How Can Call Tracking Help My Small Business

Call tracking is the most cost efficient way to analyze the telephone contact activity within your company. The number of call tracking services that can implement a tracking system for you has made this effective monitoring process available to many small businesses. When these systems were new only the large companies that could afford the underlying telephony and computer hardware needed to implement the processes. Today, trusted third party service providers shoulder the hardware and maintenance costs associated with the systems for small businesses and forward activity with analysis reports to their clients on the phone numbers assigned to them. Tracking systems began as a way to measure the success or effectiveness of sales campaigns and provides that information to advertisers, but the uses have expanded into other areas such as customer service and incident tracking.

Call tracking begins with adding a unique number to each incoming call. This unique number can be a specific phone number given in ads or contact information sites or code tagged on a link that brings the consumer to your business. When the tracking is associated with an internet web site, a line of code containing tracking numbers needs to be embedded in each and every one of the web pages on the site. Once these numbers are in place all calls directed to those numbers are run through a switch that recognizes the ID numbers and passes the calls on to the appropriate department or person.

The incoming call is recorded; all available information on the contact is gleaned from the phone line and used to create a data record in the data base the service provides. It only takes seconds and the information is available to your Customer Service Representatives (CSR) via their workstation connection to the remote call tracking center. The notes the CSR enters onto the page will be universally available the next time the customer calls.

You can also do incident management through a call tracking system. By virtue of the fact that every call is recorded that comes in on the designated telephone numbers or tagged web page connection this is an excellent place to track the inception and progress of incidents related to the client. When a customer calls your business with an issue or problem an entry is made on their data sheet. The person taking the call can write in information on the call with a pending date for the record to be looked at for a follow up call. The amount of time and effort in addition to the customer satisfaction at being recognized and their issues remembered is tremendous to people. Through flagging the record for follow up the number of incidents that "fall through the cracks" and are left uncompleted can be significantly reduced with the use of a call tracking service or system.

Knowledge based information can be programmed to be automatically made available to the CSR so they can quickly and knowledgeable respond to inquiries or issues. A prioritizing rule can be programmed into many call tracking software systems allowing you to sort calls by order of importance.