CallRail: Call Tagging

Hey, everybody, Adam Arkfeld with ParaCore, and in today’s video, we’re gonna be talking about call tags in CallRail. Call tags are awesome. We use them constantly. They’re different than the qualified lead tagging that we, that we’ve talked about in a previous video, and so today we’re gonna go all over tags and how we use them at ParaCore.

Alright, when you’re in your interface, you hover over the settings icon in the upper left. You hit that bad boy, and then, the bottom left, you’re gonna see tags, and here is the interface screen. So you have the tags and all their names. You can actually color code tags, and so that allows you to see, you know, if green is booked or something, that allows you to see faster that something was booked. You have enabled. You can actually disable tags, and then, when the tag was last used. So it’s nice to know last used, like, if you’re not really using a tag, you haven’t used it for six months or a year, you might just wanna disable the tag or remove it or kill it or something like that. So it’s a really nice little feature there.

And then down here you can add a tag. Now at ParaCore, we use tags really, really, really extensively. This is a core part of how we manage our PPC campaigns in the CallRail interface. So when you start a new CallRail account for a client or for yourself or whatever, there’s a number of default tags, and, at ParaCore, what we learned very quickly was that account managers started using tags differently, just under the accounts they were managing. They were using different terminology. CallRail uses opportunity, we prefer qualified lead, but, so account managers were just using a lot of different tags. It was very inconsistent, and in our case, a lot of the reporting and call tagging and management is done by different people. So it meant having an account manager that’s responsible for communicating with the clients. We might have an analyst that’s actually tagging the calls and then pulling them into reports, and then maybe the account manager’s going in and listening to a couple calls because, you know, they’re really curious about this account.

So we wanted to create a level, a baseline level of consistency amongst all of the different account managers and people in the account so that we had a level of consistency, and so what we did was we created a minimum number of call tags, a minimum call set, and here are the five that are in every account, so when we start a new account, we delete all the existing tags that CallRail has auto-created, and then we add our five tags and we use these, and then, we might consider using some of these other call tags. So the very first one is qualified lead, and that means that someone is calling in, and they are interested in the services. So if you’re an electrician and someone calls in and they need their ceiling fan hung up, they are a qualified lead. Now, if they need it hung up today, and they need emergency services, they’re still a qualified lead. Even if you’re not able to fulfill that sale, it gets a technician out to them. If they want it next week and you’re closed or you’re booked up or whatever or they don’t wanna pay the, the, not the service fee but the fee for your technician to get out there, then that is, that’s still a qualified lead. They just were not booked. So that’s the very first one.

CallRail uses opportunity, we like qualified lead. It’s just kinda more clear for us, and that’s probably the most important one because you can look at a 100 calls and say how many of those calls were qualified leads, and then, when we do our cost per qualified lead reporting, total number, total amount spent in AdWords, total number of forms, total number of qualified leads, we divide spend over that, and then, we have your cost per qualified lead.

The next that we use quite a bit is missed call. Missed call’s important because if you’re generating leads and they’re going to a number, and that number’s not being answered for whatever reason, that’s a major, major, major talking point that you should be having with your client because they’re paying to generate leads. So it might be that it’s after hours, which would happen a lot, so you might set up different call routing so that it goes to an overflow call routing center or it goes to other members of the team. You know maybe one person has a night that they’re on call. They might be, we work in a tour space a lot, so it might just be that they’re giving a tour and they’re not able to answer the call. That’s a big problem. Calls are coming through and they’re just not able to answer them. You’re generating leads but they can’t answer the call. That’s a bummer. So if people are missing calls, you know, it’s one thing if you’re generating a lot of activity and you’re seeing in AdWords a lot of calls are coming through, but it’s totally another if your client doesn’t even see them because they’re missing them, they think they’re solicitations, they don’t know who to call back, that’s a major problem. So missed call’s a tag that we use quite often. If you get a hundred calls, and we say, hey, let’s filter by missed calls and like, 80 of them are missed, big problem.

The next one is abandoned call. Now abandoned call is different from missed because an abandoned means that the caller didn’t really have a high intent to connect with you. They may have let it ring once or twice and then hung up and that’s an abandoned call. So it’s not really a conversation that you need to have with a client if there’s a lot of abandoned calls which would be kinda weird anyway but missed calls is another thing like a missed call might ring ten times like for a long time and then they just hang up and it never goes to voicemail or it may go into a call routing system and they hang up in the call routing system. It may go to voicemail and they hang up. So that’s the difference between missed call and abandoned call is basically intent from the lead and part of that’s subjective but it’s fairly easy to tell like if someone hangs up quickly we just use an abandoned call tag. If someone actually tries to connect like they’re hitting numbers in the call system and they just can’t get someone, they give up that’s a missed call.

Duplicate caller means someone’s calling back for you know in the case of an electrician, if someone’s calling back and they wanna change their appointment they’re gonna call and hit redial on their phone and then they’re gonna be a duplicate caller so we’re not gonna treat them as a lead because they’re really just a duplicate caller. They didn’t even really come through the call tracking system. So that’s what duplicate caller’s for and then other is basically any thing else. It might be vendors calling to try and get your business. It might be job applicants calling to scilicet business. It could be any number of things it’s like the catch all. And so when you’re running a campaign these five tags cover most everything. I mean you have a qualified lead there aren’t that many instances where they’re unqualified leads right? So I mean if you are an electrician you know maybe the scenario is like someone says I need outdoor landscape lighting and you only do electrical work in the house. So you need a landscape electrician that might be an example of a lead that’s not qualified but in reality we would probably just throw that under the other category take a note saying hey do you wanna add this negative to the AdWords campaign. And then go from there.

So you can pretty much get by with these five tags. But there are other tags that we still use a lot and account managers can add these at their discretion and they add these along with some variety of other ones. So if it’s an existing customer that’s kind of a duplicate caller but sometimes existing customers call and they’re just like calling to you know talk about whatever let’s say they’ve had services done months ago or it’s a professional services firm they just have the number saved in their phone they keep calling the tracking number. You know they might just be a duplicate caller slash existing customer. Learning opportunity means that a call came in and there was a scenario where the person answering the call needs, that call needs to be reviewed, that person needs to be trained and there needs to be a conversation with that individual answering the phone. Like they either were rude, they were having a bad day, they provided inaccurate information, the pricing was wrong, the service description was wrong, or the customer got really annoyed and the customer service was bad.

We actually have a client that spends about 15,000 a month in AdWords and Facebook and one of their call representatives was taking calls and saying oh we don’t offer this program you can get this program and this other school and they actually did offer the program and they were sending leads to another school which I’m not really sure I didn’t hear a follow up if it was intentional or not or if it was just ignorance but that’s a huge problem. So they implement a call tracking we’re monitoring a lot of the calls and we heard this call and it was like you know this is probably something you should talk to this person about or fire them ya know one of the two. So call monitoring so we use learning opportunity as a tag then we can just filter through and when we send our weekly check-ins we send a learning opportunity we download the audio and send it along with it. Voicemail means that someone called and left a voicemail. So you kind of have like call connected someone called and left a voicemail which is like a variation of a missed call and then you have a missed call and then you have an abandoned call so it’s like varying levels of engagement and call connections. So you know call connected, voicemail, missed call, abandoned call, so sometimes people throw it into voicemail.

Wrong number someone just called wrong number. Job applicant that’s obvious. Booked in the tourism industry when someone calls and they book on the phone we wanna know how many calls were actually booked. ‘Cause you can do a report on qualified leads and let’s say that you get 20 calls and ten are qualified leads but only four booked. I wanna know how many people booked then we’ll put the value of the booking in the value field because typically someone will say oh it’s gonna be $850 and then you put that in the value field so you can sort by booked look at the total value and then compare that against your investment and get a really good handle of ROI. So I really like the book tag but it only works if people are actually booking over the phone. If you’re doing lead gen for a professional services firm there’s not gonna be any sort of booking because you’re not really booking.

You might have set an appointment or something like that but you won’t even know if they become a customer until later. Alright and then the last ya know option is using tags to distinguish services or maybe even locations or geographies. So we have a number of businesses that offer different types of services so it might be that like we have a school that offers message classes, and they offer yoga, and they offer nutrition classes, and all these different things. So you might tag what service people are calling about so you have an idea of what services are getting the most activity. You can also then kind of associate that with adspend although you can pull in the campaign information in other ways but theoretically you can potentially associate with adspend like saying oh I spent $5,000 on this nutrition campaign and got this number of leads so that’s the cost per lead. That’s one way to do it as well.

So tags, professional services or geographies or something like that. It’s a pretty solid method. Alright so I realize this is not CallRails interface but I think the strategy behind using CallRail’s really important and a lot of times when there’s a system the processes and agreements amongst the staff and people using it are almost more important than the feature itself. And so for us those are the tags that we use we actually have full on descriptions of each of the tags. A qualified lead is a caller looking for the services that our client offers. Calls are tagged as qualified leads in the following instances, caller asks about services blah blah blah. So it describes each one. So we created a short document that describes those and what that allows us to do is then create consistency so that these all look the same. So the implementation of the tags is then seen when you are in the activity log right?

So we looked at the activity log in a previous video and this is the activity log for the same client. And what you see is that over here you have all of the tags, and these have not been tagged yet because they’re fairly recent. I’m filming this on January 30th and this is 28th and 29th so we haven’t just reviewed them yet and then it shows how they’re tagged. So this call was abandoned now it says unanswered it kind of already shows abandoned. This was a qualified lead. This says, Dan let me know this was a good lead, he called them back so the call came through the client missed the call then the client called him back it was a qualified lead and then the client communicated that to our account manager in a reporting meeting or some other way. So the nice thing is that you can track these things in a variety of different ways and this is one way where the call came through and then there was communication outside of CallRail and then the account manager tagged it.

Here’s a duplicate caller. This is a existing customer you know other existing customer, qualified lead, qualified lead, looking for a loan on a manufactured home. This call was abandoned, duplicate caller, so you have all of these tags so that’s great to see. And then if we do table settings here, qualified here so then we can say alright well this person was qualified and we don’t necessarily use this and this is the same color I believe so this is like a softer qualified. We don’t really use this qualified tagging system in CallRail. Now it is not a bad idea to use it we just got into the habit of not using it. But this actually allows you to get more data out of reports and see other insights within the CallRail platform.

We use the qualified lead tag because we run filters and we do most of our reporting outside of CallRail. So I might say filter by tag and then I’m gonna say I wanna see how many qualified leads we have I’m gonna apply that and then I will apply that filter and so we had three qualified leads in this time period and so here I mean I can make these qualified. I’m not going to activate call score which is a different thing. So these are three qualified leads right? We just don’t use them we use this so then it’s like alright well how many of our calls were, sorry my scrolling, were let’s say duplicate callers right. So I’m gonna hit duplicate caller I’m gonna hit apply and now I have three duplicate callers and so we use it because we wanna know a little bit with a little more granularity and a little bit more segmentation what types of calls are coming into our clients and how they’re being handled, if they’re being missed.

So a lot of times what might happen is someone calls and they hey we’re not getting any leads or something or they’re like oh what’s going on? And we might say alright let’s like see how many missed call there are. And if there’s a lot of volume, then you know here there’s not a lot of volume, but then you might say well hey man like four of your calls were missed like you missed four calls like obviously you need to work on that. So then you might set up a call flow or something along those lines. But managing a tag is really easy. This little x guy here takes it off you hit this plus and then you can add a tag so voicemail, I can remove that, then I can run reports on it.

So for ParaCore we primarily use the tagging in order to segment the data in a consistent way that’s then used for reporting and used to gather insights about the performance of the campaign. You can do a decent amount with this qualified piece but it’s kind of binary. It’s like it’s qualified or it’s not qualified and then it does show up in the reporting but it’s not to the extent that we needed at ParaCore and the extent that we want it. So that is the overview of the tagging system. That’s how we use it here at ParaCore. If you have any questions obviously please let me know but we will see you in the next video thanks.

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