Firstly you may be thinking, why track a call center with Site Catalyst? Initially it seems like a strange thing to do, hopefully after reading this article it won't seem as strange!

The motivation...

1. The invisible connection
Many businesses generate sales through both online and phone based transactions, most would think these two methods are relatively disconnected, but this is not always the case. Lots of customers struggle with the online payment process and happily pick up the phone if they see the option is available, some never get that far as they would never pay over the internet, but you may have already collected useful information online that could accelerate or potentially close a sale over the phone.

2. Apples and Apples
For compatibility with online sales systems, many call center staff applications are now built using web based (or compatible) technology. Conveniently this allows web based tracking techniques to work much like they do online. Seeing phone based purchases in the column next to online purchases for a given product makes sense, especially when campaigns have both online and phone based calls to action.

3. End to end reporting
The final key reason is that most call center analytics are disconnected from the actual sale data, so the rich information on which products were viewed and purchased is sadly lacking (unlike online purchase data in Site Catalyst). This is particularly frustrating if you want to relate product information and conversion ratios to each campaign phone number to calculate your ROI, or you want to know how John's "call to sale" ratio changes between 8-11am compared to 2-5pm.

All this may not sound like much, but in reality small tweaks make big differences. Being able to truly understand the link between online and offline transactions, along with being able to report them together in the same report, in almost real time can only be advantageous.

This post has tried to justify the reasons why you would want to try an integrate call center data into Site Catalyst, but it doesn't go into the details of how you would actually do so. That will follow in part 2. See part 2 here: http://blog.datalicious.com/call-center-tracking-using-omniture-site-cata-0

About the author Hamish Ogilvy