CallTrackingMetrics helps 21K+ clients worldwide easily track marketing campaign ROI

Know thy customers

Call quality is a given in a call tracking business. Phone sales “are a big deal and are still highly relevant even with the increased focus on digital sales,” explains Todd Fisher, CEO of CallTrackingMetrics. If a customer is calling to talk with a salesperson and ask a question, it is critical that both parties be able hear each other. And helping customers identify who is calling from their website is key to allowing them to build more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

Call tracking helps business identify who is calling from their website, digital ads, and other advertising channels, tying revenue back to specific marketing campaigns. But, setting up reliable call tracking is hard to do well. When Todd Fisher, CEO of CallTrackingMetrics, set out to build a call tracking solution, he quickly realized that most existing solutions were too expensive and complex, and frequently included as part of a larger marketing package that not every client needed. So Fisher decided to build a streamlined call tracking application himself that would meet clients’ specifications. That application needed to be reliable, adaptable, and provide high quality phone service for customers around the world.

Quality of service is key to creating a great product

Fisher moved his application to Twilio because of Twilio’s reputation for reliability and quality. “There were a lot of quality issues with the first platform we were building on,” Fisher said. “The phone conversations were really grainy, and we had a lot of outages that were unexplained, unexpected, and couldn’t be resolved.” Dropped or incomprehensible calls are a deal breaker for CallTrackingMetric’s clients. If call quality isn’t up to par, CallTrackingMetrics has to fall back on email, chat, or other communication channels, which have significantly lower conversion rates than phone calls for their customers.

Given the premium placed on live call conversations, CallTrackingMetrics knew that their solution needed a reliable and high quality communication solutions partner to build their business with. “We’ve had great success with Twilio’s call quality,” shares Fisher, “which has enabled us to better support and help grow our customers’ businesses.” This higher call quality comes along with greater reliability, and CallTrackingMetrics has seen unparalleled uptime since they started using Twilio in 2010.

As their business has continued to grow, CallTrackingMetrics’ customers demanded more phone numbers to track ad performance. But, CallTrackingMetrics found that they couldn’t rely on other providers to provide quality phone numbers. “There is one provider whose numbers we don’t even try to sell, because we know the quality is so bad,” explains Fisher. “Number quality isn’t an issue with Twilio- it’s far and away above the competition” Fisher continues. For a business built on call quality, being able to scale reliably and maintain the same level of service is key.

Full speed ahead

Fisher built an initial prototype on Twilio in just half a day. Two months later, he had a full-fledged solution, and he’s been easily adding features and functionality ever since. This has made it easier to do business on Twilio than other providers that required more time intensive build outs. Compared to competitor APIs, “Twilio was a much more stable, robust, and flexible solution,” says Fisher, “Twilio was also significantly easier for us to build on.”

Helping Fisher build his solution so quickly was the fact that Twilio handled all of the telephony, allowing CallTrackingMetrics to “focus on building an outstanding product and trust Twilio to provide high quality voice service,” elaborates Fisher. “We have confidence that it was going to work, and it has,” continues Fisher. Alongside Twilio’s reliability, their support team has been available to answer questions as they arose. “Twilio’s support team is the best compared to other communications providers we’ve used,” comments Fisher, “their response times are fast and they provide the answers we need. Twilio support has built that level of trust that they will be here for us tomorrow.” With this partnership firmly established, CallTrackingMetrics set out to further differentiate their offering from other call tracking solutions in the market.

Transparency as good business

In a competitive space, CallTrackingMetrics gained market share by offering companies — and the advertising agencies that served them — information they craved. Twilio’s API instantly provides all of the core call center metrics their customers need – call duration, call talk time, hold time, ring time. But Twilio went one step further, and provided additional metrics around call quality through their Voice Insights product.

Voice Insights, accessed directly from the Twilio Console, shows a variety of metrics around the quality of every call being made through Twilio. These insights translated into ROI for CallTrackingMetrics because they could provide their customers with more actionable insights around call quality, a vital component for successful phone sales businesses. “Voice Insights helps us provide better customer service to our customers by helping our customers pinpoint the root cause of an issue,” explains Fisher. “With number tracing information, packet transfer rates, and latency times, we’re able to help our customers trace call quality issues to the source, whether it’s a carrier issue or a problem with their office network,” Fisher continues, allowing for faster resolution of issues so customers can get their phone sale operations back up and running as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, Twilio Voice Insights provides a whole other layer of visibility into customers’ usage and traffic. “We helped our clients discover so many things with Insights,” states Fisher. One of CallTrackingMetrics’ customers realized that they only had two phone lines available for customers to call, and that customers weren’t able to leave a voicemail because the mailbox was full. “They were losing business and didn’t even know it. Now that we have Twilio Insights, our customer gained visibility into what was happening and were able to scale more effectively,” continues Fisher.

Twilio’s web interface provides clear and succinct updates on what is happening across their business. Using the dashboard “we can easily see the full picture of what happened during a call, information about what the server did, and who called,” explains Fisher. “In some instances, we’re even able to use the data stored on Twilio to help our customers if they incorrectly configured something and a call doesn’t go through,” Fisher continued. For example if they tried to block or unblock the wrong customer and end up missing the call, CallTrackingMetrics can use the phone number information stored in Twilio to let the client know which customer to call back.

Security first

When it comes to protecting customer data, CallTrackingMetrics takes no short cuts. As a company responsible for tracking their customers’ data, security is paramount for CallTrackingMetrics. “Twilio’s multi-user access control and 2FA access to the account portal enabled CallTrackingMetrics to scale securely as our organization grew,” explains Fisher, “and in the process reassure customers’ that their data is safe.” Other voice providers did not secure their websites or offer 2FA, making Twilio far and above the most secure provider.

Twilio represents a core piece of CallTrackingMetrics product, with many people across the company working on it. “Having split roles and the introduction of the read-only support role is a great addition to Twilio.com. It goes so far beyond what other communications solutions provide,” elaborates Fisher. As CallTrackingMetrics grows, “we can provide more of our users with access to Twilio.com and trust that it’s secure.”

The true ROI of ads

CallTrackingMetrics solution enables customers to optimize their marketing campaigns across a variety of channels. For example, companies can identify the total number of conversions they get from Google AdWords campaigns, email campaigns, online advertisements, and their own website. One of CallTrackingMetrics’ clients originally only tracked conversions from a paid search ad who filled out a form on their website. This garnered them 10 conversions a month. Once the client started using CallTrackingMetrics, they realized that the same ad was also responsible for generating 350 phone calls per month, significantly increasing the ROI of their marketing campaign. CallTrackingMetrics also offers competitive features like call recording, whisper messages, real-time call status and caller ID data, as well as seamless integrations with Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Salesforce, Marketo, and HubSpot.

“The magical thing we do for our customers is associating website visitors with phone callers,” Fisher said. Powerful call analytics, lead management, and ROI reporting are top reasons why “our customers come to us” continues Fisher.