For any company, knowledge is power, and for e-commerce businesses, one of the most important types of knowledge to have is a deep understanding of their customers.
Knowing your customers’ needs and wants can lead to better customer experiences, higher conversion rates, and growth.
Imagine knowing your customers’ desires, pain points, and preferences. What could you do with that information? You could tailor your marketing strategies to them. You would know what type of cross-sells and upsells would work the best. And this is just the beginning.
This is the insight that implementing call tracking and call analytics can bring to your business. In this article, we’ll look at how.
Call Tracking and Call Analytics: What’s the Difference?
While call tracking and call analytics seem like they could refer to the same thing, and many people think they do, there is a difference.
What is Call Tracking?
One way to remember what call tracking refers to is that call tracking ends when one of your team picks up the phone. Call tracking allows marketers to trace the source of the phone call and attribute conversions to a specific marketing channel or search keyword.
When you use call tracking, your marketing team begins by assigning phone numbers to marketing channels. For granularity, you may have a different number for your website, search engine ads, social media posts, and print ads. Then, when a customer calls, you know where they came from, and you can use the data collected to compare the number and quality of calls to each of these numbers.
What is Call Analytics?
On the other hand, call analytics picks up where call tracking leaves off and collects data on what happens during the phone call. Call analytics will tell you the day and time of a call, the location the caller contacted you from, and how long that caller stayed on the phone with your team.
Many advanced call analytics systems come with call recording, which allows you and your team to listen to customer calls and call transcriptions, which turns the calls into text so that you can do further analysis. Analyzing the transcripts of your calls lets you do keyword analysis to detect intent, the score calls based on defined keywords, assign a monetary value to customers, and even apply machine learning algorithms.
The Benefits of Leveraging Call Tracking Data
As we said, call tracking will give you the phone number, location, time and duration, and where the call came from. This could seem like basic information, but it is powerful. You can use this call tracking data to:
- Attribute calls and conversions to marketing channels: Call tracking will tell you which channels send you the most and most profitable calls. If you are used paid search advertising, you can even use it to track which keywords result in higher ROI.
- Understand your customer’s habits: With call tracking, you can analyze call volume and patterns to determine peak calling times, busy days of the week, and seasonal trends. This will help schedule and ensure you have enough staff to handle calls.
- Optimize your marketing campaigns: When you know which marketing channels most of your conversions are coming from, you can use these insights to spend more advertising dollars on the profitable ones and find out what’s going wrong with those falling behind.
The Value of Call Analytics
Call tracking will help you improve how you get your customers to call you, and call analytics will help you refine their customer experience while they are on the call. It is hard to say one is better than the other, but because you can use call analytics to analyze the complete ring, you can potentially discover more insights with call analytics.
Here are some of the ways call analytics can help your business:
- Improve customer service: When you record and analyze customer calls, you can determine which call scripts and techniques work for your company and which don’t.
- Train salespeople: The calls you record or transcribe from your top performers can be used as training materials for new salespeople or to improve the techniques of existing sales team members.
- Increase sales: The two benefits above will lead to more sales as your team stops using sales techniques that don’t work and starts using those that do. You can also use analytics on outbound calls to determine which times of the day or week are most effective.
- Improve efficiency: As your team learns from the insights provided through analytics, their calls will be shorter, their conversions will improve, and customer satisfaction scores will go up.
- Increase customer retention: When you know what your customers want and need and how they want to be treated, they will return.
- Fix issues as they occur: With real-time call analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing, your team won’t have to wait for a report to improve their calls. They can get insights as the call is happening.
Conclusion
Knowing your customers is critical to a successful e-commerce business. The better you understand them and their needs and pain points, the better the chance you’ll have of closing a sale or providing top-notch customer service. Both call tracking and call analytics can help you do just this.
Call tracking will provide the insights you need to optimize your marketing campaigns and turn more potential customers into actual ones. Call analytics will give you insights into the real call and a deeper understanding of what your customers want and need. They work hand in hand, and you don’t know what you’re missing if you’re not using both.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between call tracking and call analytics?
Call tracking refers to tracing the source of a call and attributing conversions to specific marketing channels or search keywords. In contrast, call analytics involves collecting and analyzing data about what happens during the call, such as duration, day and time, and caller location.
How can call tracking benefit my e-commerce business?
Call tracking allows you to attribute calls and conversions to marketing channels, understand your customers’ habits such as peak calling times and seasonal trends, and optimize your marketing campaigns based on the data collected.
What value does call analytics bring to my business?
Call analytics can improve customer service, train salespeople, increase sales, improve efficiency, increase customer retention, and fix issues as they occur with the help of real-time insights, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Does call tracking involve recording phone conversations?
No, call tracking does not involve recording phone conversations. It primarily focuses on identifying the source of the call. However, some advanced call analytics systems include call recording as a feature.
Can call analytics be used for sales training?
Yes, call analytics often involves recording and transcribing calls. These transcriptions or recorded calls can be used as training materials for new salespeople or to improve the techniques of existing team members.
How can call tracking and call analytics help improve marketing campaigns?
By understanding where the most profitable calls originate (through call tracking), you can allocate more advertising dollars to those channels. Additionally, call analytics can provide a deeper understanding of customer needs, leading to more personalized and effective marketing efforts.
What information can be gathered from call tracking?
Call tracking can provide information like the caller’s phone number, location, time and duration, and the marketing channel from which the call originated.
Can I identify peak calling times with call tracking?
By analyzing call volume and patterns through call tracking, you can identify peak calling times, busy days of the week, and even seasonal trends.
Can I assign a monetary value to customers using call analytics?
Yes, analyzing the transcripts of your calls allows you to detect intent, score calls based on defined keywords, assign a monetary value to customers, and even apply machine learning algorithms.
Is there a preferable choice between call tracking and call analytics for my e-commerce business?
Both call tracking and call analytics provide valuable insights, working hand in hand. Call tracking helps optimize your marketing campaigns, while call analytics offers insights into the customer’s experience during the call. Combining both will give you a more holistic view of your customer interactions.
