Key Metrics for Optimizing Branded Caller ID Performance

Branded Caller ID is a great way to increase brand visibility and trust when placing outbound calls. Having your brand name or logo show up on a prospect’s mobile device after they’ve just visited your website is a great customer experience and can improve call answer rates. When leveraged for the right use cases, we’ve seen Branded Caller ID lead to 10-40% increases in answer rates and require many fewer call attempts to reach a customer. 

However, answer rates alone are not enough to track the performance of Branded Caller ID and might be misleading. There are 5 key metrics you should be monitoring to maximize the business impact of Branded Caller ID. 

Answer Rate

Definition: The percentage of outbound calls placed that are answered. For example, if you place 10 calls and 2 are picked up, then you have a 20% answer rate.

Why it matters: Answer rates indicate the recognizability of your brand in the specific moment and context you’re calling, and whether you’ve captured the attention of your audience. The higher your answer rates, the more “at bats” your sales team gets at pitching your prospects.

Consider this: Answer rates are just one indicator of Branded Caller ID effectiveness. Sometimes Branded Caller ID can actually reduce first call answer rate, but still increase overall conversion rate – because uninterested prospects who were never going to convert self-select out of answering your calls when they know who's calling, and avoid wasting your agents’ time. 

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Connect Rate

Definition: The percentage of people called who end up having a live conversation. For example, if you call 2 people, 3 times each (6 calls) and they both ignore the first 2 call attempts each, but pick up on the 3rd call attempt, you have a 100% connect rate (2 out of 2 people answered), but a 33% answer rate (2 out of 6 calls answered). Even if a customer doesn’t answer any of the outbound calls, but they call back in and have a live conversation, then they still count as part of the connect rate.

Why it matters: It may be part of your strategy to make multiple call attempts per lead. Even though your overall answer rates will decline with each additional attempt, your overall connect rate will increase. Call branding may be most effective on the first couple of call attempts, after which its value diminishes and you may want to consider local presence on later attempts to maximize overall connect rate.

Consider this: Eventually Branded Caller ID should reduce the number of call attempts needed to reach a customer. So, it’s possible your connect rate may not increase materially, but you should also consider the average number of calls needed to achieve the same connect rate.

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Decline Rate

Definition: The percentage of outbound calls declined by users.

Why it matters: Decline rate shows whether people want to answer a call at the moment they see it. The more people who hit the X button to send to voicemail, the stronger the signal that your call is not a wanted one. High decline rates are a negative indicator for branding, whereas low decline rates are a positive one.

Consider this: A high decline rate might just indicate “not now” rather than “not interested at all.” That’s why it’s important to also monitor connect rate. If it turns out you have a very high rate of inbound callbacks, then that will be reflected in your connect rate (and the decline rate won’t matter.) 

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Call Duration (% Calls > 60 Seconds)

Definition: The percentage of outbound calls with talk time lasting longer than 60 seconds. 

Why it matters: Talk time over 60 seconds helps measure the quality of your live conversations. If a prospect answers your call and quickly hangs up, that’s not a valuable pick up. So your answer rates and connect rates may look great, but if your agents are not having quality conversations where they can actually qualify a prospect and/or speak to the value proposition of your product, then the branding is just wasting agents’ time and giving a false positive.

Consider this: There are different ways to measure call duration. If 45 seconds is all it takes to qualify a prospect in your industry, then you can use that instead. You can also use median talk time. We just recommend avoiding average talk time as averages can be easily skewed by a few very long conversations.

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Conversion Rate

‍Definition: The percentage of leads who convert to paid customers. 

Why it matters: The ultimate measure of the effectiveness of your outbound program (and therefore Branded Caller ID) is your overall conversion rate. If you are calling prospects, they’re answering your calls, and the calls are lasting over 60 seconds – meaning your agents are having more quality conversations – then your conversion rate logically should go up as well. But if it’s not, then the branding doesn’t matter. Perhaps you’re targeting the wrong segments of prospects or your product value proposition isn’t resonating, or your pricing is too high. Branding cannot fix those. 

Consider this: Depending on the length of your sales cycle and the complexity of all your different acquisition strategies, it might be challenging to isolate the impact of Branded Caller ID on your conversion rate. A/B testing is the best way to determine the impact, but while Regal offers the capabilities of A/B testing branded numbers, we understand it’s not always possible with your current dialer. The previous four metrics tend to be very useful leading indicators of conversion rate.

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Depending on your current contact center, you may not be able to get all these metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of Branded Caller ID. Not all five metrics are necessary to evaluate success – if you just have some of these and they are all telling the same story, then that should be enough. However, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions just based on one of these metrics alone, as that could push you in the wrong direction. 

Regal’s Contact Center solution comes with all of these metrics right out of the box. But even if you’re using Regal Call Branding^TM with another dialer, we can still produce most of these metrics by leveraging our carrier integrations.

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Learn More about Branded Caller ID

Want to learn more about Branded Caller ID? See: What’s the difference between Caller ID, CNAM, and Branded Caller ID? 

Regal Call Branding^TM is just one of many products Regal offers to improve your outbound answer rates and revenue. To see Regal in action, Request a Demo.

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