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CallSource Reflections: The Evolution of the CallSource® Solution: Not All “Leads” Are Created Equal

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Elliot Leiboff“CallSource® Reflections” is a blog series by CallSource’s® co-founder and President, Elliot Leiboff. Elliot co-founded CallSource® alongside the late Jerry Feldman in 1992. Over the years, Elliot has developed a small call tracking company to a full service lead generation performance organization. CallSource® invented call tracking. Elliot has witnessed a myriad of inventions, tried different strategies, invested in technologies and basically seen it all.

CallSource® is a classic American tale of an idea that turned into a business that has thrived through grit and determination. “CallSource® Reflections” is Elliot’s blog series on lessons learned as a business owner before the era of startups and VC funding.

Elliot’s monthly blog contributions take the reader on the journey of how our solutions and have evolved.

In my last post, I briefly touched on the beginning of CallSource’s® call tracking solution evolving into the more complex programs utilized now. Today I’d like to go into more detail on our first step in the analytics portion of these programs. Why is this so important?

In 1992, when CallSource® first began call tracking, it was enough to report how many calls each tracking number received. Our first refinement was to identify repeat callers to normalize cost-per-call analysis.

Still, a call report could be misleading. Although tracking numbers were published in ads intended to generate sales leads, they also received personal calls, calls from job seekers, vendors, spammers and just plain misdials— all of which skewed call analysis. We had to find a solution for these metrics.

The first solution to this problem was that call trackers could insert an IVR Menu (“press 1 for sales, 2 for service”) or review and sort each recorded call into categories. Because the IVR approach is inexpensive, some call tracking providers still employ it, although it creates a bad customer experience, particularly for businesses with their own IVR menu right behind the one the tracking company provides.

The second approach, reviewing each recorded call, has no impact on the customer experience, but involves the expense of listening to and sorting each call, either with human call analysts or with speech analytics software.

While software has a major cost advantage, human analysts offer significantly higher accuracy, as they are better able to cope with poor carrier connections, background noise, accents and the intricacies of the English language.

In our 25 years, CallSource® has had a great deal of experience with each of the approaches described above. While, from a profit motive, speech analytics software is highly attractive, our recommended solution is human analysts, which CallSource® employs. An IVR gives a bad customer experience, and speech analytics simply do not give the accuracy of real analysts.
As hard as most call tracking providers try to push fully automated (low cost) solutions, 25 years of experience has taught us that technology alone does little to improve sales and marketing performance.

To really “move the meter,” most businesses need assistance in analyzing and reacting to call tracking and telephone performance data. Speech analytics and eLearning are useful, but for accuracy and human motivation, there is no substitute for experienced, talented (higher cost) analysts and coaches. This is a vital difference that sets CallSource® apart from other call tracking providers.

As industry leaders and experts in all things call tracking and digital lead attribution, we at CallSource® always ensure to give the highest quality possible for our clients’ needs. We are here to help you succeed, no matter the cost.

Is Call Tracking Beneficial for My Business?

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You spend a lot of money on advertising, don’t you want to know if it is working?

In our last post How Does Call Tracking Even Work?, we went over the very basics of how call tracking works. So how do you know if your business is a good fit for call tracking? If you are trying to grow your business using different types of marketing to obtain customers, then call tracking for you.

The Problem
Do you throw advertising dollars at different marketing channels, such as the Yellow Pages, website landing pages, newspaper ads, direct mail pieces, magazines, then hope that they work? Are you assuming that your call handlers are doing their best on every phone call without a data showing leads into appointment rates? You’d be surprised how many businesses think they are performing at their best, but once they see their data through call tracking, they realize they are underperforming.
Other businesses know that the phone is their weakest link in the sales cycle and don’t even want to address it because they don’t know where to start.

The Solution
If either problem above sounds familiar, you can solve a lot by using call tracking. As owners and managers, your time and money is valuable, so why spend time worrying about what is and isn’t working by inferences, and why waste money on advertising avenues that aren’t giving you the return that you need? Call tracking can provide quick, easy-to-read reports showing where your calls are coming in from. With call tracking, there is no more guessing. One CallSource client saved over $45,000 by utilizing call tracking!

Our Experience
CallSource has worked with over 300,000 businesses over the last 25 years. We have the industry insights to not only help improve businesses through call tracking but with more services as well.

Stay tuned for future articles for deeper insights, and please drop us a message if you have any questions on whether or not call tracking can work for your business.

How Does Call Tracking Even Work?

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If your business depends on marketing to acquire new leads, then call tracking is a necessity to grow and improve your business—not an expense. Even the most basic call tracking services are better than having no type of plan in place.

At its simplest, call tracking requires publishing a unique phone number (local or toll free) for each marketing campaign that you want to track. Ideally, this should include all of your ad sources, such as your website, direct mail pieces, television advertising, etc. All calls to these numbers are routed to your main line(s). Once calls are being tracked, you can see which ad source makes the phone ring the most.

How Are Calls “Tracked”?
When a potential customer uses a call tracking phone number, the caller’s contact information is collected.

But the information collected may differ—not all Call Tracking companies are the same!

Unlike a lot of call tracking companies, CallSource’s solution, CallTrack, is the most reliable in the industry:

  • 99.99% server uptime
  • Tier 1 class phone carriers
  • Top 5 toll-free providers in the U.S.

Is It Legal?
Yes! Although some states differ in their exact notification laws, for CallSource’s purposes as a two-party state, the FCC regulates that the caller must be alerted that their call will be recorded. This is why all of CallSource’s tracking numbers have a default “disclaimer” alerting the caller, which may be customized per business if they so wish.

How Do I Use This Information?
By reviewing your tracked calls, you can identify how the call was handled. Was the call handler able to set the appointment? Call Handler Managers can evaluate call handler skills to evaluate what a call handler is doing right and where he/she needs improvement.

You can also see what numbers your callers are actually using to call in on—each call is labeled in reporting according to the marketing piece that number is published on. Instead of going the old-fashioned route of asking each caller how they heard about your business, with call tracking you can be certain that the information given is accurate. Empowered with this information, you can correctly track which marketing is generating the most calls and where to allocate your money and use your resources for the best ROI.

Don’t just rely on instincts—to better your business, you need real data that makes sense. Call tracking works to provide this data to you in an easy-to-use format. Subscribe to our blog to get more information on how you can use call tracking to better your business.

CallSource Reflections: The Beginning of Call Tracking… from the Company that Invented Call Tracking

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Elliot Leiboff“CallSource® Reflections” is a blog series by CallSource’s® co-founder and President, Elliot Leiboff. Elliot co-founded CallSource® alongside the late Jerry Feldman in 1992. Over the years, Elliot has developed a small call tracking company to a full service lead generation performance organization. CallSource® invented call tracking. Elliot has witnessed a myriad of inventions, tried different strategies, invested in technologies and basically seen it all.

CallSource® is a classic American tale of an idea that turned into a business that has thrived through grit and determination. “CallSource® Reflections” is Elliot’s blog series on lessons learned as a business owner before the era of startups and VC funding.

Elliot’s monthly blog contributions take the reader on the journey of how our solutions and have evolved.

In 1992, CallSource® was the first and only call tracking company in the U.S. It was created to help RentLine, an apartment listing service, prove its effectiveness to its advertisers.

This process of call tracking was created, and at its core still is, the practice of placing a unique phone number in each marketing campaign, then routing calls from these numbers to the client’s local number. This allows an objective attribution of the calls delivered by each marketing source or ad campaign that contains a call tracking number.

RentLine soon realized that call tracking could empower advertisers in all sorts of media to objectively compare the effectiveness of diverse marketing and advertising. Early retailer, John Wanamaker, famously complained: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

In terms of telephone response to advertising, call tracking solved that enigma. Call tracking as a service was born… along with a new company, CallSource®.

In those days, we had to explain to every prospective client how we could “magically” identify the marketing source that generated each incoming call. Believe it or not, when we provided data to our clients that compared the effectiveness and cost-per-lead of diverse marketing sources and ad campaigns it was “gee whiz!” technology.

Since high speed Internet was not yet available, monthly reports were printed, bound, and mailed to clients. If a client had a fax machine, they could even receive a nightly list of missed calls from the prior day.

It was truly “cutting edge” data we could provide to help our clients and their businesses.

Now twenty-five years later, CallSource® has served hundreds of thousands of customers, tracked more than a billion calls and has had scores of call tracking providers join us in what is now the call tracking industry, and the standard way to prover metrics such as ROI with our analytics and reporting.

This, compiled with lead attribution tells the entire customer journey. Marketing can prove end-to-end ROI and sales can attribute KPI’s with their efforts. CallSource’s evolution from inventing the industry to leading digital and lead resolution proves there is always room to grow.