Tracking Touch-Tone Opportunities

Tell us about yourself and your company. I’ve always been in the medical field—mainly surgical medicine. I was previously vice president with Einstein Industries, whose specialties were Web strategies for doctors, dentists, and lawyers. In December 2008 I opened eMediaNode, where I have broadened my services, though still focusing on the dental and medical communities. For a dentist, eMediaNode might work on a Web-site conversion, search engine optimization, video production, or even direct mail or advertisement copy. We’re fairly small, with about 40 to 45 clients and 12 people on staff. We’re trying to be the suite that helps clients understand where their business is coming from.

You offer a multitude of services. Why’d you bring on an additional piece of technology—to gather leads—for your own business and for your clients? Ten years ago at Einstein, I recognized I needed a solution and brought on ATG. Before, we were not tracking phone calls. Any time you talk to doctors and dentists and you ask if they track calls, they say, “Yes, we track everything.” In reality, they track very little. They might ask a customer, “How did you find out about us?” If the customer responds, “the radio,” for instance, doctors should go further and ask, “What time? What channel? And did you go to our Web site?” They don’t ask those additional questions so they don’t record leads properly. If we weren’t tracking phone calls, many times we’d be missing the bulk of the traffic from our Web site. We once thought “communication” was an email from a Web site. Today, many people call while looking at the Web site. If we can’t track the phone call, and gain insight from it, we might miss an important opportunity. 

So what solution did you implement at eMediaNode? We implemented ATG Call Tracking in March 2009. We did review other companies with similar services, but we found ATG’s customer service elements to be good. The implementation was very simple; they have a nice interface where you can easily input a call-tracking number on your Web site. We’re able to monitor the calls coming in directly from our contact forms. The results have been great for us—and also impressive for our clients who we arm with ATG Call Tracking. For example, one of our clients based in Atlanta receives about 40 contact forms a month, but they receive 140 phone calls. If they weren’t tracking those phone calls, there’s a chance they could miss 100 Web-site leads. 

What are the biggest benefits? It helps manage accounts and it helps me with renewal time.… [It’s] much easier for [users] to see a return on investment with eMediaNode. Call Tracking enables managers to not only see the end results and diagnostic details of phone calls, but it provides companies an immediate way to evaluate staff handling phone calls. Often in this space—elective medicine—we are dealing with fee-for-service–type patients. An event for a patient runs at the very least $300. If you miss a phone call, or an opportunity, that’s huge. Listening in on phone calls, especially repeat callers, you can gauge a prospect’s level of interest and put them in a particular list. In using the call tracking to evaluate my staff, I can script FAQs and have available the 10 most-often-asked questions for them to give callers. 

When looking at tracking results, the main thing I look at is the volume from a Web site. A Web caller has a completely different perspective of your business than a caller not familiar with the site. Those callers need to be handled differently. The Internet is like a drive-thru window: “I want my meal—hot, fast—and I’m outta there.” Average visitors spend 30 seconds or less on your site. If you aren’t able to give the call-to-action message fast enough to the customer you’ve lost your opportunity. If you knew that was a $50,000 deal on the phone, you wouldn’t put the person on hold or miss the call, would you? Not only does the site have to be compelling, but it’s helpful to know where visitors come from, how they came, and what keywords they used (and in what order). Did they return to the homepage? Did they go to the “Contact Us” page? And, lastly, did they call us? If so, I want to know what time of day, their phone number, how long the call lasted, and I want a recording of the call. If I can’t measure all those from my Web site, I have a hole in my strategy.

FIVE FAST FACTS

How old is the implementation? I originally worked with ATG back in 2003 at Einstein Industries. The contract with ATG at eMediaNode began in March 2009.

Who was involved in the decision process? I was the only one involved.

What’s been your best CRM idea? Pointing out to customers specific calls that they need to listen to from Call Tracking.

Biggest surprise about ATG Call Tracking? The per-minute charge when I go over my bucket allowance.

Anything you’d change if you had to do it all over again? Better contract terms from the beginning.

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