Enterprise Call Recording

What many businesses want are completed sales. They aren’t really interested in how many clicks they get with online advertising, what they want to know is if there are any particular keywords that are leading to completed sales.

That’s where Calltracks.com sees an opportunity. As company founder and CEO, Stuart Buckley, noted recently, “measuring what converts and what does not is in my opinion the Holy Grail of call tracking, and indeed keyword tracking.”

To that end, then, Calltracks.com is offering a conversion attribution measurement software product, which company officials say can “track a phone call or keyword from first contact with a customer or client to a completed sale.”

Because this is the sort of information you really want to be able to put your hands on, isn’t it? What good are a million clicks or calls if they don’t generate sales? Buckley’s vision is to give businesses a way to more closely target their marketing spend on what are proven to be the more effective avenues in terms of closed sales, not simply vague expressions of interest.

Such techniques fall under the larger heading of enterprise call recording, which as TMC’s (News - Alert) Susan J. Campbell explained recently, “is a process of recording incoming calls a company or call center receives from a client or customer.”

Of course the main advantage of call recording is in analyzing the content of calls, not only to train your agents how to  better deal with customers, but for the content of the calls, for what that tells you about what kind of job you’re doing with customers. Much valuable business intelligence can be mined -- why customers respond to certain offers and not to others, for example. This can help you fine-tune your incentives to achieve desired sales results.

Analyzing customer calls can be a great way to identify market trends, what people are responding to and what they want. Some companies use the technology to identify whenever a competitor’s name pops up in a call, so they can measure how they’re doing in relation to the competition.

Buckley said his software is currently used by a range of businesses, including those in the automotive and security industries. He said he’s had customers tell him that in addition to tracking, they’ve found the product useful for helping their staff improve their customer service as well, because it provides such metrics as how quickly the phone gets answered, as well as recording calls.

Analyzing customer calls can yield a treasure trove of actionable intelligence -- done correctly, you can identify and solve common problems with your products or services. Hey if forty-two people call to say Tab A doesn’t fit into Slot B like it should, you might want to look into that. One company is even picking out satisfied customer calls to study by programming their software to detect laughter, on the theory that only satisfied customers laugh during a call.

Of course the problem there is that satisfied customers don’t usually call, they just get on with life. Calls are usually if somebody has a problem, which is why capturing and analyzing that information is crucial.

Using genuine customer calls for your staff’s training and performance improvement is a common approach, but of course if you’re using such enterprise call recording you can use the recorded calls only for internal purposes and information, as Campbell points out, adding that the calls cannot be sold to third parties and “certain elements of the call cannot be recorded, such as the capture of the credit card number or other private customer information.” Check with appropriate legal counsel if you have any questions.

As one company executive put it, you want focus groups to identify issues with your product? Study your customer calls. There’s your focus group.