Call Tracking For A University

Measuring the number of telephone calls during the clearing process to improve visibility

A leading university used Mediahawk to track their telephone calls during the clearing process. Specific telephone numbers were set up to provide tracking information on the following areas:

Source of caller (advertising, website, ppc, direct mail)

Location of caller

How long before the call was answered

Number of calls not getting answered

Number of callers receiving the engaged tone

How long it took for a call to be answered

The university received an unprecedented number of calls during the clearing process this year. As the clearing telephone number was set up to monitor the call activity, detailed information in the form of online reporting was captured to enable an overall assessment of the effectiveness of the marketing campaign and response management.

The results

The university was surprised by the sheer number of calls it received during clearing. For the calls received between 19 to 31 August, the top level figures were as follows:

Over 30,000 phone calls were received in 13 days!

Over 17,000 calls were received on the first day of clearing of which:

85% were engaged

4% rang out

11% were answered!

Once the university realised that they were missing large volumes of calls, they could start to review their call handling and increase staff accordingly. The next day the figures were much more acceptable:

9% engaged

8% not answered

83% answered

The university did not man their telephones over the second weekend but they still received over 600 calls on the Saturday from people looking information about the university.

During the first 13 days of clearing the university took nearly 7,000 calls and spent nearly 7,300 minutes on the telephone.

Using the data during the campaign, the university was able to see what time of day they were getting their peak call volumes and when they were most likely to miss calls, as can be seen in the following graph:-

University graph 1

To get a clearer picture of where their callers came from, the university could also break down this figure by location of callers:

University graph 2

All this valuable data was provided by using Mediahawk’s call tracking system which provides detailed call information each time a call is made. Other data that the call tracking numbers showed the university included:

Call duration

The number of unique callers, i.e. which calls were from people calling back

Which advertising generated the telephone calls

In addition to the information received on caller location, the university had access to the response levels generated through advertising. The clearing number had been advertised in specific media and on the university website. The marketing team were encouraged to see that the money used to spend on advertising had generated a fantastic response from online media, but there were certain areas that did not deliver a high return. The outcome from this will be that the marketing team can now assess which adverts to book in the future and can avoid wasting money on those that failed to deliver any calls.

With Mediahawk’s call data, the university has gained a valuable insight into their call handling capabilities and they can use this data next year to staff their call centre more effectively. Furthermore, they have a much better understanding of what marketing generated the response and can channel their budget accordingly.

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