked a step change in their potential.  

It was the year call tracking came of age.

INBOUND PHONE CALLS IN THE AGE OF ALEXA

In our new eBook, which you can read on SlideShare here, we explain that despite the best efforts of Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa, ‘human-to-human’ voice calls aren’t going away.

In fact, research that we commissioned back at the end of 2017 highlighted that organizations recognize the need to ensure customers feel more valued than ever – and human-to-human voice calls remain the best way to do this.

Why? We found that the voice can give businesses and organisations a personality, to ensure they don’t become faceless online services. We also confirmed our long-held belief that phone calls remain the best way to address complicated queries, complaints and sales. Voice can add an immediacy in answering requests, as well as adding professionalism and knowledgeability, that other means of communication just can’t (yet).

And perhaps most importantly, voice is still deemed to “enhance the experience” offered to customers.  

So, with phone calls not going anywhere, a call tracking product that marketers can trust is the zenith of marketing attribution, closing the loop in their reporting. And in 2018 this became more of a reality.  

GROWING UP

Call tracking has evolved, and ResponseTap has been at the forefront of this evolution.  

Your average call tracking technology can measure how many calls a campaign generated. But understanding the real value and outcome of each call has previously been impossible without technical integrations to CRM systems, or asking call center agents to record call outcomes, which can be inaccurate. That’s why in 2018 we developed Smart Match.

Once Smart Match is activated in ResponseTap, a simple CSV upload or Excel sales report later and the algorithm matches the report outcomes to phone calls. This shows which specific marketing activity has driven the revenue or outcome.  

This insight now makes it even easier to discover which marketing sources are driving the highest value phone sales, so you can optimize campaigns based on revenue or profit generated from each campaign and report an accurate ROI. 

You can see for yourself here how one of our customers, Cruise1st, has used Smart Match to enable them to take a cut of their sales data and link it to their phone calls. This has allowed them to match a revenue and profit to each and every call; as a result they’re now closer to a channel attribution and ROI by channel. For them this has been a ‘major breakthrough’.  

Learn more about the next iteration of call tracking technology in the eBook. Drake and Blondie even make an appearance…