Summary

Marketing optimization firm Dial 800 offers clients web-based, on-demand call tracking software with an unparalleled blend of powerful filters, fully customizable reports, and extensive details. To build and deploy this new application, Dial 800 turned to the expertise of Sieena Software. The result is a robust application, supporting thousands of concurrent users on a database of tens of millions of phone call data, with perpetual scalability, adapting as Dial 800 grows.

Overview of Dial 800

For twenty years, Dial 800 had established itself as a leading provider of vanity and other toll-free numbers to advertisers across all mediums for clients of every size.  Market feedback to Dial 800 consistently praised the power of such numbers to drive calls, but in many cases inbound call data wasn’t tracked at all, leaving marketers blind to the performance of their efforts.  The call reports available at the time were often delayed, incomplete, or even contradictory, further mystifying those companies trying to assess their advertising investments and campaigns.

In 2007, Dial 800 set out to relieve its customers of the mysteries of consumer response.  Their vision was a software-as-a-service providing clients real-time, actionable call information.  Dial 800 needed more than a website; it needed a technology platform.

“We wanted to be the Switzerland of the industry,” says Scott Richards, CEO of Dial 800. “Our intent was to create genuine ‘marketing neutrality’: empowering marketers with call data they could trust to truly understand their marketing efforts.

“The standard we set for this goal was extremely high—basically unprecedented.  We knew what we wanted, but we needed to build it from scratch.  Finding an adept and innovative technology partner was the key to this project’s success.”

“We knew what we wanted, but we needed to build it from scratch.  Finding an adept and innovative technology partner was the key to this project’s success.” Scott Richards, CEO of Dial 800

Problem

Marketers struggled with limited visibility of the efficacy of their marketing campaigns and existing call tracking solutions were inherently flawed by their imprecision.  For example, unanswered and incomplete calls, when undistinguished from complete calls, artificially inflate call volumes.  Similarly, many such reports fail to identify repeat callers—who should not result in additional billings as unique leads; need appropriate customer service response; and may require specialized routing to different stages in the sales process.  Such calls are often misreported in simplistic reports of total call counts.

Most crucially, a persisting focus on call quantity paid little heed to call quality.  Caller demographics were often limited to a phone number and area code, perhaps a name: of little help, if any, when developing a marketing strategy around call traffic.

Truly detailed call records present significant challenges relative to data flow and reliability.  For true reporting accuracy, performance marks must be identical regardless of the number of a system’s concurrent users.  Supporting such user traffic is challenge enough, hampering existing solutions’ timely retrieval of data points numbering in the millions. Yet on-demand reports—immediate and without interruption—are the only means of truly monitoring and managing a campaign’s success.

Problems:

Real-time call information was hard to capture, even harder to transmit Existing solutions were tainted by vendor bias Unique callers and repeat callers went undistinguished Caller demographics offered scant details Reliability, dependent on scalability, presented prohibitive obstacles

Dial 800 selected Sieena, a premier Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, based on their expertise in cutting-edge technology and their portfolio of services including application design, user experience, custom development and all-hours critical support.  Sieena paid careful attention to the unique needs and goals of Dial 800.  That tireless scrutiny and effort produced CallView 360˚—an application tailored to the Dial 800 vision of call tracking.

The architecture of CallView 360˚ was built in Microsoft .NET framework 3.5, in a manner that allows easy modification and expansion of the program.  The incorporation of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 gives CallView 360˚ exceptional scalability and robust database functionality.  Database mirroring is used for high availability, keeping both downtime and the use of a full SQL cluster to absolute minimums.

Sieena experts in user experience worked closely with call tracking veterans at Dial 800 to keep the CallView 360˚ user interface simple and intuitive, minimizing training time for both without compromising content.  Dial 800 and Sieena continue to work together, providing full critical support and maintenance of the application at all times.

Benefits

The release of Callview360˚ revolutionized call tracking.  Users of Callview 360˚ have the most powerful forms of call tracking tools: analytics, filters; charting; a dashboard; and access to their full call history, including recordings of every incoming call, which can be exported, saved, or emailed, all with a single mouse-click.

Used in combination, the filters and analytics provided by CallView 360˚ offer not just full details of call status and duration, but also API integration, which the software uses to automatically calculate cost per call, cost per lead, and campaign ROI, as well as accurate and precise closing rates by both toll-free number and destination.
CallView 360˚ also distinguishes repeat callers from unique callers, and offers a complete demographic picture of callers, including full name, home ownership, family size, occupation, and income bracket.  Clients of Dial 800 now know exactly who’s calling them, when, and to what effect—all displayed live on an intuitive dashboard. 

Dial 800, now a full-service marketing optimization firm, offers this incredible combination of features as the centerpiece of integrated toll-free numbers, call tracking, call routing, and direct response automation engines.

Looking Forward

The planning and launch of a web-based, mission-critical application as robust and scalable as Callview360˚ required prodigious teamwork.  Sieena finished the project on an aggressive timeline, under the prescribed budget, all while developing a productive, persistent relationship with Dial 800, offering both the company and its customers progressive sustainability in the otherwise volatile world of technological innovation. “The initial response has been overwhelming,” says Richards. “Companies have a real need for this level of access to call data, and CallView360˚ gives it to them, untainted by bias and perfectly precise.  This is exactly what we hoped to offer our clients, and the Sieena team made it possible.  We’re already working with them on our next big idea—the next evolution in marketing optimization.”

To learn more about how Sieena can solve your technical needs, visit www.sieena.com.

Explore revolutionary call tracking, Callview360˚ and Dial 800, at www.dial800.com.