How to Turn Phone Calls into Customers with Call Intelligence and Reporting

There’s no question that inbound phone calls are one of the most high-intent purchase activities for any local business.

Once someone has picked up the phone to call a business, they’ve typically already done their research in terms of checking out past reviews, looking at the business’ past work, and so on. In fact, it’s been said that call leads are 10-15 times more likely to convert than other online sources.

In this article, we’re going to discuss how to make the most of your agency or clients’ inbound calls. We’ll also review the key takeaways discussed on our recent webinar titled: How to Turn Phone Calls into Customers with Call Intelligence and Reporting: 

In this webinar, our Product Manager Jordan Snider sat down with team members from both WildJar—a call tracking intelligence platform—and Sprocket Digital, which is a data-driven digital marketing agency that uses both AgencyAnalytics and WildJar. We’ll look into:

• What is the “Call Experience”?

• The Value of Calls

• Automating Your Call Reporting

Let’s get started.

What is the “Call Experience”?

According to Wildjar founder James O'Neill, in order to understand the “call experience” we first need to understand the customer journey. In essence, it’s important to understand how or why these customers found your client’s business in the first place.

2021 saw significant changes in the call landscape. We went from traditional advertising to a much more complex digital journey. The customer journey today often involves multiple platforms, channels, and devices. This complexity of digital behaviours makes it harder to track the customer journey. 

Luckily, the customer journey can be tracked with the right tools in place. Since companies are investing so much in digital advertising, tracking exactly where your clients’ customers come from and what their journey has been has become a crucial part of any marketing campaign.

The challenge, however, is that as soon as the customer leaves their digital journey and picks up the phone, the trail often goes cold.

The call experience is extremely valuable, but frequently goes undocumented without the right tools in place. Customers are having real-life conversations with your clients’ business, giving them live, valuable intel. You need to document it.

Customers are often telling your clients exactly what they want and how the business can solve their problems. That said, this information can get lost if you’re just using traditional attribution and customer journey tracking software such as Google Analytics.

That’s where WildJar’s call tracking software comes in.

WildJar is designed to bridge the gap from the online world to the offline world. Specifically,  WildJar works with agencies to help them understand what their customers' path to purchase is from their first digital click all the way to the final sales call.

Their call tracking reporting software captures critical data for every sales call that comes in so you can see which web pages are actually driving phone calls to the business. This includes key call tracking metrics such as:

• Call duration

• Status of the call (answered vs. missed)

• Call transcripts and audio recordings

• And much more

Source: AgencyAnalytics + Wildjar Integration

With this data, you now understand:

•  Why people are reaching out to your clients in the first place

• What problems they’re having

• How your team responded to their phone call

In the recent year, there has also been a critical shift in how agencies and their clients are looking at their online marketing spend. They’re not just focused solely on increasing media budgets or simply looking at performance-based on conversions. Instead, agencies have become more strategic advisors to their clients. Here’s what James from Wildjar had to say:

We're seeing agencies starting to listen to call recordings on behalf of their clients, give insights into exactly what that customer is inquiring about, and work with the business owners or the teams to improve these outcomes.

Wildjar has also noticed that a lot of attention goes into reducing the number of missed calls. With reminders like email or SMS notifications, WildJar can let the customer know that they’re being acknowledged and someone from the business will call them back.

Now that the world has started to reopen post-COVID, a major trend that WildJar has witnessed is a significant increase in the number of phone calls that businesses are receiving. Interestingly, these increased call volumes are even surpassing pre-COVID levels.

It’s clear that both businesses and consumers have changed the way they do business with one another. Even though there is obviously a lot more online activity, consumers are still heavily relying on phone calls to get information fast.

As James highlights, the key is to give customers that same convenient online experience over the phone: 

There's more emotion on the phone and consumers have done all that research online. They've chosen your brand. They want to seek to speak to somebody. They want to speak to a person. And your job is to give the customer that same fantastic customer experience over the phone that they received online.

The final piece of the puzzle that James discussed is that businesses need to be sure they’re maximizing their return on investment and attributing all your conversions and sales back to the correct advertising channel.

That’s exactly where the WildJar + AgencyAnalytics integration can help. The integration is designed to close that last gap between marketing, sales, and the buyer’s journey.

With these two platforms, you can now understand your customers at a deeper level, you can start spotting emerging trends, and you can start funneling those insights back into the buyer’s journey. - James O’Neil, Founder of WildJar

In short, with AgencyAnalytics and WildJar you’re now optimizing for every opportunity that’s presented to you over the phone to drive revenue to your clients’ business.

Sprocket Digital on the Value of Phone Calls

Sprocket Digital prides itself on being a data-driven agency, which means that they try to limit their assumptions around what will and won't work for their clients. They know that they need to measure everything and let the numbers dictate how to best allocate marketing budgets between ad platforms and campaigns.

Even though you may think that tracking everything on a website is easy since it’s all online. However, there are a few complexities Sprocket Digital have encountered that may be relevant to other agency owners. 

One of the most common challenges they’ve faced is how to measure their client’s phone calls more accurately than just the number of clicks. The problem with phone number click tracking is that it’s heavily biased towards mobile users since they can simply call from the same device that they’re browsing from.

From a marketing analytics perspective, the last thing they want to do is bring this inherent device bias into their numbers when they’re assessing and optimizing the campaigns.

With the help of third-party call tracking apps like Wildjar, however, they're able to improve their tracking capabilities. The platform makes it easy to import tracked calls into Google Analytics and Google Ads so they can optimize their marketing activity towards high-quality calls.

For example, they’re able to assess the quality of calls with metrics like call duration or by listening to the audio recordings. Although listening to call recordings can be a bit labor-intensive, it does allow them to not only determine which campaigns are generating the most call volume, but also which are generating the highest number of new customer inquiries for a business. 

These recordings can also come in handy for business owners themselves in the following ways:

• It allows them to assess the ratio of answered to unanswered calls

• Receive email notifications of any missed calls and return them back immediately

• To assess the quality of phone service provided by internal customer service staff

In a nutshell, call tracking software has become something they can’t live without when it comes to lead generation for their clients.

Automating Your Call Tracking with WildJar & AgencyAnalytics

We’ve discussed why call tracking and attribution is so essential for agencies and their clients, let’s now look at how you can automate this entire process with WildJar and AgencyAnalytics.

A few of the key use cases and benefits of automating your call tracking include:

• Easily track call metrics: This gives the ability to hone in on KPIs to measure your call efforts, including looking at new vs. return calls, answered vs. missed, and call sources. 

• Listen to call recordings: Call tracking software also allows you to keep track of your past recordings and verify the lead quality.

• Monitor call performance: Finally, knowing how calls are performing is just as important as actually getting the phone to ring in the first place.

To make the most of your call tracking data, AgencyAnalytics is designed to aggregate marketing data from various sources so you can access insights and review calls all from one single dashboard. 

Want to automate your agency’s call reporting? Below are a few of the key features of the WildJar + AgencyAnalytics integration that can help scale your agency:

• Native platform automation: Firstly, given the native integration, all your client’s data is automatically pulled from WildJar into a dedicated client dashboard. From there, you can choose to schedule reports to automatically send to clients, get report approval notifications before they’re sent out, and track the open-rate and click-through of all your report emails.

• Personalizing the client experience: While automating your call tracking is crucial to scaling an agency, you still want to offer clients a personalized experience. With features such as custom metrics and goals, you offer that level of customization that clients are looking for in a streamlined reporting process.

Easily white label all your client reports and dashboard with your agency's branding including logo, and color scheme. Even host reports on your own domain.

In order to understand exactly how Sprocket Digital is has automated their client reporting, here are a few ways that they have helped clients manage their leads with AgencyAnalytics and WildJar:

• Their clients have 24/7 access to all the data with their own login

• Clients receive email notifications for all the inbound calls 

• They create custom and automated reports that send to clients on a weekly and monthly basis

• They also use the Google Sheets integration to monitor their internal call tracking lead sheets

• Finally, they use Google Analytics for additional reporting on their client’s lead generation activities 

Source: Call Tracking Dashboard Template

Summary: Automating Your Clients’ Call Tracking Reporting 

It’s clear that the number of phone calls local businesses are receiving is on the rise. In order to help clients’ make the most of their inbound calls, it’s essential for agencies to have the right call tracking metrics in place such as call duration, answer vs. missed, and so on. In addition, instead of manually reporting these results to clients, agencies that want to scale their business should prioritize automating their client reporting. 

By combining AgencyAnalytics and WildJar, agencies can get the best of both worlds. With the right call tracking software and automated reporting in place, you have everything you need to deliver more high-quality leads to clients and scale your agency.