Call Management

Keep Company Culture Alive in Your Home Services Business – Even in the Heat!

July 10, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Peak seasons can be stressful for all, but don’t let that derail you from communication and appreciation.

Summer is a busy time for businesses serving in the home services industry – especially if HVAC services are a division of your company.

This should not be an excuse for letting company culture dwindle. In fact, when employees have long, busy days, it’s more important than ever to ensure you are showing your appreciation to keep them motivated to do a great job.

I’m going to take some pressure off of your already busy scheduled during this peak season to help with some ideas to show employee appreciation and keep company culture on the rise this summer for your business.

Make the most out of your employees’ time

If you have been using a call tracking service for at least a year, block some time on your calendar to look at last year’s data.

By viewing reports from the previous year, focus on seeing what the busiest weeks, days, and times of day that you received inbound calls. Pay special attention to any times that it seems there was a spike in missed calls.

This information will help you figure out how to better schedule teams so they aren’t overwhelmed, and work at maximum efficiency to help as many customers as possible.

Have a summer party!

Using that same data, see if there was a day last year that you weren’t as busy and can maybe utilize this year to close for a few hours to show employee appreciation with a summer BBQ.

If it doesn’t make sense for your business to close a few hours early or for a day, try something smaller like bringing in a catered lunch, doughnuts for breakfast, or small value gift cards for employees who are doing their all during this peak season. There is big difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Fun activities add to the intrinsic values that create company culture.

Keep employees updated on goals

It is important that employees feel included and know the work they are doing on a day-to-day basis is contributing to something bigger.

Keep communication open and don’t skip your regular monthly meetings just because you may be extra busy. It is important to set aside an hour to make sure you communicate overarching company goals, make sure employees are on point with KPI’s, and to talk about phone skills to ensure peak performance and to talk out any issues of people feeling overwhelmed or overworked.

If you don’t already have an outlined team meeting schedule, download our team meeting slide deck to ease the talk tracks for your next meeting.

Now keep up the great work and make the most of this busy summer season – we are rooting for your success!

Get a Custom Vanity Phone Number Equipped With Call Tracking and Prove Your ROI

July 8, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Don’t simply acquire a vanity number – get a custom number that has custom reporting, too.

Looking to stand out with your newest marketing campaign or for your business’ branding efforts? A custom phone number, also called a vanity phone number, is the perfect option for both cases.

What is a vanity number?

A vanity number is an easy-to-remember phone number that either spells a specific word or phrase or has an easy numeric sequence such as repeating number.

Vanity numbers are useful to build your brand, get consumers to remember you, and prevent competition.

But how do you prove the effectiveness of a vanity number when you need ROI to effectively run a business or department?

That is where call tracking for your vanity numbers comes in handy.

All of CallSource’s vanity numbers come equipped with call tracking – so you don’t have to wonder how well your vanity number or the advertisement is performing and proving its ROI.

What kind of information can you find with call tracking on your custom phone numbers?

CallSource’s call tracking can help you with several insights into your business performance.

View how many total calls and missed calls your vanity number receives in any specified time frame.

You can also view calls by hour and by day of the week. See what hours and days are busiest to make sure your staff is available to answer these calls during the times that callers are calling.

Besides volume and time of day, you have access to all your call recordings and which number the consumer called in from (if you have multiple vanity numbers), the duration of the call, and the caller’s phone number.

This information helps far more than just vanity number performance; these reports truly help you prove ROI on your vanity numbers and their utilization.

Want to know more?

Curious to learn more about the additional reporting and features available with CallSource vanity numbers?

Find your perfect vanity number here and then talk to a CallSource representative for more information today.

You Spend a lot of Money on Marketing – Now Make Sure Those Inbound Leads are Worth the Dollars Spent

July 5, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Don’t let inbound leads fall through the cracks due to missed calls or poor employee performance.

Do you hear that?

The ringing.

…..and ringing…..

………and ringing.

Voicemail.

And do you hear that from over there?

A call handler on the phone with a prospect.

This one is interested!

But wait – oh – they said they’d have to think about it and your call handler just said “okay” and let them hang up.

So do you hear it?

These are your precious marketing budget dollars being thrown away with every missed phone call or missed appointment opportunity.

Do you know exactly how many calls are being missed in your office, as well as how your call handlers are handling phone calls?

These are two very vital aspects that you should be paying attention to.

How do you make sure you are getting the most out of your marketing dollars spent?

Call tracking is useful in many aspects for bettering your business – but let’s focus on how it can help you in the two areas noted above.

Take control of your missed calls

If you have a properly staffed business with enough call handlers and rollover lines, you shouldn’t be missing many calls.

You may think you aren’t missing many, but how do you know for sure?

Call tracking delivers specific missed call reports so that you can see an overview from how many missed calls you receive in any period: yearly, monthly, daily, weekly – all the way down to by hour.

By viewing these reports, you can verify your busiest phone times and days to make sure you have enough people to answer phones on the schedule. Perhaps by looking at the data, you may conclude that you have too many missed calls overall and need to hire an additional call handler or use an answering service.

Use the data to determine your decisions.

Another benefit that your call tracking service should offer is missed call notifications. With these, you can be notified immediately when a call goes unanswered for whatever reason.

These notifications can even pick up if the caller hung up before you were able to pick up the phone. They also deliver the phone number the call originated from so you can work at the moment to return the call.

Stop missing calls and take control of your phones.

Ensure your employees are handling calls appropriately

Ok, so now your call handlers are picking up most phone calls – how well are they doing in booking those callers into appointments?

If your marketing is working and your phone is ringing with prospective customers, you don’t want to lose those prospects and not convert the call into an appointment due to call handlers’ lack of skill.

Instead of relying on hovering over your employees and trying to listen to their phone calls, a good call tracking option should also have a call conversion plan as well!

CallSource has live human analysts score employees’ phone calls not only to see how many leads they are converting into an appointment or where they are missing the opportunity to book but also to score certain aspects of the phone call to make sure that they are being successful and giving a good caller experience.

By looking at these reports and seeing your overall appointment conversion percentage as well as broken out by the call handler, you can see if you are making or missing your appointment goal. If there are specific call handlers that need more help than others (or maybe all can use a bit of a push), there is call coaching available as well. Make sure to have frequent team and one-on-one meetings with your employees to discuss if they are meeting their KPI’s.

Download our team meeting slide deck and call handler self-analysis to help voice your goals to your opinions and stay up-to-date on their performance, as well as help improve their phone skills.

Feel free to reach out to a CallSource representative if you’d like to learn more about how CallSource can help you improve your marketing ROI and employee performance.

10 Interesting Phone Facts, from a Company that Relies on Phone Calls

July 3, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Without telephones, call tracking couldn’t exist.

Although we’ve added many services to our repertoire since inventing call tracking back in 1991, the core of CallSource offline performance data really focuses on your business’ phone calls.

Since phones are such a vital part of call tracking, let’s look at some interesting facts and history of the telephone – all the way back to its conception.

Italian innovator Antonio Meucci is credited with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854. Yet, Alexander Graham Bell was granted the first US patent for the telephone in 1876 – two years after he began his research in 1874.¹
The American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T) was formed in 1885.¹
In 1900, there were nearly 600,000 phones in Bell’s telephone system, and by the 1960s, there were more than 80 million phone hookups in the U.S. and 160 million in the world.¹
The first mobile phone call was made on April 3, 1973 by a former Motorola inventor, Martin Cooper – who is known as “the father of the cellphone.”²
The first cell phones went on sale in the US in 1983, costing about $4,000 each!²
CallSource invented call tracking in 1991.
Mobile phones have 18 times more bacteria than toilet handles.³ (Gross)
As of the end of 2016, over 50% of homes and apartments have only cellphone service. This means under half of households (almost 46%) still have landline phones.⁴
By spring of 2017, there were almost 240 million cell phone users in the United States.⁵
CallSource has tracked over 1 billion phone calls since 1995.

Interested in call tracking for your business? Speak to one of our representatives today.

Can a Vanity Number Help Boost Calls to your Hearing Office?

June 27, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

An easy-to-remember custom phone number may help increase inbound calls from patients.

What are your hearing practice’s most expensive ad placements?

Do you advertise on TV, the radio, or billboards?

These forms of marketing have a few things in common:

Expensive
Seen or heard short-term
Non-tangible return

Unlike advertising in the newspaper, with a direct mail piece, or on a flier, these types of ads cannot be held by your prospective patients – but it doesn’t mean that they cannot be successful.

A driver has to pass by a billboard to see it – since he or she is driving, they only have a second or to read and retain the information.

In a radio or TV ad, you only see/hear the ad for a short period, and the call-to-action at the end (usually a telephone number) gives the consumer limited time to remember or jot down the number.
So how can you make the most out of these types of ads to ensure you get a good ROI on your marketing dollars?

Solution: A vanity number.

True, vanity phone numbers are not only helpful in the types of ads mentioned above but can be used on any of your marketing materials.

Why choose a vanity number?

Well, what are you more likely to remember when looking at or hearing it quickly: 888-432-7464 or 888-HEARING? I think we both know the answer.

And why is an easy-to-remember phone number important for your hearing office? Well, it has been found that the average first-time hearing aid wearer is about 70 years of age. With this age comes some normal signs of age-related forgetfulness. One such normal type of memory lapse among older adults is having trouble remembering what you’ve just read. So if it may already be difficult for older consumers to remember information they’ve read, don’t you think a random assortment of numbers would be difficult to remember?

But don’t just take my word for it – A Chicago Tribute advertising survey discovered that ads use vanity numbers received ten times the amount of responses compared to those with a local numeric sequence phone number.

Ready to try out a vanity number for your office?

CallSource vanity numbers don’t only provide you with an easy-to-remember custom phone number but also deliver all of the call tracking metrics too, so you can measure the success of that phone number with real data.

Check out available options we have for you right now and feel free to contact a vanity specialist today.

Are Your Inbound Marketing Efforts Creating Enough Lead Generation?

June 18, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Make sure your marketing content is reaching the right audiences and actually working – by tracking it.

Your marketing efforts are wasted if they aren’t reaching the right people – and you cannot know what is working the most successfully without learning, failing, learning more and succeeding – which requires data. By tracking your marketing efforts to receive inbound leads, you can stop wasting marketing dollars on what isn’t working, and start perfecting more of what is working to do more of it.

So what avenues exist to successfully track your marketing success? Let’s go over the options that you should be utilizing at your business.

Call Tracking

If you have an appointment-based business, call tracking is essential for correctly attributing inbound phone leads.

It is not serving your business to put the same, main phone number on all of your marketing pieces. Sure, your call handlers may ask callers where they heard about you to try to guess and attribute which marketing piece drove their phone call, but what there are many possible ways this can go wrong.

One problem is that the call handler will most likely forget to ask this question of every caller, which gives you zero information. Also, the caller may not remember where they saw your number, or state where they called from incorrectly. For example, the caller may have first heard about your business on the radio, but then it was a direct mail piece they received that really drove their call to you.

When you place unique tracking phone numbers on all of your different marketing pieces, there is no more guesswork or hoping that you will get the correct attribution.

Call tracking correctly tells you what marketing pieces are driving the most inbound calls, and even can break down how many actual leads you are receiving from each piece versus junk phone calls – so you can really invest your marketing dollars into the ones that are working and get rid of underperforming advertising sources.

Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI)

Dynamic Number Insertion, often referred to as simply DNI, is a more detailed hybrid of call tracking and digital attribution.

DNI is a great way to correctly attribute phone calls that come in from your online marketing sources. Instead of placing a static phone number on your website, dynamic number insertion will display a different phone number based on each unique visitor. This way, you can not only see from a call tracking standpoint that this lead called in from your website, but you can also then go back and see what search terms drove this person to your website in the first place.

Digital Attribution

We’re living in a digital world – so you better be able to improve your online presence and successfully attribute how you are earning leads in your internet campaigns and marketing efforts.
There are a few different digital attribution models, so it is up to you to pick the one that best suits your business needs. Here are some of the most popular:

Last Click Attribution Model: The last click receives full credit for the conversion

First Click Attribution Model: The first click receives full credit for the conversion

Linear Attribution: Each touch point receives equal credit for the conversion

Time Decay: The touch point(s) furthest away from the conversion receive the least credit

You can always create your own custom model for attribution – but it is important that you do choose and stay consistent so you can compare data to make informed decisions. Google Analytics is a great tool for your digital attribution that anyone can use.

Of course, having a combination of all of the above tracking models will yield the highest results. That is why CallSource delivers products to help you in all of these areas. Curious to learn more? Reach out to one of our representatives and we will be happy to help your business succeed.