Minding the business with CallRail

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People across the globe have come together over the past few weeks to navigate new and challenging waters. Between shopping, working remotely, and becoming teachers to our children and caregivers to our families, it may feel overwhelming finding the balance between our work priorities and home lives.

At CallRail, we celebrate several values as employees. We aim to work with intensity, to build and deliver exceptional products, to respect everyone we work with, and to turn it off after hours to enjoy time spent with our friends, families, and communities. But when a sense of unease is rapidly spreading across our lives, we want to take a moment to highlight a particular value of ours: Minding the business.

“Minding the business” means recognizing that a high-performing business is the engine that powers everything we do. When we help our customers thrive, we thrive. We want to tackle challenges head-on, focus on your needs, and build tools and features that help you and your business.

As you join us in serving your customers the best way possible through these uncertain times, we’ve collected some tips we find most helpful in delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Build a call flow to direct your callers to the right person or team

The Call Flow Builder allows you to create and customize routing experiences for your inbound calls. We have a number of different options that you can string together to route calls to the appropriate person while keeping your reports up-to-date automatically. Here are some ways you can use the Call Flow Builder to keep business operations running smoothly.

Use a Menu step and a Tag step to categorize callers based upon the menu option they select. You can use the Menu step in a number of different ways beyond asking callers to “press one for sales, press two for support,” like associating a topic with a menu choice.

Perhaps you anticipate a high volume of calls about rescheduling appointments or a surge in gift certificate purchases. A menu step is a great way to ask callers to “press one to reschedule your appointment” or “press two for instructions on purchasing a gift card online.” Once you’ve put your menu options in place, you can follow each choice with a Tag step. This adds call tags to your reports and call log so you know which menu options are chosen most often just by glancing at your Activity dashboard.

Instructing your callers upfront

Another helpful tip with the call flow builder is to use the Greeting and Voicemail steps as ways to instruct your callers on how to take care of certain things on their own if your staff is focused on more pressing matters.

Let’s use our gift card option as an example. With the Menu step, you ask callers to press 2 for instructions on purchasing a gift card online. Follow that Menu step with a Tag step, like “Gift Card Inquiry,” and then close out your call flow with a Voicemail step that walks callers through how to purchase a gift card on your website before they can leave you a message. You can upload an mp3 file of your own voicemail or greeting, or use our automated text-to-speech tool to read your message to your callers.

Once the caller hangs up, you’ll see their call on your Call Log, with the tag “Gift Card Inquiry” so you know the purpose of their call and that they were taken care of independently in just a few minutes.

While our Call Flow Builder offers advanced routing options, the steps covered here are available on our $45 Calls Essentials pricing plan. Included in this same pricing tier is our Schedule step, which allows you to route callers to specific places using your hours of operation, as well as Simulcall and Round Robin steps, which are both helpful in connecting your customers with as many available agents as possible.

Keep remote agents connected to customers with Lead Center

As many of us shift to working remotely, it’s important to remain connected and available to our customers and teams. Lead Center is CallRail’s contact center solution, and home to text messaging and our browser-based softphone. You can use Lead Center to take calls directly from your browser, keeping your new working space clear of cumbersome phone systems. Lead Center is an add-on available for $10 per company in your account and includes an unlimited number of users or agents.

In Lead Center, you’ll see each customer’s timeline, which includes the marketing channel in which they found your business, as well as a history of interactions they’ve had with your team. This includes previous calls, text messages, or forms they’ve filled out on your website (if you’re using Form Tracking). You’ll be able to tag calls for your reports, add notes to calls for the rest of your team to review, and even add values to your calls (which can later be reported to Google Ads if you need to tie a dollar amount with a conversion).

If your team members are set up as Agents in CallRail, we’ll also associate their names with each interaction they have with a customer, including the calls they’ve taken or placed in Lead Center. Then, you can use our Calls by Agent report to measure productivity for individual team members. The data from this report can be spliced by total number of calls, inbound calls, outbound calls, missed calls, and average duration of calls over a given time period. This report is available to you, with or without the Lead Center add-on, as part of our Calls Essentials plan as well.

Transition from source-level to keyword-level tracking

Many of our customers use single, source-tracking numbers to track specific campaigns online. If you or your clients are looking for ways to reduce your advertising budget, but need detailed information on the marketing channels bringing valuable leads to your business, we recommend temporarily disabling some of your source tracking numbers in favor of keyword-level tracking.

Keyword-level tracking correlates phone calls with website visitors, so you know who’s calling, which marketing source brought them to your website, and which pages they browsed on your site before, during, and after they reached out to you. Keyword pools have a minimum requirement of four numbers at CallRail; however, you can use this pool to track all of your website traffic instead of having multiple source tracking numbers dedicated to specific channels. You also have control over who sees a number from your pool by setting rules that only show numbers to specific visitors:

To see if keyword-level tracking is a better fit for your business over individual source tracking numbers, you can use our Calls by Number report to see which tracking phone numbers receive the most (and least) amount of phone calls. If you see online source tracking numbers with low call volume, it may be time to disable those numbers and implement a keyword pool to track all your website traffic. This way, callers from those sources are still captured in CallRail so you can continue to measure the performance of your marketing channels.

Both keyword-level tracking and our Calls by Number report are available on our $45 Call Essentials plan. For more details on how to make the switch, check out this help article.

How can we help?

We’re lucky to have an amazing network of small business owners, marketing agencies, dental offices, and healthcare practices (just to name a few). If you have ideas outside of what’s covered in this article, or if you want to connect with like-minded marketers, head over to CallRail’s Community.

If you have questions about how to implement any of these solutions in your CallRail account, our Customer Support team is available Monday through Friday from 8:00 am until 8:00 pm EST. To get in touch with us, visit our Help Center and click “Submit a Ticket” at the top of the page and let us know how we can help you.

Before we sign off on this blog post, we want to take a moment to recognize and thank each of our customers. We’re committed to understanding your needs so that we build a product that helps you conduct business no matter where you are or which industry you serve. Thank you for your partnership. We hope you and yours stay safe and healthy.

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