Managing customer relationships is now all about data.
Savvy businesses understand the importance of this change, and that’s why the CRM software industry is booming.
The options are numerous and the competition fierce.
A CRM tool can be a force multiplier. To work properly, you need to populate it with the right data.
We live in a digital age, but a great amount of business still takes place outside of your CRM. Video meetings and phone calls might take place in a world of their own, but they produce data. Data that is not properly logged in your CRM. This creates gaps in your customer profile. By not employing CRM call tracking, you are essentially crippling yourself.
Why Is a CRM Necessary Today?
Over 74% of businesses in the United States have implemented a CRM system to manage their customer interactions efficiently. Knowing the benefits of a CRM, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
- Customer Focus: CRMs consolidate all customer interactions, providing a 360-degree view. With CRM call tracking and CRM call logs, this view extends to data from incoming and outgoing calls as well. You can then personalize communications, anticipate needs and cultivate stronger relationships.
- Team Alignment: Many businesses suffer from departmental silos. Invisible walls between different teams that hinder communication and alignment. CRMs can bring these walls down. Sales, marketing and customer service departments can access and share customer information on a real time basis. Everyone remains on the same page, This fosters a smoother collaboration and a more unified customer experience.
- Data-Driven Decisions: The mathematician Clive Humby said that data are the new oil. And he wasn’t wrong. Decisions not based on factual data can lead to disastrous results. With a CRM, you can alleviate that risk for your business. CRMs track customer interactions, analyze sales pipelines and measure campaign effectiveness. You can then allocate resources and make changes according to these valuable data.
- Automation: CRMs automate mundane tasks. They save time and labor and enable you or your staff to focus on more strategic activities.
- Improved Sales & Marketing: Not all leads are valuable. With a CRM, sales teams can prioritize those that matter, track progress through the sales funnel and close deals faster. Marketing teams can use customer data for targeted campaigns, personalization and measuring ROI.
- Scalability & Growth: As your business grows, you will discover that managing customer data becomes unwieldy. With a CRM, you can scale more effectively and accommodate an ever increasing customer base.
What is Call Tracking & How it Can Help You
Call tracking helps you understand the full customer journey. There are many paths that a customer follows before they pick up the phone to call you. Having a clear picture of them, will enable you to properly plan your marketing campaigns and sales tactics.
Call tracking works by assigning unique phone numbers to different marketing campaigns, websites or even individual ads. When a customer calls your business though one of these numbers, the call tracking system can record important data, such as:
- The caller’s phone number
- The caller’s location
- Date and time of the call
- Duration of the call
- The source, channel, campaign,keyword that led to the call
- Pages visited before and after making the call
In many cases, the call tracking software can create call transcriptions and summaries. You can then review calls, find out weak points and strengths and adjust your call handling techniques properly.
Call tracking provides you with valuable data and insights. You can see which marketing channels generate the most calls, which calls convert into sales and how well is your staff performing.
A New Era in Marketing Attribution
To understand what makes or breaks your marketing campaigns, you need proper marketing attribution processes.
Marketing attribution essentially tracks the various touchpoints a customer interacts with, (social media ads, website visits, email campaigns), before converting into a sale or a lead. It’s a mapping of the customer journey. By understanding that journey, you can optimize your budget allocation, improve campaigns, analyze customer behavior and enhance your remarketing.
With the touchpoints increasing as the digital and physical worlds start to merge, marketing attribution becomes harder. CRMs are able to tell you where your customers are coming from and why, but only if you feed them the relevant data. CRMs need to have access to the whole customer journey. And this of course includes phone calls and CRM call tracking.
How Can CRM Call Tracking Help You
- Never miss a lead
Attributing leads from phone calls can be difficult. A CRM call tracking integration solves this problem by automatically creating log data and keeping track of the source that led to the call. You will have clear visibility into which marketing channels, campaigns and efforts generate the most high-quality leads.
- Sales efficiency
By keeping and reviewing calls, you can see which ones are most likely to convert into sales. Then, you or your team can prioritize these calls or focus on going after the most high potential leads. Not to mention, you can always come back to these calls for sales coaching.
- Personalized customer interactions
CRM call logging has the potential to turn into a treasure trove of data. Sales and support teams can use these data for more personalized interactions with customers. They can refer to past purchases, inquiries or problems and foster better relationships.
- Improved customer service
A savvy customer service leader or business owner would absolutely dive into past call recordings. They are filled to the brim with insights that can help identify bottlenecks, issues with products and services or customer support processes.
- Better marketing ROI
With CRM call tracking you will be able to see which marketing channels bring you the most phone calls. Which ones work and which needs adjustment or scrapping. You will optimize budget allocation and improve your marketing ROI.
- Automated workflows
Say goodbye to manually logging calls, creating summaries or assigning team members. By integrating your call tracking software with your CRM, all these time consuming tasks will be done automatically.
How to Maximize your CRM Call Tracking
There are a multitude of call tracking tools out there. Picking the right one might seem like a daunting task. So here are the features that we consider necessary for an optimized CRM call tracking integration.
Call Recording
The Holy Grail of call tracking. As mentioned above, call recordings and transcriptions are a treasure trove of data. You can use them to improve your processes, evaluate your team and most importantly learn more about your customers. They provide training opportunities, cultivate better communication between sales and marketing and remove time waste. You will no longer need to rehash old talking points in new conversations with old callers. Truly, call recordings can be turned into a golden goose. And modern call tracking tools even offer AI generated call summaries that can save even more time.
Lead & Call Evaluation
Marketing and sales teams rely heavily on CRMs for lead qualification, nurturing them from marketing campaigns all the way to sale. Call tracking software can identify high-potential leads with a strong possibility of conversion. These tools use automated scoring systems (often 1-5 stars) based on call conversations, providing valuable insights into lead quality.
Don’t waste time manually updating your CRM – leverage the power of integration! If your call tracking software identifies a lead as unqualified, automatically reflect that score in your CRM. This ensures your CRM has the most up-to-date information for efficient lead management and avoids unnecessary work for your team.
Call Flows
An important part of the customer experience is the call flow. Customers have questions and they need answers fast and without much trouble. Any advanced call tracking tool will help you design smooth call flows and use keypad entries to create a unique experience for your customer. Call whispers can be useful for the call receiver too, since they will have information about the caller before even talking to them. Lastly, post-call surveys will help you gather even more data and tag phone leads.
CRM Tools with Integrated Call Tracking
There are a few CRM tools that offer call tracking features of their own. They save you the hustle of employing two different tools at the cost of diminished call tracking capabilities. Still, every business has its own needs, so we believe it would be beneficial to mention them.
- Hubspot
It’s ideal for small businesses that don’t have a large volume of calls to handle. Hubspot Call Tracking offers basic features like call logging and routing. It’s included in the Sales Hub plan, so if your call tracking needs aren’t great or you don’t rely on phone calls as much, then Hubspot CRM and call tracking might be a good bundle deal for you.
- Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a more sales-focused CRM. And so is its call tracking tool. Making sales calls from Pipedrive will save your team time, maintain a flowing pipeline of leads, record calls and avoid missed opportunities. Its analytics are also robust and might unlock some valuable insights for your sales efforts. Although a good combination, still Pipedrive doesn’t run the gamut of call tracking features that dedicated tools do.
- Zoho
Zoho call tracking is better suited to contact centers and customer service teams. You can collect all customer information in one place and enable your team to resolve tickets and questions faster. It keeps records of every call to help you assess call quality.
Nimbata Call Tracking and CRM Integration
As you can see, CRMs with integrated call tracking do exist and can be a good solution. But if you are looking to gain the maximum advantages possible, then a combination of a highly capable CRM and a dedicated, advanced call tracking software is the ideal solution.
Nimbata is such an advanced call tracking tool. It offers a full range of features that will help you with your CRM data enrichment process and make the best out of your phone marketing efforts. You can record calls and generate transcriptions automatically. Call whispers, voicemails, ID Display, greetings and keypad entries will make the lives of both your clients’ and your agents’ much easier.
You can take notes on your phone leads, score and evaluate them on a star classification system. This way you can focus more on qualified leads.
💡 Call Tracking Tips by Marketing Experts
We faced a challenge organizing calls in our CRM, not knowing if they were from new or existing clients. To fix this, we started using call tracking option for both new and repeat callers.
By sending data to our CRM based on whether it was a new or repeat caller, we could see exactly from which channels our new leads were coming from each month. This not only made reporting easier but also improved how we get new clients.
Now, with this clarity, we make better decisions and allocate budget into the channels that bring in more new clients, making our process of lead generation to work even better.
Call Tracking Data to send to your CRM
- Contact or Company Level
- Marketing Attribution Data: FBCLID, GCLID, Microsoft Click ID, UTM Parameters (UTM_Source, UTM_Campaign, UTM_Medium), Landing & Action Pages
- Caller Data: Caller Name, Phone Number, Location, Device Type, Digits Pressed (Keypad Entry Data)
- Call & Lead Scoring: Tags, Values, Custom Properties (Fields)
- Inbound Call Activity
- Call Data: Tracking Number Called, Destination Number, Post-Call Survey Data, Recording Link, Action Page, Call Outcome
Integrating Nimbata with Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Zoho is an effortless process thanks to Nimbata’s native integration feature. You can extract the maximum value out of these tools and grow your business.
You can see for yourself. Try Nimbata for free for 14 Days. No credit card required.
Takeaway
The world of business is much different than it was only a few decades ago. CRMs are almost no longer optional. They can be the building blocks of strong customer relationships. But they alone are not enough to capture the entire customer journey. Phone calls, even today, remain a vital touchpoint that many businesses fail to account for. Thus, they create blindspots ans gaps in their marketing planning and customer service efforts.
This is why a CRM call tracking integration is vital. It alleviates this problem by feeding your CRM with all the valuable call data. By integrating these tools, you gain a complete understanding of the customer journey and propel your business forward.