Ensuring The Call Tracking Numbers You Have Published are Clean
Don't let misdials affect your ad or direct response campaign
If you have every used Toll Free Numbers in your ad
tracking or direct response campaigns then you are familiar with the problem of
misdials. At the very least, misdials are a nuisance, and at their absolute
worse, they can cripple your phone system.
Even a few misdials a day can negatively impact the
performance of your sales team. As salespeople or call centers receive misdials, they slowly lose
their zeal for taking calls. Worse, certain agents may not answer a call
altogether 'knowing' it's a misdial. We must minimize misdials to a level that
when they do occur they are rare and unexpected.
Unfortunately, misdials are impossible to completely
eliminate, but there are best practices on minimizing misdials to the point that
they do not impact your ad tracking statistics or the viability of your direct
response programs.
Let's take a few minutes to understand how misdials occur.
Our friends at MoreCallsMedia have published their findings on the'Most
Typical Ways Customers Misdial a Phone Number'. The study focuses on caller
mistakes including pressing the zero key instead of the letter "O". In the world
of vanity numbers this is known as "Confusion". Then there is forgetting a key,
called the "Dropsy". My specialty is the "Fat Finger". Accidental repeat key
presses are referred to as "Stuttering" and of course transposing numbers are
labeled "Dyslexia". There are another 20 common ways to misdial numbers, but
we'll save those for another post.
The most significant factor of misdials is advertising and
publication. The nature of misdials are that callers are intending to call
someone else, and, for example, "Stutter" on their keypad and dial your tracking
number instead of the one intended. So the biggest impact will be the sheer
quantity of people dialing the correct number in the first place. For example,
years ago Callbutton had a marine dealership tracking its online advertising
with our SMART toll free numbers. In January 2004 Continental Airlines published
a phone number for their frequent fliers of 800-XXX-2004 to coincide with the
New Year. Our client's number, published for years was 800-XXY-2004, only one
digit apart. Our estimations were that .01% of callers fat fingered their
dialing and called our client by mistake. But when the intended number receives
10,000 calls a day, a .01% error rate drove 100 calls a day to our small
business client. It was a distraction to their receptionist and skewed their
phone call data. But what to do?
What are the best practices for obtaining clean numbers and
keeping them that way? At Callbutton, we take a careful approach to acquiring
new numbers and then we bake the numbers to ensure they receive little to
no traffic. This approach works, even if you have existing numbers receiving an
unacceptable amount of misdials.
NEW NUMBERS
When acquiring new numbers for call tracking purposes,
consider using 855 numbers. The 855 prefix was just put into service for the
first time in October, 2010. With no one ever before dialing '855', the chances
of your 855 number getting misdialed is very low. If you want to be sure, ask
your vendor for call counts. It is difficult to find numbers with no calls in
the past 90 days, but your new numbers should certainly have less than 5 calls
in the past 90 days. Anything more than that is not acceptable. If your vendor
can't or won't provide call counts, you may want to consider a new vendor. At
Callbutton, we often setup dedicated Bakeries for our clients where they
can see their pool of available numbers and their 90-day call counts. We even
provide analysis of where those calls are coming from. Real-time reporting and
monitoring of a Bakery of numbers ensures only super-clean numbers go
into service on your campaigns.
EXISTING NUMBERS
Perhaps you have many numbers in place now and fear some
are receiving an unacceptable number of misdials. Consider performing a
Short-Call Check. Measure all your numbers against a current average or set your
own standard, you after all know your business better than anyone. On numbers
receiving more calls than the benchmark, take action:
- - Block calls where possible, e.g. if you advertise locally only, block calls from out of state
- Play a qualifying intercept message to callers asking them to press to connect, e.g. "Hello you have reached Mommy-time Book Sellers. Press 1 to place an order. Press 2 to disconnect or simply hang-up."
- Put your vendor to work. At Callbutton, we have made personal inquiries over the years when our clients have had their number misprinted by an unaffiliated business. Just imagine a multi-million print catalog printing your number by mistake? It's a printing mistake and it impacts your business. Get help.
ONGOING
Managing a pool of tracking numbers never stops. As many
examples in this post have covered, everything can be fine one day, and shot the
next; keep in mind that misdials are short calls. Only the socially gifted and
mentally deranged misdial a phone number and then talk to the receiving party
for 3 minutes. Most of us recognize the misdial, perhaps double check the number
and hang-up in less than 15 seconds. If you manage twenty numbers, a sudden
onslaught of misdials may be obvious, but if you manage hundreds or thousands of
tracking numbers you need to set up exception reports that alert you by email of
any tracking number receiving a high number of short calls. At Callbutton we
allow you to enter a short-call definition in seconds and percentage of total
calls in our reporting system. Clients are alerted to any tracking number
receiving more short calls than the benchmark percentage of total calls so they
can investigate and take action before the misdials severely impact their
marketing campaigns.
Keep your fingers crossed that your numbers stay clean and
implement some reporting measures to keep them that way.
Learn More
The best way to learn more is to use our technologies to communicate with us. Click the phone link to talk with us, or click the email link to send us a message.
