As an advertiser, you’ll profit from learning how to increase call quality from pay per call advertising campaigns.
To begin with, you need to know that there is constant tension between call quality and call quantity. For example, some media channels have the capability to drive a tremendous quantity of calls, but the call quality is so poor that you need a filtering device to sort them out.
This won’t necessarily make those media channels unprofitable. But testing is necessary to determine the economics. The good news is that the metrics are all apparent which allows you to tweak the bits and pieces of the pay per call campaign in order to increase call quality and the ultimate profitability of the channel.
How to Filter Call Quality for Pay Per Call
If you are using a media channel which is driving loads of calls, such as SMS, click-to-call, affiliates, autodialing, etc. you are most certainly going to want to filter those calls before they hit your call center. The best defense is in attempting to improve call quality by altering your message. E.G. If you have specific qualification criteria, make it obvious in the creative. Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to deal with call quality issues after the call has begun.
One the call has been initiated, a wonderful filtering device is the IVR (Interactive Voice Response system). An IVR will prompt callers to press keys on their keypad in order to speak to the ‘correct agent’. By carefully crafting the questions in your IVR, you can eliminate most of the callers who do not qualify for what you are selling and get rid of them before they cost you even more money by tying up your call center.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you are selling legal advice to people at risk of foreclosure. Your ad says ‘Call Now to Learn How to Avoid Foreclosure’. Let’s assume you have sent this message to a million cell phone users and you expect 0.1% of them to respond via click-to-call. That’s a thousand phone calls. Do you really want all those calls putting pressure on your call center? Probably not. At least not before they have been filtered. So you put an IVR in place. The first question your IVR asks them is ‘If you’d like to speak with someone about avoiding foreclosure, press 1, otherwise press 2‘. That weeds out many of the people who don’t even know why they clicked-to-call. Next, your IVR asks ‘If you are currently in foreclosure, press 1, otherwise press 2‘. Voila! This simple device has saved you mucho moola by eliminating most of the unqualified callers,enabling your agents to stay focused on closing deals.
You can see how easy it is to use an IVR to filter call quality for pay per call advertising. You can eliminate the cost of handling most of the poor quality calls with your live agents. Now all you need to do is monitor the metrics, evaluate the economics and tweak the campaign elements until you are happy with the balance between call quantity, and call quality.
By Benny Traub
