CallRail: Notifications Overview

Alright, alright, in today’s video we’re going to be talking about notifications. This is probably the least sexy video we’re going to be running, but alas, notifications are quite important for the business owner, your clients, and everybody involved. Just kind of make sure that everybody knows what’s going on. So while it may be the least sexy, it’s probably actually one of the most important ones, so here we are. Stay tuned.

Alright, here’s the activity dashboard, which you’ve seen a number of times so far and in order to get over to the notifications for your CallRail account, you’re going to hit this settings guy, right? And we have our integrations and then down here on the left, we have three options for notifications. This is call and text alerts. These are basically alerts that are on the fly that happen right when something happens. This is a summary that’s going to happen at the end of the week or daily or monthly or something like that. That just shows you a snapshot of all the activity, and then form alerts. CallRail integrates with forms on your website and you can be alerted when a form is submitted. I’m going to go through all three of these. Form alerts is actually really cool. That will be the last one we look at.

Alright, call and text alerts, you can set, well I think, as many alerts as you want. You can add additional notifications, but this is to receive alerts for calls and texts to your tracking numbers. So for example, I might add a notification. I would select a user. I’m not going to click this drop-down ’cause it’ll show every user in my account, but I would select a user and then I would choose the number. So I’m going to say either all numbers or let’s say I just want to know when someone calls me. I want to be contacted when someone calls me from the website, this is our phone number pool, and then the interaction that triggers the alert type. So this interaction could be all calls that come in, only calls from first time callers, only missed calls and voicemails, or only voicemails.

So essentially we’re saying when do we want to be notified of a certain type of activity? Do we want all activity? Do we want missed calls, voicemails, you know, what? Do we want to filter those by tags, based on the tags that are applied to the call? Do we want to filter by agent? And do we want to filter by qualified status? So this essentially says when a call comes in, what are the qualifications that result in an alert or a notification? So that’s all of this right here and then if I hit text messages, this is when text messages come in. You can say do I want to be notified when a text message comes in. I get a little bit confused between like, me actually getting a text message and the activity being text message.

This is the interaction of phone call coming in or a text message coming in and then you have the alert type over here, which is email notification, alright? So I’m actually going to edit this one because this has my user selected and it shows calls and text messages and I have enabled the desktop app and I also have the mobile app installed so I can get different types of alerts coming to me. So I can have the mobile app show me a notification. I can have my desktop app kick up a notification. I currently just do email because I don’t really need these in real real time; I just like to know when things happen. But if it’s like, a time sensitive call or like, it’s really important that you get things right away, desktop app and mobile app might be really good answers for you, alright? So you can select that for different users, you can choose the numbers, select the interaction that you want to actually see and then select how you want to be notified and then you can add a bunch of these. You can add multiple notifications for different people.

Now the next one down, this one I find really helpful for clients and I don’t have one for ParaCore because I don’t need it myself, but if your client has access to CallRail, even if they don’t have access to CallRail, they oftentimes like knowing what’s happening in their CallRail account or with their call activity and so the call summary section is really nice. I can select a user here and then I can say, you know, once a week I want to get a summary of the call statistics and I also want to get the top keywords that are generating calls and I want to be notified of that via an email and I want to see all calls, not just qualified or not qualified, and I want to filter by tags or I don’t. You know, here, this one can be interesting if you said like, not scored or not qualified to get a feel for how many calls are coming in that maybe were not addressed correctly or not qualified or whatever, right? So this is a really, you know … You can, just depending on what you need, you might decide that you’re selecting, you know, what types of calls … How many actual qualified calls you got or how many like, weren’t tagged or weren’t qualified, so that might be helpful for you. I typically find that clients are most interested in having like, a weekly email that has like, you know, summary statistics and maybe some of these other things, but even keyword and sources, not necessarily that important for clients.

Maybe for you as an ad words digital marketer, but usually not for a client, at least as far as we’ve seen. Those are the summaries. You can add a bunch of different summaries. You can add multiple if you want and they do have to be added as a user to CallRail, but they don’t need like, full access. You can just give them like, notification access and you’re totally fine, and then form alerts. So form alerts is really cool. It’s probably my favorite part of CallRail’s notifications. So I can add an alert here. Form alerts are probably like, my favorite part of CallRail notifications. I can add alert for like, a particular person when all forms come in. So this is basically saying when all forms happen, I want to get an email alert when a form is submitted. Now I actually get a separate email alert through our website and, you know, so I already get an alert, so we actually don’t use form alerts here in CallRail’s interface, however it’s kind of an easy way to set up a form alert where you don’t have to do like, zap year or some sort of website plug-in or something else. It just automatically picks up the form if there’s a type submit on the form and then it’ll kick you over an email, so that’s pretty cool. I’m going to kill this though because I don’t actually need them.

So the phone and text notifications are get a call every time a customer fills out a form on your website. So this means that someone’s on your website and they fill out the form and they submit it and typically what happens is that form submission goes, the person on the receiving end gets the email, and then they call back like, a day later or a couple hours later or whatever. In this instance, what happens is they fill out the form, your cell phone, this is my cell phone that I’ve blurred out, receives a phone call coming in and it’s like, an Atlanta area code ’cause that’s where CallRail is. I answer and it says you’ve received a ParaCore lead. Press one to hear the information or press two to connect. So if I press one, it’ll actually read the information like the name, the company, whatever information’s in the form and I’m like, okay cool, like, I’m not going to answer that person so I’m just going to hang up, or if it’s actually interesting information, I might hit two when it’s done reading and it’ll actually connect me with the person that filled out the form on the fly. It’ll just connect me on the phone call. So I could be driving, get the phone call that comes in, I listen, I’m like oh, that’s a really qualified lead, I’m going to hit two, and that’s going to call them, it’s going to connect the two of us and then we’re going to be on the phone together without me ever having to like, look down at my phone, right?

So that’s a really convenient and easy way to handle an inbound lead. Just automatically connects you; it’s awesome. I prefer to … The number the customer sees on their caller ID, then you can choose the same number as above. So this is my cell phone number, I probably wouldn’t want that, or the tracking number on your website, so that’s a good one, or you can … If you have other numbers in your account, an outbound caller ID, you can add one and then they can see that number so that’s really cool. This is one of my favorite features. I think it’s totally sweet. I think it works great for a lot of different types of companies. Especially if you’re a small business owner, it’s amazing, it’s excellent. As a side note, if you’re using Unbounce, Unbounce’s forms do not use the input type equals submit and so this actually becomes an issue on Unbounce forms and they have a work around piece of code for it, but that only works on desktop on Unbounce. So that’s kind of annoying. If you’re using Unbounce, this doesn’t work all the time. It works great on normal forms, on your website, but just be aware that it doesn’t work all the time and that sucks.

Text messages, you can get a text message every time a customer fills out a form. This just sends you a text message saying a form was filled out. It doesn’t like, send you the details, which I wish it did so I could just like, hit the phone number and call them right from there. It just says hey, a form was filled out on your website, click here, and then it like, links to CallRail. So it’s not the most helpful, but it does let you know, and then you can decide when you get text notifications and phone calls. So you can, you know, choose weekdays, all day, you know, certain days of the week. You can add a time, so you can like, really be specific about it, right? So add between blah blah blah. So this is nice because it allows you to basically select when you get those notifications. Like if you don’t want them at night or after hours or whatever, you can make that decision here.

So those are the notification options within CallRail. You have the call and text alerts, which are like, real time notifications on your desktop app, your mobile phone, or your email when calls or texts come in. Call summaries, that’s kind of periodic. You have daily, weekly, monthly, and then you can choose that. That’s probably the best for clients, and then form alerts, which is really cool. If you’re a small business owner and looking to get leads coming in, form alerts is super amazing. So that’s all for today’s video, the incredibly un-sexy notifications, but very important notifications. That’s the overview; that’s all I got for you. I’ll see you in the next video.