Call Analytics: Listen to Your Patients to Improve Conversions

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex Membrillo: Hey, everybody, really excited to have you guys on Ignite. We’ve got our SVP of healthcare marketing on the line and on video for you, this is going to be a really good one. Lauren’s been at Cardinal for the better part of a decade has helped grow a number of our provider groups well into the hundreds of locations. She is a wizard, all things, healthcare marketing strategy, and we are going to be learning a lot from her today. Today’s topic of conversation, call analytics. Lauren, welcome to Ignite, what’s up?

Lauren Leone: Hi.

Alex: Let’s get into it. Why does call tracking matter? Can I just use a Google forwarding number? Why this call tracking? Why should I be talking about that looking into it?

Lauren: It’s going to matter for the business and it’s also going to matter for the marketing. I think that’s a misconception a lot of our clients, when they think about whether to implement call tracking, they see a cost and they think, “Do I really need recordings of the phone calls operationally? I don’t know if I need that.” It goes a lot deeper and this is something we have to walk a lot of our clients through. From a business perspective, what it can do is it can give you insights into things like no answer rates and the rate at which calls are being sent to voicemail. Are they being called back? What is the average duration of a call? Things like that.

You can use that information to improve your operations. I think that’s a huge benefit to the business, but what they often don’t realize is if we’re able to track calls using dynamic solution like CallRail, for example, that has a connection into ad words and analytics. We can use that data in real-time, the second a call is triggered from a specific keyword to optimize those campaigns in real-time. Those data points are extremely important to the optimization of your campaigns as well.

Alex: There’s two things there. It helps with your PVC and your paid social ad campaigns, but it also helps and I guess SEO to some degree, but really mostly search and social where you’re getting into all the data, but it also helps the business understand things like who’s getting called back, called times. How are we taking the calls internally? How do you get the client to start? Do they need to listen to all of their calls? Do agencies report to them, “Hey, we’re noticing a lot of voicemails drop-off,” how do they get started there? Do they have to expect to listen to hundreds of calls? What do they do?

Lauren: The smaller companies may have the capacity to do it. Sometimes at the beginning of a relationship, we’ll take maybe 10% of the calls and listen to them with approval from the client, of course, to maintain HIPAA compliance, but to try to identify maybe some proxies, like what percentage of people are actually booking appointments and what percentage of people are getting answered. These softwares have a lot of sophisticated add-ons that you can layer in. Things like call listening and keyword spotting, where you can go in and set up.

I want to listen for, if the person who placed the call says the word ‘book appointment’, we’re going to tag that as a different type of conversion than if someone mentioned keywords like billing department, invoice, records, forms, things that we know aren’t actually a new patient metrics. There’s so many layers you can get into there, Alex. You can do what’s called keypad scoring where the person who answers the call can stay on the line, the person from the call center for about three seconds after the call. It could be as simple as hit one for a new patient appointment, two for returning patient appointment, and three for all else.

That information can also be piped into your campaigns and into your reporting. There’s a lot you can do that doesn’t require you to have the capacity to listen to all the calls.

Alex: I love it and that would require retraining some of the call center staff, but well worth it so that you can track back how many new leads you’re getting versus just organic brand type stuff. What is conversation intelligence?

Lauren: It’s going to go a couple of ways. It used to just be, if keyword X, let’s call it appointment was mentioned, it would be categorized or qualified as a lead. If it wasn’t mentioned it wasn’t. Call analytics has gotten a lot more sophisticated. You can actually identify which of the individuals on the call said the specific keyword that sometimes can help you get a little bit further into the funnel. Now a lot of the calls are actually scripted, they’ll actually transcribe them as well. You have like the actual writing of the call and you can go through and use queries or formulas to identify when keywords were said.

You’re not always so reliant on the voice intelligence, which I know is not perfect.

Alex: I got you and sentiment analysis is what? Is that when we’re evaluating– like the tracking technology is seeing a lot of people are being Debbie Downers run a better business? What is that?

Lauren: You technically could use it for improving your operations. You could set up keywords like “slow” or “rude”. You could set up those terms if you want to try to figure out if someone is calling in to complain or they’re consistently seeing that there’s something impeding your ability to grow. We have other episodes that talk about reputation, but there’s only so much we can do on the marketing front to help with those things. You’re going to have to balance that out with improved operations.

Alex: At the end of the day, you got to run a better shot. If you want a better reputation, we can only help so much. We can only help a good shop look better, but can’t fix a bad shot. I got it. Let’s talk about the marketing side. I’m a provider group and I install call tracking on my site, what’s the biggest change that happens with search and your Google ads campaigns that’ll drop your cost per lead down tremendously? Is that like I all of a sudden realized a ton of the keywords we’re bidding on are just driving brand inquiries or brand click?

What are the biggest things for provider groups to look at once they implement it?

Lauren: You’ve got two instances. You’ve got, “I have nothing” and “now I have something to optimize against.” That’s going to be previously, maybe your campaigns were optimized towards how many people can I get to click through an ad? How many people land on a landing page? Maybe they spend 30 to 60 seconds there, but I wasn’t getting any really good quality indicators that they were more than just a prospect. I wasn’t getting any validation in my campaigns. Turning on call tracking and porting that information into ad words can help you identify which keywords are doing more than just a click, which keywords are actually driving a patient.

If you have existing conversion tracking, maybe you have forms. We’re getting a piece of the picture. What it’s going to do is just accelerate those learnings the way that ad-words works and the way that the Cardinal team works is the more data that you have to optimize against, the quicker you’re going to learn, the quicker you’re going to cut out wasted spend on keywords that aren’t converting. It’s either going to be a situation where it’s new learnings or it’s going to accelerate the learnings, but either way, from a marketing perspective, there’s absolutely zero downside to having this data in there.

Alex: Zero downside and they’re going to say the downside is cost. If I’m not going to get anything really smart out of it, but what you just said, that one of the biggest things is you might be driving clicks and leads, but they’re not actually driving patients. The only way to know that it’s really to connect call tracking. What’s the difference, the Google product is free? Why do I need to invest in CallRail or any call tracking? CallRail’s the best? Why do I need to invest in this?

Lauren: Google call forwarding is definitely a solution for small paid search-only initiatives. It’s going to allow you to get some of those data points. What it’s not going to do is give you the full picture. A true call tracking solution gives you multichannel tracking. Direct traffic, organic traffic, e-mail, paid. You can put a call tracking number on a billboard. What you want to do is have a single solution that gives you the full picture if you are taking a multichannel marketing approach. We really only would recommend some of the free solutions for people just getting started, dabbling in paid search.

If you want to go beyond that, if you want to really get sophisticated with your campaigns, you’re going to want to look at the full picture.

Alex: I got it. Talking about the full picture, important that I would think these call tracking technologies integrate with different other technologies. What’s important to know there for a provider group if they’re looking at CRM or anything else, any technologies they need to be integrating into here?

Lauren: There’s a lot of cool ways that CallRail or call tracking solutions can integrate. I’ve said it already, but the integration directly with ad words and analytics is something that not all solutions have. That’s huge. If you’re assessing call tracking solutions, look for that on their integrations tab, they probably all have a published page that just says who we integrate with. There’s other really cool things like the integration with Google My Business.

If you’re running a multi-location shop and you have hundreds of offices and you want to get a better indication of who is calling from a map listing, for example, you can actually push a call tracking number from CallRail by connecting it into your Google My Business without impacting your SEO. We know that you don’t want to hurt code, a call tracking number on your site or on your listings because you’re going to mess with your map information, but you can actually list it alongside your primary direct number.

The integration with Google My Business is pretty cool. It takes away a lot of the manual work. Then really one of the biggest things, if you’re going for full circle tracking would be the integrations with Salesforce, for example. There’s other CRMs and perhaps where CallRail doesn’t integrate with your CRM, you can use something like Zapier or Webhooks to push that information in. Really what you want to do is you want to capture in CallRail the keyword, the campaign information, the source information alongside the phone number record.

Then you want to push all of that into– let’s take Salesforce, for example, so that each record that is created contains all of the information on how that person found you and the information about who they are, what number they called from. Then that ultimately can be piped back into ad words.

Alex: Look at all that sophisticated tips today. Sophisticated tips, I like it.

Lauren: A bunch of buzzwords, right?

Alex: It was not buzzwords. I didn’t know you could do that with GMB. I think that’s the next level stuff. It seems like first step is maybe the Google forwarding number if you’re just dabbling in paid search. Then get call tracking if you want to track more than just one channel, then integrate it into all the technologies, like three levels to this thing. You almost start needing a technologist and someone that can do the Zapier integration. It’s definitely like third-level type stuff, but there are agencies out there that can help you with all of that at Cardinal.

What else do people need to know about call tracking, any final thoughts on this, Lauren?

Lauren: I think there’s one other thing I would mention here that we haven’t talked about. It’s not really the connection or how the data ports into ad words, but if you’re using, for example, something like the call transcribes or we listen to 10% of calls and we realize that people are saying immediate care instead of urgent care or the sentiment that people are using. We all have our terminology in healthcare or any industry that we think is right. That doesn’t mean that that’s how the end consumer is thinking or phrasing it.

I think there’s also an opportunity in something like call tracking to listen to some of the calls, understand what keywords your patients are using, and then take those terms and go into your campaign and start bidding on them. That is something that we’re starting to do with our clients. We have uncovered situations where people are not using what we thought was the right term. Let’s say cognitive home care, really they were just saying Alzheimer’s care. We were bidding on the wrong terms. Listening to the calls is something that can help you find the right keywords, understand the terms that your patients are using.

Then that in and of itself is going to help you improve your [crosstalk]

Alex: You just helped every homecare agency out there. We have much of those clients. You just helped them, that’s good. All your urgent cares out there. It sounds like immediate care is something you need to be bidding on if you’re not already. Any other vertical, listen to the calls. That’s in the old days before the internet, all managers were asked to go to the front lines, go sit at the front desk. This is your front desk. You have to listen to the customer calls, undercover boss style. I like it, Lauren. I know it’s really important to us.

Then we have touted CallRail a whole bunch of promise. We were not paid to do this at least on the front end, but they are the best technology provider and they’re here in Atlanta, the best city in the country, in my humble opinion. Lauren, thanks for joining us on Ignite.

Lauren: Thanks, Alex.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing, subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.

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