A guide to finding a call tracking provider

Tracking inbound phone calls is becoming a “must have service” for a lot of companies these days. If you’re doing any sort of online or offline marketing and are not tracking your calls, you’re probably wasting your money as you’re not getting the full picture about your marketing efforts.

There is no shortage of companies providing call tracking services and new companies seem to be popping up all of the time. However, you should be very careful about who you choose to provide you with this crucial service as things are not always as they seem.

The telecoms company and the call tracking provider

Every single call tracking company in the world relies on a telecoms company to provide them with the inbound telephone numbers and data from the calls. This is why you need to be very cautious about who you select to be your call tracking provider.

Most call tracking companies are simply "data crunchers". They are simply using another companies data to present to you. They are not the owners of the telephone numbers, they are not in control of the data for the numbers, they have little to no telecoms experience and they are unable to offer support on the telephone numbers as they are relying on their telecoms provider.

If you are advertising a telephone number and tracking the calls to it, it is vital that your number works and that the data for it is accurate. It is also vital that, if any problems occur with the service, you can deal directly with the telecoms provider and not a third party.

Keeping hold of your tracking numbers

We have heard of nightmare scenarios where advertisers lose their tracking numbers because they have been allocated to someone else by mistake, where numbers are being used by several advertisers at the same time and where numbers have been disconnected through no fault of the advertiser. We have had one company that moved their business to us because their number wasn't working and they couldn't get any support for 2 days. They wasted thousands of pounds in advertising and looked very bad to anyone dialling their numbers as they weren't working.

The telecoms industry is highly regulated and the end user (the advertiser) is protected by various laws and regulations. All telecom companies have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and are also required to have an approved dispute resolution in place.

Questions you should ask

• Are you a telecoms company?
• Are you regulated by the communication governing body such as Ofcom for the UK?
• Have you been allocated your own numbers and number ranges by the regulator?
• Do you own and operate your own telecoms equipment and network?
• Are you in control of the inbound tracking numbers and can you support them directly if anything goes wrong with them?
• Do you offer 24 hours support?
• Is there an approved dispute resolution in place?

If a company answers any of the above questions with "No" then you should probably not use them and carry on looking for another provider.

We (TTNC) have been providing call tracking services for more than 8 years now. Over 8,500 businesses of all sizes use our services, in a variety of different ways. With more than 7 million numbers allocated to us by Ofcom there's quite a lot of scope for what you can do.

There are no additional monthly charges or per call/per minute charges for our call tracking service, the call data is available with any number you get from us. This is easily accessed through our online control panel, myTTNC. We also offer free Google Analytics integration. This means you can take your tracking even further and use the power of Google's reporting tools for your online and offline calls.