4 essential call tracking metrics you should be measuring

How many calls does your call center handle on any given day? How many are new or returning customers? How did they find you? If you’re keen to improve the performance of your contact center, tracking the call metrics that matter most to you will give you a clear vision of where improvements need to be made.

Call tracking enables you to take a closer look at where your calls are coming from. In addition to that, it provides you with data that will enhance your call center operations, your sales strategy, and the overall customer experience you deliver.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the essential call tracking metrics you need to be measuring, from volume and duration to scoring.

What are the key call tracking metrics?

Call tracking metrics are the most effective way of monitoring and measuring the performance of your contact centers. Here are some of the key ones you need to pay attention to if you want to take your contact centre to the next level:

• Call volume: This tells you how many calls your call center is receiving every day and where those calls are coming from. Call volume is also important to track for outbound calls, which helps you unlock the other half of the customer journey. Call tracking software does this for you automatically.
• First-time callers: If a person has picked up the phone for the first time, you want to be able to track those calls and understand what drove it. A clear understanding of who your first-time callers are and what they need will enable you to tailor your scripts and create a stellar customer experience.
• Sales calls vs. service calls: It’s likely your call centre receives a mix of both sales calls and service calls from customers old and new. You need to understand what drives these calls and what is being said, to help you optimize the experience. Use this information to tailor scripts, reduce AHT, and improve the online experience if there are common, recurring queries.
• Conversion rates: This tracks the percentage of people who make a purchase on the call. Tracking conversion rates shows how effective your agents are at converting leads and other actions such as upselling and increasing average order value. Conversation Analytics helps you lift the lid on what happens on every call your agents make and take, at scale, so you’ll always be able to see which calls had positive outcomes.

What are the benefits of call tracking metrics?

Tracking key call center metrics and acting on what you find will help you stay on track with your business objectives and ultimately, will help your business grow. But there are several other benefits of call tracking that you should consider.

Map the customer journey: The purpose of journey mapping is to understand your customer’s intentions, motivations, and pain points. With call tracking, you can identify common trends in your customer journey, highlight FAQs that delay conversion, and understand what turns a ‘ring-ring’ into ‘kerching’!

Invest in the right marketing channels: Without real feedback, how can you optimize your campaigns? Call tracking can show you which channels, keywords, social ads, or websites led a person to pick up the phone. Unearth hidden insights and adapt your campaigns and budgets accordingly.

Refine your customer-facing communications: Talking to customers about how and why they chose you can provide detailed insights into opportunities and threats. This can be used to refine your agent scripts and enhance self-service tools to make your communications more persuasive.

Streamline data collection and analysis: Enhancing the performance of your marketing campaigns and channels relies on data. If you’re planning to implement call tracking, you need to make sure call tracking software slots neatly into your existing tech stack. Streamlining data and ensuring it all ends up in the same place makes it easier to extract insights and make improvements at scale.

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Which call tracking metrics should you measure?

Call tracking metrics can unlock a wealth of insights that will make your operations more effective than ever. By developing a clear understanding of why your customers are calling, you can highlight which interactions lead to conversions, train your agents to deflect low-value leads and pinpoint FAQs to improve scripts and increase the number of successful calls.

What if you could take call tracking metrics one step further and collect data that shines a spotlight on what your customers want? With Conversation Analytics, you can enhance the customer experience by monitoring what actually happens on those calls. Here are some of the essential call tracking metrics you should be measuring if you want to take your contact center to the next level.

Call volume

Call volume tells you how many calls your call centre is receiving every day and most importantly with call tracking, where those calls are coming from. For example, if you’re able to see the number of calls being generated by your marketing campaigns, you can accurately track ROI. Call volume is also important to track for outbound calls made by your sales team, which can help you unlock the other half of the customer journey.

How can it be tracked?

Tracking call volume as a metric depends on your agents and sales team meticulously logging each and every call. While this is possible, it does involve a lot of manual work and you should factor in a level of human error. Call tracking software can automatically log both inbound and outbound calls for you, as well as providing high-quality analysis to give you better visibility on how your agents drive successful call outcomes.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is a metric linked directly to lead generation and revenue, as it tracks the percentage of people who make a purchase on the call. Since a purchase may not happen during the first contact, you might prefer to track the number of warm leads that convert. If your business relies on phone calls to make sales, this is a KPI. Tracking conversion rate shows how effective your agents are at converting leads and other revenue-driven actions such as upselling and increasing average order value.

How can it be tracked?

There are a couple of ways you can measure conversion rate. The first is a straightforward calculation in which you divide the number of phone calls that led to conversions by the total number of phone calls received. If you want more accurate results, you may prefer to record initial interactions as warm leads and set a timeframe for conversion, then divide the number of conversions by the number of warm leads over time. Using Conversation Analytics will allow you to see how your contact center is performing without the manual work.

First-time callers

First impressions count. If a customer or a lead has picked up the phone for the first time, you want to be able to track those calls and understand what drove it. A clear understanding of who your first-time callers are and what they need will enable you to tailor your scripts and create a stellar customer experience. Also, if you know where they came from thanks to call tracking, you can deep dive into the keywords that brought them, the landing pages they viewed, and which campaigns are delivering those calls.

How can it be tracked?

Connecting offline interactions with the online customer journey is tricky and will require you to have call tracking software in place. If you want to gain insight into a first-time caller’s journey, you need to track their journey from end to end. With Infinity, tracking first-time callers is as simple as one-two-three:

A different telephone number is assigned to each unique visitor on the website.

When a visitor calls the unique number their user data is recorded, and call tracking links the call to the visitors' digital activity.

This connection gives you a complete view of the caller’s journey, so you can tell what they've been browsing, what products they may be interested in, and which campaigns, channels and keywords drove their call.

Essentially, call tracking merges phone call data with the visitor’s digital activity, giving you the full picture of the customer journey and enabling you to make smarter decisions.

Sales calls vs. service calls

It’s likely that your call centre receives a mix of both sales calls and service calls from customers old and new. To be able to handle these effectively and provide exceptional customer experiences, you need to understand what drives these calls and what is being said. With this knowledge at your fingertips, you can start to optimise the experience by tailoring scripts and reducing AHT by routing them directly to the right person.

How can it be tracked?

To understand the number of sales calls vs. service calls coming into your contact centre, your agents need to wrap categorising calls into their ACW process. That said, one of the most common issues in call centres is to ensure that your agents are a) completing activity codes and b) assigning the correct activity code. With tools like Conversation Analytics, outcomes can be automatically assigned.