Call Tracking Solutions are About More Than Protecting Company Telecom Assets
July 23, 2015
By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor
Today, many companies implement call management or call accounting software in order to keep skyrocketing telecommunications costs in check, and to ensure that employees aren’t misusing telecom resources. This is a great idea: in an era of mobility, when many workers are using solutions that allow them to make remote calls (on the company’s dime) from anywhere, it’s important to get a handle on expenses. The good news about call management solutions is that, coupled with analytics, they can also lead to improved efficiencies in the company, and a better understanding of how effective the organization’s communications are.
Call analytics software, which is often built into call accounting solutions, measures and manages call information. It can keep track of what numbers were called/called in to the organization, and then measure, monitor, analyze and report on the resulting call data. The tools provided by these call accounting and analytics solutions allow companies a great deal of flexibility in how they measure and monitor calls. According to Claire Schoen writing for Marketing Land, they can also offer features that are useful to sales and marketing professionals in the organization.
“Using unique phone numbers with integrated tracking codes, you can learn all sorts of things about the caller, from their current location to what keyword got them to you in the first place,” she wrote. “As the software gets increasingly sophisticated, it’s also possible to score the phone calls as they come in, provide “whisper” messages with data about the caller as the call comes in, or use conversation analytics to trigger follow-up nurturing campaigns from your CRM [customer relationship management] or marketing automation system.”
By integrating the information gleaned into knowledge bases that keep track of customer behavior, organizations can gain deep insight into what’s working in their marketing practices and what isn’t. Marketers and sales teams can track inbound calls using keywords (thanks to speech analytics), and then link the call to a specific customer, campaign or channel and follow them through the conversion funnel to identify the most profitable sources to put more resources behind in the future. The ability to link calls to individual customers is also a great way to improve customer relationships.
“Integrating call analytics data with CRM, marketing automation, tag (News - Alert) management and other marketing technology systems can provide a more complete view of each customer for more relevant, personalized marketing,” wrote Schoen.
While you may trust your employees to use your telecom resources properly, call management solutions are about more than just ensuring no one is misusing the company long-distance service. It’s also about using data analytics to mine every bit of intelligence possible from the way customers and workers are using the telephone.
Edited by Dominick Sorrentino