Understanding the “CSI” of Marketing: CallForensics™

No, we’re not referring to those hyper-real crime shows drenched in outrageous, unrealistic colors with sexy, model-esque stars that could be masquerading as runway models rather than “homicide detectives.” The “CSI” we’re talking about has to do with the world of marketing – specifically the area of Call Tracking — and it’s known as CallForensics™. So forget what David Caruso or the gorgeous Lucy Lawless may have taught you on CSI: Miami… we’re going to a whole different place in “investigative analysis.”

More sophisticated methods of Call Tracking, such as CallForensics™, provide web history (when available) and go further by analyzing the call and providing context and relevancy.

The Benefits of CallForensics™

The most important thing to remember about CallForensics™ is that the process analyzes different aspects of a call in order to understand the source of the call, reason for the call, who should answer the call and even what was discussed during the call. Indeed, by analyzing the conversation, we can determine a great many things such as:

Knowing where a call originated
Understanding the context of the call
Determining if it was a wrong number
Determining if there’s a sales opportunity
Deciding if the caller can be “segmented” for further “nurturing”

Now let’s take a closer look at the primary benefits CallForensics™ offers the world of modern marketing…

Disqualifies Unwanted Leads Quickly – An incoming call from a marketing campaign using a tracked number doesn’t automatically count as a conversion or lead; as a matter of fact, calls that last 10 seconds or less are likely wrong numbers or considered “irrelevant.” CallForensics™ takes this into account and creates another metric for “bad calls.”
Measures the Presence of Your Competition – Queries can be set up that “listen” for the names of your competitors in telephone conversations, and when one is mentioned CallForensics™ can send email alerts, log the call and even generate real-time reports to map which competitors are being talked about… and how many times.
Uses “Tag Clouds” – CallForensics™ creates a “tag cloud” of every call, which is a visual representation of text data that is used to depict keyword metadata from phone calls. In so doing, free-form text is visualized – the larger the text appears in the tag cloud, the more prominent the word was in the conversation. This is an effective and quick way to review incoming calls.
Bridges the Gap Between Product Manager and Sales Team – Through the power of CallForensics™, product managers set up queries to “listen” for key product names and terms and when the sales department takes an incoming phone call in which the conversation matches the query, the product manager will be notified of the call details.
Acts as a Great Tool for Sales Managers – As we have been hinting at, CallForensics™ provides an enormous amount of data to help sales managers understand call volume, length, context and conversion opportunities. By going a step further and using dashboard reporting, sales managers are able to better manage staff by optimizing the number of salespeople and ensuring they are productive.

There are, of course, more benefits to utilizing CallForensics™, but what’s most vital to keep in mind is that at its core is the marketing tactic that makes the most of every dollar: Call Tracking. From tiny startups seeking to optimize search advertising to multi-billion-dollar corporations looking for the most lucrative leads, businesses are finding that Call Tracking provides unprecedented insight into the dollars spent on online advertising and marketing campaigns.