Low Calls Last Week—What Now?

by Laura Hudson | April 16, 2015

Part 3 of a multi-part series on “Going Behind the Media Curtain”

So, call volume last week just doesn’t look right.

Don’t worry, we noticed too. With your Brand Strategist, Brand Coordinator, Media Buyer, the Media Project Manager, and the Media Director all watching calls, it’s likely we’re already knee-deep in our “low call protocol” to figure out what happened.

Sounds fancy, but what exactly does “low call protocol” involve?

There are quite a few steps included to determine what could be the reason for any missteps in call volume. Your media buyer starts with a request sent to all stations for the post logs from the previous week. The post log request also includes an inquiry about any usual market activity the reps may be able to share.

Once post logs are in-house, we can get a better idea about what may have happened.

  1. Your media buyer checks the logs to ensure that your spots ran as ordered on the correct days, in the correct time periods. They also look for pre-emptions. If your spots didn’t air, then that will have an effect.
  2. Your traffic manager checks the logs for any traffic errors. The stations should be running the spots that we specify; if they aren’t, it could affect call volume.

While all the checks and balances are run for your TV schedule, your Brand Coordinator is also running through a list of variables.

  1. They call your phone number(s) and ensure they are ringing through appropriately without any oddities or wait time.
  2. Call source information is also reviewed to find outliers or anomalies. Did forms take a dip? What about web chats? Were there fewer referrals than normal?

After we’ve crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s, we’ll be in touch with you to deliver our findings. Our hope is that we know what happened and we are already working to fix it. Too many pre-empts? No problem, we’ll whip those stations into shape and get your spots back on the air. Call source oddity? We can help identify the issue and work toward a solution.

So what if everything checks out?

Sometimes, everything runs like it should, traffic is correct, phone numbers work, and yet, call volumes still decrease. This scenario is the bane of our existence, and it happens more often than we would like. Most times, off-call weeks are just off-call weeks and we don’t have an answer. But rest assured, each time it happens, we will check it out because you never know what you might find. And if we don’t see a rebound in a timely fashion, we’ll do everything we can to make those phones ring again.

And that is an entirely different process hiding behind the curtain that we’ll be sure to cover in a future post.