Call Management

The Easiest Way to Get More Inbound Business Calls – Without Spending More Money

November 29, 2017 by Cassie Ciopryna 2 Comments

It’s true – it doesn’t have to cost a thing.

You need more inbound calls. More opportunities to make more sales. More prospects for additional revenue.

Obviously, that’s why you are reading this. “How do I do this?!” you’re asking. Ok, I’ll get to the point. It’s very simple, actually.

Are you ready?

via GIPHY

Find a magic lamp, rub it three times, and make your wish to the genie!

OK, OK, it’s obviously not that easy. Improving your business takes work and a bit of effort. You already know that; we know that. So, with the same effort, how can you effectively start receiving an influx of inbound calls?

Invest more marketing dollars into the avenues that are generating more inbound calls, and nix the ones that are under-performing.

It sounds pretty obvious, right? But how do you know how to make these crucial decisions?

By tracking your calls, you can quickly and easily see which marketing source(s) are driving the most phone calls. By evaluating your data over time, you can identify any trends and get a large enough sample size of data to determine what really is and is not working for you or driving true prospect calls into your office.

Let’s look at a real-world example from a CallSource client.

A hearing clinic was looking to generate more prospects without spending any additional marketing dollars. Because of course, you can always try to throw money at the problem and hope that works, but data-backed results work better—don’t you think?

This clinic has been a CallSource client for a number of years, so they had a great size of data to look back on. Since CallSource’s reports provide marketing transparency without an agenda, they were able to ensure that their marketing spend wasn’t being spent on underperforming marketing tactics.

The hearing clinic first wanted to verify if the advertising campaigns that they thought were strong performers were actually yielding the best returns. Determining how much a quality lead costs you across each campaign will allow you to weigh your return on investment of your marketing dollars.

Through CallSource’s metrics, the hearing clinic was able to identify that their newspaper campaign wasn’t returning as strong of a result as it had in the past (see graph below).

Once they realized this, they decided to reallocate the money they were spending on the newspaper and apply those dollars into their website instead. By reallocating this spend; they were able to generate more leads without spending any more money.

Do you know what your top-performing marketing sources are, or do you just think you know?

When it comes to improving your business, don’t leave it to guesswork. If you want to get more calls, and therefore more business, you will have to utilize real, unbiased data for your business to increase sales.

Please comment below with any additional tips or questions of your own. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to a CallSource Representative. We can’t wait to hear about how you improve, too.

6 Ways to Incentivize Sales When You Can’t Use Cash

November 21, 2017 by Stephanie Kurowski 1 Comment

Sure, cash incentives are great—but what are some more out-of-the-box incentive ideas for employees?

Whether trying to reach a new goal or maintain a current goal, an incentive motivates people to achieve higher results. This is especially true in the workplace. When employees feel their efforts are noticed and appreciated, they are driven to perform at their best.

Incentives not only motivate employees and boost morale, but incentives provide an opportunity for your employees to care and be more invested in your business. People care more about a situation if the outcome affects them; incentives allow people to have skin in the game. Let’s face it; work is more exciting when given an extra perk here and there!

An incentive does not necessarily mean extra money or cash payouts. Creative incentives can be equally effective as cash. Since these out of the box incentive plans don’t cost as much, you can give them more frequently—and frequency is key to creating excitement for team members.

So what are some non-cash incentives that can be implemented in your office?

No Cost Incentives

Best Parking Spot – While this may not work for everyone, if your office has limited parking (or a huge lot to traverse early in the morning), giving an employee the best-reserved spot for a certain amount of time is a nice perk. For example, the team member with the highest prospect call to appointment set ratio in a given week could receive the coveted parking spot for a designated amount of time.

Schedule Flexibility – Another no-cost incentive is to allow a team member to choose their schedule for a given day or week. Obviously, the schedule they pick should be within reason; if they prefer an earlier shift over the later shift, this could go a long way in recognizing an employee who has met their goals.

Employee of the Month – Awarding an employee of the month is an easy way to recognize top-performing employees. A monetary award can be given along with being named Employee of the Month, but even just being recognized for their efforts can improve employee morale. According to an article published in Harvard Business Review, one study found that simple recognition not only has “a powerful effect on those being called out, [but] it also has a significant impact on peers who see great work is rewarded.” An easy act of recognizing employees can have a big impact in the office.

Low Cost Incentives

Extra Time Off – Who wouldn’t love a little extra PAID time off? This could be anything from an extra vacation day, getting to leave two hours early (or come in two hours late for those non-morning people), or getting a long lunch.

Gift Cards/Coupons – Giving $20 to the local coffee shop, 50% off a house cleaning service, a free carwash, or tickets to a local event such as a county fair or concert are all great options. The possibilities are endless! If utilizing this type of reward, it is best to let the individual pick from some options. What motivates one person may not motivate another. For example, a gift card for a dog walking service may be exciting for a dog owner but not so much if the person doesn’t have a dog.

Catered Lunch – A catered lunch is a great reward when setting a team goal. Group incentives promote collaborative efforts and employees push each other to perform at higher levels. Team members begin to feel a sense of camaraderie when working together towards a common goal. Rewarding them as a group rather than individually strengthens their bonds.

Things to Consider

Before implementing any incentive program, conducting a needs analysis of the office is key. Below are a few items to ask yourself.

• What are you trying to achieve?
• What are your business goals?
• What is your team struggling with?

The plan you create should help address these questions/concerns. Also, the reward given should reflect the effort needed to meet the goal. Lastly, have fun with it!

For more incentive ideas and help achieving other business goals, subscribe to our blog, reach out to your dedicated CallSource representative, or contact us to get your own personalized business plan.

When it Comes to Improvement, One Automotive Department is Leading the Pack

November 20, 2017 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Do you know which department is improving the most every year for your dealership?

With the last quarter and the year soon coming to a close, it is a great time to examine how 2017 started off for car dealerships to properly prepare for the upcoming year and Q1. You are allocating budgets, putting 2018 plans in place and (hopefully) setting goals.

All future planning and decisions should be being made based off of real data that your dealership has been accumulating to make smart decisions to improve. In which department should you be investing more money? Where are there improvements to be made, and what areas of the business have been increasing? The good news is, things for auto dealers have been looking brighter since 2015.

Although appointments were up in all three departments, there is still one clear department that has been improving more than the others.

According to CallSource’s analytics data, appointments set during the first quarter have been steadily increasing in all three departments: sales, service, and parts, since 2015. Below are CallSource’s findings for 2017’s first quarter, which was the best yet for dealerships (^1,2,3,4).

10.5% of examined sales calls resulted in appointments; up 1.8 and 2.9 percentage points from 2016 and 2015 respectively.
9.6% of examined service calls resulted in appointments; up 2.9 and 5.1 percentage points from 2016 and 2015 respectively.
0.8% of examined parts calls resulted in appointments; up 0.5 percentage points from 2016 and 2015 equally.

Although appointments were up in all three departments, there is still one clear department that has been improving more than the others.

Inbound calls AND appointments for service lead the growth in inbound bookable prospects. 24.6% of bookable calls during 2017’s first quarter were for the service department – compared to 14.6% in 2015. To compare, sales appointments were at 12% this year, and 12.7% in 2015. So what may be the reasoning behind this increase in service departments capturing more appointments year over year? Your dealership should be paying more attention to Fixed Operations for 2018!

Fixed Operations departments are the way to keep your new customers coming back and to guarantee that they’ll want to purchase from you again. You know that competition between dealerships is never going away, especially when it comes to sales. Customers don’t yet have any loyalty to a particular dealership—they just want the best price and value for the car that they want.

National Automobile Dealers Association’s (NADA) 2016 data also coincides with CallSource’s findings—they found that while a percentage of dealerships’ total gross profits fell in vehicle sales departments, they have risen in service and parts.

Bottom line – you should be investing in your service department. Don’t try to cut costs simply because your sales may not be performing quite as high as you’d like. Throwing more money into sales initiatives isn’t the answer; those expenses can be better allocated to Fixed Operations. Look at the data before making these key decisions for the upcoming year.

We’ll be elaborating on this topic soon—stay tuned for more insights on how to empower your service department to run at its highest capacity and to keep customers coming back.

References:
^1. Based on CallSource call detail records of auto locations from January 2015 to March 2017 (excludes Auto-Media)
^2. Auto locations where CallSource’s Leadscore product is active and there is at least 1 examined call (aka leadscored call)
^3. Bookable Sales calls include calls where the Leadscore call type is “Sales” with and ECP result of “Appointment Set” or “Missed Opportunity”
^4. Sales Appointments are calls where the Leadscore call type is “Sales” and the ECP result is “Appointment Set”

How One HVAC and Plumbing Company Added Over $40,000 to Their Bottom Line in 3 Months with Call Coaching

November 9, 2017 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Just because your call handlers may already be good, doesn’t mean they don’t have room for improvement.

We Care Plumbing, Heating Air and Solar, is a Nexstar member and an award-winning Heating, Cooling, Solar Power and Plumbing Contractor serving Southern California homeowners. Based in Murrieta, California, We Care provides furnace, air conditioner, solar power and plumbing services to their primary service areas.

The business opened in 2000 and currently has roughly 200 employees, about 20 of these being in the call center. Although We Care has been in business for 17 years, when CallSource’s call tracking and performance management system was introduced to them at a Nexstar event, it was evident that CallSource provided solutions that they needed.

We Care signed up with CallSource in late 2016 in order to get further insight into their marketing performance, recapture money from missed opportunities and, most importantly, utilize our employee performance tracking tools – CallSource’s Telephone Performance Analysis (TPA) report and Call Coaching services.

Challenge

We Care set a goal in 2017 to have more training-enablement tools to gain better insight into their call handlers’ performance, as well as grow their call center. With their new Call Center Manager, Shannon Woolson, joining the team in January, there were lots of changes to be made.

Without a proper performance management tool in place, they couldn’t quite benchmark their current performance and set clear goals and expectations for the current call center team members.

We Care also wanted to create team unity – there was a want and need to bring everyone together to work on call handling skills and behaviors, encourage team rapport and build a collaborative environment.

A universal problem We Care had was that enough incoming leads were coming in, but there were too many missed opportunities. Their motto “Do not let the customer go” was shared from management with the call handlers. They had enough installers and sales team members to go out to homes, but weren’t setting enough appointments internally to even get to capacity.

Solution

In January of 2017, just a few months after onboarding with CallSource, We Care implemented Call Coaching for their current 12 call handlers.

Time management was one of the deciding factors for Woolson, who has over 25 years’ experience in call center management. She noted that even if a manager somehow thinks they have time to sit and listen to employees’ recorded calls, it would be a lot of work to listen to every call for even only five handlers. This time can be used much more effectively elsewhere, and in reality there isn’t enough time – there are other tasks to concentrate on. “You can’t do that,” she said, “so [coaching] gives you an opportunity to focus on the business and on your team and have somebody else take care of that piece for you. [They] give you a snapshot of what’s really going on and who needs better improvement.”

New to her position with We Care, Woolson didn’t have too much input or knowledge on her call handlers to see what areas they needed extra help in, or where they were making or missing the mark. Call Coaching allowed her to focus on important managerial tasks, while enabling her to quickly identify improvement opportunities. Woolson used CallSource’s Telephone Performance Analysis (TPA) score cards and their coaching sessions.

Shannon was very pleased with the level of tools available to her from CallSource. This was her first experience with CallSource; as a senior call center manager, she had used other call tracking companies in the past. Shannon noted that they didn’t have any type of coaching available – only basic notifications and recordings. “It wasn’t to a level of coaching and training that we’re offered [with CallSource]. I love that piece of it.”

Metrics Evolution

Employees began scheduling and attending their Call Coaching sessions in February 2017.

Shannon makes sure to be involved with the team’s coaching sessions as well, since coaching is not completed with each session, but must be followed up on and engrained in the employees on a day-to-day basis as well. As the call handlers’ manager, she knows that it is also a part of her duties to guarantee that the call handlers are retaining and following through with the skills they are being coached on during their sessions in the office.

She says, “Yeah, you could save time if you just never listen to any recordings and hope that your agents are doing the right thing on every call, but the reality is, everybody gets in a hurry.” Empathy is lost, along with skills for overcoming objections, which Shannon noted her team did not have when she took over at We Care.

“This (Call Coaching) helps shed light on those areas of opportunity for development. Also, it helps fix the problem and save time down the road versus ignoring the problem and things are going to take more time.”

Shannon not only has her CallSource advisor at her disposal to help set goals and stay on track, but she has open communication with We Care’s call coach as well. Shannon takes the time out of her schedule to sit in on every team session and listen to the calls that Mary, their call coach, has coached on. This way, Shannon can continue coaching within the office in the interim between sessions and make sure her team is able to maintain their skills and call quality that they are working on.

Results

After only three months of Call Coaching, We Care improved their overall conversion rate from 74% to 78%. With an average of 151 calls per month while on coaching, this means that based on CallSource’s average blended ticket price of $450, they booked an average of 118 appointments per month, adding over $14,000 per month to their bottom line (over $42,000!).

Of the progress so far with their Call Coaching program, Shannon says “they seem to be better agents because of it.”
“Overall,” she says, “people are sometimes loaded up with their appointments and [think], ‘Ugh, it’s something else to do,’ but once training is concluded, they’re glad they did it.”

For managers who think that their employees are already performing at the best they can, Shannon says “That’s not the case. There’s always room for improvement.” She and her employees proved already within 3 months of coaching that there is room for improvement, and they plan on continuing at this same pace in the coming months.

Software vs. Human Call Processing: What’s the Difference?

November 7, 2017 by Kevin Dieny Leave a Comment

Software and human call processing have significant differences for businesses who rely on the accuracy of phone call information.

The difference between software speech analytics and human call processing is wide, but there are improvements. Technology has come a long way in the past 40 years making enormous leaps in speech analytics. Companies that find the newest system are quick to patent and secure their advances as the demand for speech-enabled devices grows year after year. Mobile devices are increasingly adding advanced speech analytics to enhance productivity, make driving safer, and texting hands-free.

“With the introduction of Apple’s Siri and similar voice search services from Google and Microsoft, it is natural to wonder why it has taken so long for voice recognition technology to advance to this level, and we wonder, when can we expect to hear a more human-level performance?” – Baker, Huang, and Reddy

The goal of speech analytics for businesses is to affordably identify what happened on a phone call, if the caller a missed opportunity, and what this information can do to help both marketing and sales closing going forward. The goal of the patent creators is to be a little more accurate and have fewer errors than their competitors to have a superior product. These goals clash with the largest innovators of speech analytics technology whose goal is to make speech analytics better than human processing.

“Speech analytics in the next 40 years will pass the Turning test.” – Baker, Huang, and Reddy

There are three major problems that software speech analytics has to overcome: background noise, echo or reverberation, and the accent or dialect variations. Major scientific theories, algorithms, and models have taken shape around advances in modern computing allowing innovative ideas to finally become a reality. In the following sections, we will discuss these three major problems that you should consider if you are interested in call processing.

“The basic learning and decoding algorithms have not changed substantially in 40 years.” – Baker, Huang, and Reddy

To properly discuss how the differences impact businesses who utilize speech analytics to score and process phone calls we need to know their WER. The Word Error Rate (WER) is a standardized model of assessing how well software performs at speech analytics. “The word error rate (WER) is a good measure of the performance of dictation system, and a reasonable approximation of the success of a voice search system.” – Senior

“The best commercial speech analytics systems achieve 30.5% error.” – Case

1. Background Noise: How well do Apple, Google, and Microsoft perform?

Figure 1.

Background noise is a contributing factor to the ability to clearly and accurately transcribe a conversation during a phone call. Sources of noise include wind, crowds, music, and even screaming children. Ideally, a phone call is placed by the caller in a quiet place where they can think and talk coherently.

That’s not always the case.

Looking above at figure 1, the ability for software speech analytics to accurately translate what is being said by the caller in noisy environments corresponds to high WER, or high error rates. When the caller knows that they have difficulty being heard by the person on the other side of the line, they will attempt to compensate, and this is called the Lombard effect. The Lombard effect often makes software recognition even more difficult because the caller’s speech fluctuates:

The loudness of the caller’s voice goes up and down.
Pitch changes in the caller’s voice.
The harmonic rate of words changes for the caller.
The duration and pausing of syllable intensity shifts for the caller.

The big takeaway of whether or not noise is a consideration for you and your business is how often has noise impacted your companies calls in the past, and what are you going to do about it?

“Results of our study shows that performance of cloud-based speech analytics systems can be affected by jitter and packet loss; which are commonly occurring over WiFi and cellular and mobile network connections.” – Assefi

If even 25% of your businesses phone calls occur from cell phones, your business has been negatively impacted by noise in some degree – but it is ultimately up to you to put a dollar value on that expense. Having human call processing analysts screen and listen to your calls is one way to mitigate the factor of noise in calls.

2. Echo and Reverberation: Building Robust Call Handling Systems

Source: https://www.kirtland.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2000429478/

Software speech analytics software must account for the direction of the voice. A simple way to understand this problem is to carry on a conversation in an empty and hardwood floored house. If you start to hear your voice echo off the walls and floor, it interrupts what you are saying. In the image above, the Airforce tests echo and reverberation in an echo-free room. As you can see, people typically won’t be calling your business from this type of place.

Imagine how difficult it would be to hear someone’s voice with an echo also being picked up by the phone microphone and relayed over the call. Hello… hello… hello…

The best takeaway from echo and reverberation I can give you is that to train software on how to account for the doubling effect of sounds from echo, recordings of human scored calls are used over and over again, every single day to add to training data. As of today, software is 100% dependent upon calls that were already scored by humans to raise their day-to-day accuracy of phone call transcriptions using these steps:

A human call analyst is used to evaluate how well a system is at diagnosing echo and sound reverberation in the caller’s environment.
After the phone call has been scored and transcribed by a human call analyst, the information is added to software speech analytics training data.
The speech software will then attempt to transcribe the call and differences between the human transcription and the software transcription produces a WER rate.
Rinse and repeat… over and over again millions of times to lower the average WER rate.

Human call analysts are trained and vetted using a similar school of thought using these steps:

Human call analysts vetted with years of call handling experience are put through a school with hours of training with typical calls, difficult calls, and how to avoid word errors.
CallSource human call analysts are given amazing opportunities to work from their chosen locations, they are screened and trained on the best practices in the industry and are motivated to improve their accuracy rates continually.
Once human call analysts are certified, they begin taking phone calls and work with mentors and colleagues to ensure that processes are being followed.
Rinse and repeat… on their schedule, delivering the lowest WER rates in the industry.

“The network must not only learn how to recognize speech sounds, but how to transform them into letters, this is challenging, especially in an orthographically irregular language like English.” – Alex Graves

Graves (quoted above) has researched for improving models of speech analytics with neural networks and gives insight into how speech analytics output can defer in decoding single sentences:

Example #1

Speaker: TO ILLUSTRATE THE POINT A PROMINENT MIDDLE EAST ANALYST IN WASHINGTON RESOUNDTS A CALL FROM ON CAMPAIGN.

Speech Recognition Software: TWO ALSTRAIT THE POINT A PROMINENT MIDILLE EAST ANALYST IM WASHINGTON RECOUNCACALL FROM ONE CAMPAIGN.

Example #2

Speaker: ALL THE EQUITY RAISING IN MILAN GAVE THAT STOCK MARKET INDIGESTION LAST YEAR.

Speech Recognition Software: ALL THE EQUITY RAISING IN MULONG GAVE THAT STACKR MARKET IN JUSTIAN LAST YEAR.

Source: Towards End-to-End Speech Recognition with Recurrent Neural Networks by Alex Graves

Both software speech analytics and human call analysts require robust systems to ensure that WER rates are as low as possible. WER rates directly contribute to businesses missing phone calls and misunderstanding what actually happened on phone calls. End to end speech software struggles to deal with echo and state of the art solutions continue to fall short the worse the noise and echo are in the environment of the caller.

3. Accents and Dialects: The curveball of call handling

Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/XEde2IUYpj3Hi/html5

According to Wikipedia, the United States has over 30 major dialects of the English language. For native-born Americans, these apply to the geographic location you are born and raised, but also to the dialects of your parents. Assuming that all of your business calls are from callers with a dialect that software has trained on, you should be looking a moderately high but acceptable WER rate for accents. The diversity of your callers weighs heavily on the accuracy outcomes of speech analytics WER rates. You would see a shocking rise in WER rates for callers that come from a distinct dialect or who carry a unique accent separate from what the software has been training on.

“The performance of speech analytics systems degrades when speaker accent is different from that in the training set. Accent-independent or accent-dependent recognition both require collection of more training data.” – Kiu Wai Kat

Accents and dialects represent a curve, such as a curveball, as utterances are spoken, and software attempts to accurately decode the words into coherent sentences. The degrading accuracy rates contribute to large gaps and word errors which may completely miss what was said or intended. When the outcome of what happened is dependent on a single word… and that word is usually interpreted incorrectly; the consequences are detrimental for businesses.

All of the large studies on accents point out that speech analytics has been unable to conquer the British English speech systems of Scotland, and with hilarious results (see the video below, video contains adult humor)

Source: BBC Scotland, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hbfjw

Only small progress has been made in dealing with different dialects and accents as these interrupt the way that words sound to software speech analytics. The systematic approach required for robust software speech analytics is challenged by the need for a system that is adaptable to a large variance of pronunciation.

Human call analysts also struggle with accents and dialects unfamiliar to them. However, one huge advantage that CallSource has is to select and hire human analysts who are familiar with those accents. There are call analysts who understand large sets of accents and dialects with ease and they are fully capable of the challenge.

“The error rate from accent speakers is around 30.89%” – Liu Wai Kat

The quantifiable reasons that accents are difficult to classify, transcribe and decode have to do with the acoustic differences between accent groups. Those differences are difficult to account for while still accounting for noise and echo in the environment. For ESL (English as a second language) speakers who have thicker accents, the problems are compounded if they are not in ideally quiet and low echo environments.

The detection of key phrases during a call is vitally important to understanding what happened during a call. How those key phrases are used is how that call will ultimately be classified by the system. Marketing and sales are unable to move forward effectively without accurate information of what happened during an initial phone call into the business. Advances in the improvement of accents will have to be developed in every accent and dialect individually and added to training data collectively to overcome the problem of high WER rates.

Conclusion

You should ask yourself: are you clever enough to handle high phone call accuracy rates? Can you make a difference in your business by knowing what happened on every single call? Can you achieve the results you need even with pages of word errors?

We think you are clever.

We know that you could turn that knowledge into practical business decisions for the future, and by those decisions, you can make waves in your market. Assuming you do not want to deal with all of these issues, just go back to doing what you do best:

Asking the caller to call you back from a quieter place over 30% of the time.
Asking the caller to move into a room with fewer echoes over 30% of the time.
Having to task a sales or service employee to re-listen to 30% of phone calls from a region with specific accents.
Asking the caller to call you back from a landline or a location with better reception.

Figure 2.

The differences between software-based speech analytics and human call analysts comes down to how much of an impact accuracy makes in your business. Talk to your appointment setters and ask them if they ever have trouble hearing what people are saying because it’s a good bet that if they have ever had trouble, your call processing has had trouble.

Learn more about CallSource’s Human Call Processing and Monitoring Services

Article References

Assefi, Mehdi, et al. “An Experimental Evaluation of Apple Siri and Google Speech analytics.” An Experimental Evaluation of Apple Siri and Google Speech analytics, www.cs.montana.edu/izurieta/pubs/sede2_2015.pdf.
Hannun, Awni, et al. “Deep Speech: Scaling up End-to-End Speech analytics.” [1412.5567] Deep Speech: Scaling up End-to-End Speech analytics, 19 Dec. 2014, arxiv.org/abs/1412.5567.
Kat, Liu Wai, and P. Fung. “Fast Accent Identification and Accented Speech analytics.” 1999 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings. ICASSP99 (Cat. No.99CH36258), 1999, doi:10.1109/icassp.1999.758102.
Senior, Andrew, et al. “An Empirical Study of Learning Rates in Deep Neural Networks for Speech analytics.” An Empirical Study of Learning Rates in Deep Neural Networks for Speech analytics – IEEE Conference Publication, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6638963/.
Xuedong Huang, James Baker, and Raj Reddy. 2014. A historical perspective of speech analytics. Commun. ACM 57, 1 (January 2014), 94-103. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2500887
Zhang, Ying, et al. “Towards End-to-End Speech analytics with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.” [1701.02720] Towards End-to-End Speech analytics with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, Cornell University, 10 Jan. 2017, arxiv.org/abs/1701.02720.

3 Things That Will Make Transferring Your Call Tracking Carrier Simple

November 3, 2017 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Want to start tracking your marketing numbers but afraid it’ll be too much of a hassle to switch carriers?

So you’ve decided to make the move over to CallSource for all of your call tracking and performance management needs, but you don’t want to deal with the hassle of re-publishing all of your marketing numbers. Have no fear! CallSource can easily port over your existing call tracking numbers from your previous provider into CallSource without any loss of service.

Just follow these 3 easy steps and you’ll be well on your way to seeing results!

Step 1: The Proper Paperwork

The proper paperwork will depend on whether you wish to port in local numbers or toll free numbers to CallSource. (Not sure which is which? Hop on over to our FAQs page to find out!)

Fill out the LOA (Letter of Authorization) for local phone numbers, or the RespOrg (Responsible Organization) for toll-free numbers. These will be provided by your dedicated CallSource Representative(s). The proper paperwork gives your current provider authorization to release your numbers to CallSource.

Make sure that the information on the LOA and/or RespOrg match what your current provider has on file for your account.

Pro Tip: Request your CSR (or customer service record) from your current provider to ensure this process is as smooth as possible.

Step 2: Proof of ‘Ownership’

Provide your dedicated CallSource Representative(s) with a copy of a recent bill/invoice from your current call tracking provider. Make sure it includes your Account ID, Name on the Account, Billing Telephone Number, and Billing Address. Without the proper identification, the carriers may have a difficult time moving numbers – and we want to ensure this process is as quick and painless as possible for you!

Step 3: The Numbers

This is probably the easiest step, but often the most forgotten! Make sure you provide a Word Doc or Excel Spreadsheet with a list of the numbers you want to port over to CallSource. Don’t forget to include where you want them to ring to (probably your main office number) and where they’re currently published or where you will be publishing these numbers.

Pro Tip: Ask your current call tracking company to provide you with an excel spreadsheet with this information.

As a final security measure, we always recommend speaking to your current tracking or telephone provider company to see if there’s anything specific they require before they release your numbers to CallSource.

These steps may seem too good to be true, but it really can be as easy as 1-2-3!

If you have any questions, check out our FAQs page or contact our support team at support@callsource.com. We’re more than happy to walk you through the process!