How to Budget for Call Tracking

As we head into the final quarter of the year, businesses everywhere are faced with the task of forecasting their annual budget for 2020. The key is to invest in tools that control costs and boost conversions and revenue—not just within the purview of marketing, but across your entire organization.

While call tracking is traditionally allocated as a marketing expense, our services can impact many departments, including sales, customer support, and operations. Besides, CallTrackingMetrics is no longer just call tracking; we can help you attribute your texts, forms, and now chats, and give you the tools to fully automate your workflow and customer communications.

With its ability to improve customer experience, empower sales agents, increase productivity, and better manage resources, call tracking is a perfect example of an expense with massive cross-organizational payoff.

How to Make the Case for Each Department’s Budget

Accurate, easy reporting of expenditures and returns on investment allows your business to allocate your budgets and track marketing efforts. For marketers in particular, call tracking gives you the tools to determine the ROI of campaigns, track numbers, advertising channels, and more, so you can strategically spend in the areas that best reward your efforts.

Read more: 6 Key Performance Indicators You Can Track within CTM

But the impact doesn’t stop there. Make the case for how call tracking brings value in each of the following departments:

Sales

Sales success is built on information. But almost 50% of sales reps feel they lack critical customer information prior to calls. Call tracking arms your sales team with a wealth of customer data before they pick up the phone including channel, visitor data, call history, and more—and intelligently routes calls, texts, chats, or form submissions based on this information. Agents can leverage our AI tools to score these points of contact and identify hot leads. Then, set triggers in motion to quickly take action and layer in additional communications for prospects.

Operations

Efficiency and profitability go hand-in-hand. Because our software automates routing and the customization of the caller experience, we streamline processes and help sales and service teams work more efficiently. And in an age where so much personal data is stored online, call tracking tools that also contribute to the task of securing information add value well beyond lead generation. With the right security features, such as GDPR and HIPAA compliance, call tracking can protect customers’ identities and assets, as well as businesses’ reputations.

Support

We offer an affordable contact center solution for the modern workforce (and the only one with marketing attribution built in). Our cloud-based platform is fully customizable with tools to coach your agents, record and transcribe calls, monitor agent performance, and route calls or chats to the right agents the first time, preventing bottlenecks and keeping productivity high. Ditch your expensive desk phones with our sophisticated softphone that can allow your team to work and answer calls from anywhere, and manage everything within one unified communications dashboard.

Strategies to Increase Revenue and Reduce Costs

Not all call tracking tools are created equal. CallTrackingMetrics offers easy functionality and extra features that increase cost savings and revenue. The following tools can you help build efficiencies, improve communication, and streamline processes across an entire company using CallTrackingMetrics.

Take a look to make sure you’re utilizing each of the following features to get the most bang for your buck:

• Smart Routing: Direct calls based on caller profiles or conditions, such as: actions the caller has taken on a website, whether they’ve called previously, demographics, and more. This helps prevent wasted time and energy routing calls between teams, and increases customer satisfaction.
• Custom Fields: Create fields unique to your needs—such as company name, company ID, service plan, customer segment, or account manager—and route calls based on the information in these fields. Callers can be immediately connected with their dedicated agent, or routed to specialists based on their industry, segment, or more. Many of our clients find CallTrackingMetrics can function as a mini-CRM, helping them track and translate meaningful data across their teams.
• GeoContact: Dynamically display phone numbers on your business’s website that appear local—based on where the visitor is located in the world. When local numbers are added to CTM’s ability to route calls to the most geographically relevant agent or office, businesses are truly able to combine the best of both worlds—the reach of a corporate entity with the comfort of a local business.

Looking Ahead

CallTrackingMetrics is unique in that we’re the only platform that combines marketing attribution with a complete contact center solution. This helps your team consolidate software and easily visualize the full customer journey: from the ad that inspired a customer to contact your business to all of his or her interactions with sales and support.

Our latest updates have brought unlimited form tracking onto our Marketing plans as well as live chat on Marketing and Contact Center plans. You can access introductory pricing for chat if you activate it now through the end of the year, which is $19/user for Marketing plans and $15/user for Contact Center plans.

We also offer numerous free support resources and live trainings. Visit our training calendar anytime to see what’s on deck, and look out for our monthly Academy series, where you can work interactively with a CTM coach to learn everything you need to get started on our platform.

Whether you’re new to CallTrackingMetrics and could use our help getting ramped up quickly, or want a dedicated team to help you work through a complex set-up, our professional services team is available for additional support. You can save time and resources with our Fast Track Packs, and we also offer incentives to switch to CallTrackingMetrics and save. Contact our sales team to learn more.

Last but not least, you can unlock annual savings on any CallTrackingMetrics account by pre-paying your monthly subscription for the year. Visit your plan page to see your savings and make the switch!