The complexity and customization inherent to B2B makes it a phone-centric sector: People need to give you a call fairly early on in the sales process to understand if you really can solve their problems. As we explained in our last post, if you want to have any clue how effective your B2B digital marketing efforts are, you need a call tracking solution to tie those calls back to the ad that triggered them.
Once you have a call-tracking solution in place, you’ll discover that these platforms can do much more than just “connect the dots” from a PPC ad, to a website visit, to a call from a prospective customer.
Principal among the advanced tools that reliably prove to be a complete game changer for our clients: Call recording.
Call recording and analysis was once only the domain of big multi-nationals with full IT staffs and complex enterprise-level phone solutions. But with a modern call tracking platform, even the most modest operation can get an unprecedented view into who their customers are, what they need–and how well your team is meeting those needs.
The Three Insights You Find in Call Recordings
In every instance where we’ve enabled call recording for a client, we’ve learned immensely valuable details. These generally come in three flavors:
- marketing insights
- customer insights
- customer service insights
Every call you review is likely to yield nuggets in one or more of these categories–as well as highlight important ways that these overlap or reinforce each other. For example, listening to an unhappy customer’s call might reveal both a botched customer service process, and a marketing misstep that’s attracting the wrong target audience.
Marketing Insights
When you’re using off-the-rack call tracking, you will immediately see how your online ads and website yield over-the-phone inquiries. This is a huge step up!
But it’s still just numbers on a spreadsheet. You need to have some sense of the content of those calls to know how to properly categorize them. How many are sales inquiries and actual sales opportunities? How many sales are completed–and over how many calls? Are these channels also bringing in existing customers? Are you fielding support calls through these channels? Are some of these conversations more developmental than anything else?
We’ve found that, with some customers, the overwhelming bulk of their calls are support related. Should that really be part of how you’re calculating ROI on an ad campaign? More importantly, why are customers looking for support having to follow such a twisted path to get to you? This possibly signifies that you need to change some other part of your support or sales program–or do some website redesign–so that your valued existing customers have an easier time getting you on the phone. It also presents an opportunity to address frequently asked questions on your website, thereby reducing the number of support phone calls.
Customer Insights
For us, as an agency, call recording has been an incredibly valuable tool to help us better understand our client’s customers. We can hear the questions they have–and how they ask them. Patterns emerge.
There can be a big gap between the customer you imagine having and the one you have–and that’s much easier for someone else to hear when reviewing a call recording than it is for the salesperson to pin down in the heat of the moment.
Maybe you need to shift your marketing efforts to attract a different audience? Or maybe this is a hint that there is pent-up demand for something else you could be offering? At the very least, if there’s a simple question most of your callers seem to be asking, you can probably reduce their frustration (and save your sales team some time) by prominently answering that question on your web page, rather than field the same call 15 times each day.
Customer Service Insights
This goes in tandem with those customer insights. Are the calls you’re getting being handled properly–or at all? We had one instance where a client implemented call tracking, and everything looked great. Those ads were bringing visitors to the website–and then they were calling! But sales still seemed soft. Once we implemented call recording, we discovered nearly 75 percent of their qualified sales leads were going straight to voicemail!
Once you start listening, you’ll discover how much you were missing: mishandled calls, misrouted calls, calls going to a forgotten voicemail box–and also calls where you hear about what you’re really doing right, or get a hint at a new product or service you could offer, or begin to see a pattern that leads to a whole new (and lucrative) avenue for your business.
Ready to Start a Conversation About Call Tracking?
You can know that you’re getting calls, and see which pages and ads are inspiring those calls–but if you don’t have a meaningful sense of what happens on those calls, it’s hard to draw any conclusions as to what your next best move is. Request a consultation on our website to talk to our team of experts about advanced call tracking features and call recording.