Inbound Call Tracking:
What It Is, How it Works & Benefits

71% of customers expect to receive a personalized experience on their very first call. Learn how to track voice calls to meet their needs and earn their business for years.

Inbound call tracking is a key aspect of data-driven decisions. Yet, only a portion of call centers leverage the technology to its full potential. Find out what is call tracking, how it works, and why you should care to start making a difference today.

Key Takeaways:

• Inbound call tracking allows you to monitor and analyze customer calls based on aspects like content and outcome to deliver outstanding personalized service.
• Inbound call tracking leverages dynamic number insertion, tags, recordings, and transcriptions to analyze and categorize incoming customer calls.
• Inbound call tracking significantly impacts the ROI of inbound and outbound marketing campaigns, team efficiency, and overall operational clarity.

What Is Call Tracking in Inbound?

Inbound call tracking is a common feature of call center software and a strategy used by high-performing businesses to monitor and analyze incoming customer calls. It evaluates interactions based on factors including content, duration, outcome, etc.

Call tracking is particularly useful in industries where inbound customer calls are a core aspect of the sales and support process, such as SaaS, healthcare, real estate, etc. This allows businesses to optimize operations, improve experience, and boost revenue.

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How Does Call Tracking Work?

Inbound call tracking leverages multiple automated and manual processes to generate actionable data-based insights. This starts with properly categorizing a call via campaign-specific numbers and call tags to track source, topic, and outcome. 

The next step is to add context to the interaction via recording in a CRM or other software and writing/generating a call transcription and summary. These resources can later be used to evaluate agent performance and improve future calls.

Finally, the inbound call tracking process ends with analysis. Call center software can often automatically input and track specific call metrics via proprietary Analytics features, which can then be connected to 3rd party CRM and BI tools via integrations.

Types of Inbound Call Tracking

As mentioned in the previous section, inbound call tracking consists of multiple stand-alone activities that come together to form the process as a whole. In this section, we’ll discuss each of them in more detail and help you understand how to track calls.

Dynamic Number Insertion

Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) is a powerful automation feature that can dynamically change the phone number displayed on a website based on the visitor’s source. For example, someone coming from Google will see a different number than from an ad.

This is particularly helpful when it comes to evaluating the performance of a marketing campaign or identifying the source of an operational bottleneck based on the topic and channel of the most frequent customer support tickets.

Call Monitoring

Call monitoring includes listening to live or recorded calls to train agents and assess the quality of customer service, individual agent performance, or call scripts. You can do this in one of three ways – whispering, listening, and barging. 

Call whispering allows managers to guide new agents through calls without the customer’s knowledge. Listening lets them listen to interactions completely anonymously. Lastly, with barging, they can step in and offer help to the caller directly.

Call Tagging

Call tagging allows agents to categorize calls based on specific criteria, such as the nature of the inquiry, the outcome of the call, the marketing source, or a different custom metric. It’s often combined with call notes to provide context on the specific interaction.

Since tags and notes can be customized to suit the business’ needs, their key is enabling effective analysis and reporting. This is especially helpful in discovering underlying issues, identifying customer trends, and optimizing efficiency.

What Are the Benefits of Inbound Call Tracking?

Based on what we’ve discussed so far, you can probably see just how powerful inbound call tracking can be. But let’s not leave anything up to the imagination and talk specifics.

1. Maximize Conversions & Marketing ROI

Inbound call tracking is the best way to evaluate the efficiency of your campaigns in driving phone calls and conversions. By understanding which channels are most profitable, you can optimize strategy and budgets to maximize conversions and ROI.

2. Understand Your Target Audience Better

Call recordings and transcriptions from inbound call tracking efforts are key in gathering vital insights into customer conversations. By analyzing these, you can better understand customers’ key needs, preferences, and behaviors to personalize your service.

3. Improve Remarketing Campaigns

In an overlap between inbound and outbound, the insights gained from call tracking allow you to create better outbound cold and retargeting campaigns that address the needs and interests of your key target personas.

4. Boost Inbound Agent Performance

On top of your customers, inbound call tracking also helps you better understand your team’s performance, thanks to agent reporting. This lets you reward top performers, offer tailored training, and uncover operational inefficiencies at a company level.

5. Unite Your Inbound Operations with Integrations

VoIP Call tracking systems can connect with 3rd party CRM and Business Intelligence systems via existing or custom integrations over an open API. This helps centralize information and operations for all teams and improve efficiency.

How to Start Tracking Calls with CloudTalk

Getting started with inbound call tracking may seem overwhelming at first, but right now, it’s the easiest it’s ever been. Call center software like CloudTalk streamlines call tracking by automating large parts of the process with AI-powered features.

This includes:

• Call Recordings: Access call recordings, call history, and analytics directly from your browser and optimize your outbound calling strategy and targeting.
  
• Topic Extraction: Track agents’ discussions with customers to improve your communication strategy. Adjust scripts, boost campaigns, and reach your goals.
  
• Call Transcriptions: Automatically transcribe your calls with our AI conversation intelligence. Revolutionize the way you analyze and understand interactions.
  
• Sentiment Analysis: Get immediate feedback on your customers’ or leads’ moods and follow their sentiment shifts in real time.
  
• Automatic Summaries & Tags: Eliminate repetition, save up to 50% of your agents’ time, and boost efficiency with automatic post-call summaries.

So, what are you waiting for? Your customers are relying on you to deliver the best experiences, or they’ll take their business elsewhere. Every minute counts.