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Know more About Adam Hofman and CallRail.com
Adam Hofman is Product Manager at CallRail who specializes in the company’s Conversation Intelligence products and new product ventures. Adam is a nerd: passionate about the future of marketing technology and the importance of data in making better business decisions. He looks forward to seeing how technology will continue to change how we interact with customers and gain understanding of lead quality. CallRail is a leading marketing attribution software company based in Atlanta and trusted by more than 100,000 businesses around the world.
Learn The Formula To Success
Links From the Conversation
- To learn more about CallRail by visiting www.CallRail.com
Learn the Formula for Success
- How conversation intelligence can be used to grow your practice
- How call tracking can help you make smart marketing decisions
- How to use forms on your website in and follow HIPAA guidelines
- How to protect recorded calls and follow HIPAA guidelines
- How to score your intake professionals
Transcript of the Conversation
Speaker 2: (singing)
RJ Martino: I’m your host, RJ Martino, president of iProv and Scale Technology. They’re our sponsor for this show. I’ve grown multiple businesses and I’m trying to learn new ways to grow my companies. I’ve always done it my own way, but I want to learn other ways. I want to hear how others have grown. I’m addicted to growing companies and as we speak, I’m still growing my company and I’m trying to figure out how to continue to grow. I’m super excited today to have Adam Hofman with CallRail. CallRail is kind of an 800 pound gorilla when it comes to call recording services and you would be so surprised how many patients you’re losing because of your, just call it the overall intake process, whether that is the phones not being answered fast enough, you keeping people on hold too long, but more than anything maybe that the intake process is just a bad experience in general.
Maybe the person’s rude whenever they pick up the phone. Maybe they’re not polite or they act like they are not there to service the patient. Inevitably, whether we like it or not, we keep talking about this is becoming a consumer driven healthcare market. So Adam talks about call rail and how that’s going to help your business and specifically help your intake process. A big fan of their company, big fan of Adam. Adam is a kind of our go to guy if we’ve got product questions and we’ve built a little relationship that I’m excited to share with you guys today. So before I say anything else, let me introduce Adam Hofman.
Okay. Adam Hofman with CallRail. Man, I’m excited that you’re here. You guys have been a valuable resource to my agency and I’m just been so impressed with the company so thank you so much for joining us, Adam.
Adam Hofman: Yeah, great. No problem. Glad to be here.
RJ Martino: You know, I always like to remind who the audiences that you’re speaking to and these are successful healthcare practices, successful organizations that are trying to grow. They’re trying to figure out how do they go from 10 to 50 people, how do they go from 20 to 40 people. So we like to introduce products that can help them do that. So I kind of want to start with, for those of the audience that don’t know you, could you kind of give a introduction of yourself and the company?
Adam Hofman: Yeah. My name’s Adam Hofman. I’ve been a product manager for CallRail for the last four years, give or take. I’ve been with the company a little longer than about four and a half years. Really, as a product manager, my main goal is to build, build products that are extremely useful to our customers and help them become more successful. So from the start, CallRail as a company has been all about how can we allow medical practices small to medium businesses, how can we allow them the ability to gain insight into how well their marketing is performing and to allow them to gain that insight, view the data, and to be able to make action or have actionable insight into those things and to take action, take action on those either by adjusting maybe a marketing campaign or using a different search keyword if they wanted to.
For people who have no background into what the world of call tracking is, that’s really what we started the business as is really, it’s an ability to tie a marketing ad or something, maybe a billboard, a phone number on anything, tie those things back into a engine that will help you understand the effectiveness of all of those things. So for a medical practice, that’s super, super valuable and a lot of our customers are in the medical field. They are people who require HIPAA compliance. They’re in the medical field and they are really looking at gaining understanding on where their leads are coming from so that they can continue to get more of those. So as a company, that’s really what we’ve been focused on its inception and really just helping other, helping companies grow through better understanding the quality of their leads and also where they’re coming from.
RJ Martino: I love that. I am a very familiar with this, but if there’s a, let’s say a physician group of two or three physicians and they had to implement CallRail, how would they do that immediately? Can you talk about how it would be used?
Adam Hofman: Yeah.
RJ Martino: For people that literally haven’t even heard of CallRail until today.
Adam Hofman: Right, yeah. The very first thing is to go to callrail.com and we do have a free 14-day trial. We have a few different kind of product types that we provide for companies and that is we provide the ability to do call tracking, which is you, when you have a CallRail account, you create a tracking number or multiple tracking numbers and you either put those on your website or put those on any Google paid ad or any paid advertisement or really anywhere on the web. You can put those on business cards as well if you wanted to.
From there we, basically, when a call comes in, we route those things to a, your actual business number. Because of that we’re allowed, we’re able to actually capture that data from that visitor and to determine which campaign it came from and display that all in the CallRail application. So that means you can pull reports and you can really dive in as much as you want to into kind of the data aspect of it and the reporting aspect. On the other side, we also offer a forms product that allows anybody who for a medical practice, I think it’s really important and I think it is very widely used that these, that a physician group or a dentist’s office has a form on their website for, “Hey, if you’re a new patient, fill this form out and we’ll reach out to you.”
With CallRail, we’re actually able to track those form submissions in a similar way that we do calls. So that means that we can look at, we can determine exactly where those people came from when they filled out that form and to, so you can do reporting on that within CallRail and further understand and optimize kind of how you are attaining those future patients or customers.
RJ Martino: Well, so for some of the people who have done call recording in the past, I’ll tell you, as we utilize it for our clients, if you can imagine what we used to do is literally just recording a call so we could listen to it and we did that through a phone system. So call recording is super valuable for us because we can train based off of it. We can do things like you can listen to a call recording and attribute if it’s a qualified lead or if it’s just a new vendor trying to reach out to you. You can even here if your intake process is being handled properly. One of the things that CallRail does for us is you log into CallRail and you have all of the recordings.
But as Adam shared, you also get this really cool column that tells you where it came from, whether it was social media, organic, whether it was a paid ad or whether it was straight from the website, a business card. It tells you where those calls are coming for. So for marketers or for business leaders that are trying to figure out the best way to advertise, CallRail gives us that data and they give it to you in this beautiful platform that is quick and easy to use too. One of the features that I use a lot too is as we’re listening to calls, you can listen to it at 2X or much faster, and so reviewing those calls is not as burdensome as some might think.
Adam Hofman: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well thanks for the kind words for sure. We definitely feel the same way about the product and how we built it and how it’s empowering these business leaders to make better decisions for their business. I think the other side of that is, the other side of that call recording piece is for a medical practice, I would assume that HIPAA compliance is something that is important, protecting that person’s personal health information and to make sure that if you are recording calls through CallRail, yeah, we’re gonna make sure that those recordings are secure, that they don’t fall into the wrong hands, that they are HIPAA compliant in terms of giving the users the correct access to those recordings. So that we’re not letting people, letting just anybody listen to a call recording.
But also just maintaining that HIPAA compliance through not displaying the wrong types of data to a different type of user and to make sure that when you exit CallRail, that you’re actually, as a HIPAA account, you’re actually exited out of the application and logged out so that the next time you come in you’re not worried about like, “Hey, somebody is using my computer. They logged into CallRail. They can now see all of this stuff that I don’t necessarily want them to have access to. So really, we do a really great job of protecting that information and allowing our healthcare customers to be HIPAA compliant.
On the other side of the call recording aspect is now we’ve built features now that you don’t have to listen to the entire call recording. We have features that I’ve personally worked on, that my teams have worked on. Our conversation intelligence features like CallScribe and Keyword Spotting and our automated scoring feature that really help our customers determine the quality of those leads without even having to necessarily listen to any of the call recording at all. They can glance at Keyword Spotting report or they can glance that a call and be able to see common words that were used in the call. They’re able to see the keywords that they’re actually looking for in a call transcription, and being able to look at those and say, “Okay, well I know what this call is about now because this person said, ‘I’m a new patient.’ This person said, ‘I’m looking or I have this type of insurance.'”
It’s super powerful to just be able for a person who is working on analyzing the quality of the leads but also the quality of the call and who answered the call, to be able to just to click on a call recording and see, all right this is what happened on that call and I’m not spending five minutes listening to the whole thing. So those are some other really powerful enhancements that we’ve put into the product for our customers in the healthcare space and other small to medium businesses that our customers love and find really effective and that just saved them loads and loads of time.
RJ Martino: Wow. Yeah, that would save us loads and loads of time. I think if we talked about how we utilize and what we’ve found most surprising about CallRail is how much it’s helped us on the internal training side. That is we listen to these conversations and immediately we’re able to give good feedback to our intake team on what we should be doing differently. When we think about marketing, we often think about outbound, social media, video. We forget how important that first touch is, that first time they actually talk to a human being, that front desk person is the face of the company. So I have been so surprised how much of a benefit we’ve gotten to just give that feedback because it’s forgotten. It’s a forgotten art that a lot of practices forget how important it is to have a smiling face at the front desk.
Adam Hofman: Yeah, that’s a great point.
RJ Martino: By listening to these calls though we are spending … I mean, you talk about … Often I’m talking to kind of smaller practices cause that’s often who we’re working with. But on the larger side or even on these really busier clinics, there’s a lot of calls to listen to.
Adam Hofman: Absolutely.
RJ Martino: So you talked about Keyword Spotting and CallScribing. This is a feature that I haven’t utilized before. Talk about, is it a reporting tool? Talk about those just a little bit more. Go into a little more detail about how Keyword Spotting actually works.
Adam Hofman: Yeah, absolutely. So we built out CallScribe, which is kind of is the call transcription piece of everything and that utilizes, I’m sure people have heard it before, but utilizes machine learning technology to really just do speech to text analysis on a phone call. So that turns that into a transcript. The Keyword Spotting feature is something the customer goes in and configures. So that means that they can go in and say, “All right, I really care. I want to know when exactly somebody turns into a new patients.” So I want to create a Keyword Spotting set that is basically just rules for what happens when somebody says these settable, this set of words or phrases. So I can set up a keyword set that says new patient, I’m looking for that new patient, that person who says a new patient.
I’m looking for the agent to say, what kind of insurance do you have? I’m looking for that customer to say one of these five different types of insurance and I’m looking for the agent to say when’s a good time for you to stop in. I can use all of those and I can say, “All right, when all of those things happen, I want to mark this as a qualified lead and I want to apply a tag to this call as a new patient.” So what that means from a reporting perspective is that once you start getting calls and start getting calls tagged as a new patient, you can look back and you can filter a report that says, “I want to look at every call that is a new patient call from the last 90 days.”
You can pull a report on that. You can export it. You can look at the amount of calls that you’ve gotten that are new patient calls. It really gives you an opportunity to look period over period and kind of compare, hey, over in or six months ago, we had this amount of new patients, new patient calls in the month of January. But in June we had this other amount that is much larger and then you can look at, hey, did we run a specific campaign or were people like driven to this other thing that we didn’t really know that they were driven to? Then you can make more kind of marketing investment decisions based on that too.
RJ Martino: Very neat stuff. You’ve touched on it just a little bit, but the elephant in the room always whenever we just talk about call recording, is HIPAA and kind of high tech requirements on this. CallRail, is that something you guys are well versed in and can kind of lead clients through or is that something that the onus is on us to make sure it’s happening?
Adam Hofman: Yeah, so we have customers really sign agreements with us. We promise them that we are going to keep their data HIPAA compliant so they can sign up for a HIPAA compliant account. But that also means that on their end, they have to make sure that they’re also HIPAA compliant too on their side. So we put those agreements in place, and our team, we’ve been HIPAA compliant or provided HIPAA compliance for I believe the last three years and I would say a lot of our healthcare practices utilize that feature and our team is extremely well versed in everything there is about HIPAA and keeping data secure, especially when it comes to something like call recording, because that is something that some healthcare practices hesitate to do because of the question of, well is all of this, are you going to keep this secure.
RJ Martino: Good stuff. Well, one of the other things, I’m sure we’ve got audience members listening to this saying, “Yeah, I’d love this. I’d like to be able to record listening calls. I’d love to be able to score,” what we call score these calls if they’re good calls or not. But pricing always scares them. But tell us your pricing model or tell us just about pricing. Is it variable for everybody? Do you need to call to get that information, do you guys published pricing now?
Adam Hofman: No. It is on our website and if you just go to the pricing page at callrail.com. It’s all there. We start at $30 per month for any calls plan. Then that goes kind of based on what features you want and what kind of your usage is looking like. From a calls perspective, we really bill by the amount of numbers you have and the amount of minutes that you use per month. Definitely reaching out to our sales team to, if you have specific questions about pricing is definitely the best option or just to … We do have that 14-day trial that if you just want to try it out. You start a free trial, somebody on our sales team is going going to reach out to you anyway. So, we’re very customer focused and we definitely jump on things whenever somebody signs up for a trial, we want to make sure that they’re getting the value out of creating that trial and really diving in.
On the forms perspective, if you are interested in using our forms product, we provide that for free. We provide a light plan that allows you to do some basic form tracking and then we allow or we also have a paid plan for that as well that gives you things like Google Analytics integrations and customer reporting and stuff like that around form submissions.
RJ Martino: I think a lots of physicians here are learning or know how to grow their practice. They obviously know how to provide healthcare services but the technology or the use of new technology is always a little … There’s a bit of a learning curve. As far as ease of use goes, what has been the feedback you’ve received from healthcare providers?
Adam Hofman: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m obviously biased, but I think we are the best looking and the most understandable call tracking product or just call attribution and marketing attribution product out there. We have a design team that is devoted entirely to what makes a user experience the most clear and makes it so easy for somebody to just, who may not know what their … Know what CallRail is specifically, but maybe somebody told them like, “Hey, you need to use this tool. Go sign up for it,” and then they jump in. We want to make that person able to use CallRail in 20 minutes and to be able to know here’s what I need to do to start on the road to be successful using this product.
RJ Martino: Well, we did not start with CallRail. We’ve actually used a few other providers and I can concur everything you’re saying, which is the interface is just beautiful and easy to use. We’ve got end users using the tool. We’ve got account managers using the tool. We’ve got developers using the tool. Depending on your use of the tool, they’re always, you guys always speak in our language. You give developers crystal clear instructions. So user experience is just second to none. Talk a little bit about the competitive landscape out there. How big is CallRail at this point? Where have you guys come from? Who else is in the market or tell us about what maybe you guys don’t offer that we would find through another vendor?
Adam Hofman: Yeah, that’s another great question. When I started with the company, I mean, the company started with our two co-founders more than five years ago and when I started with the company we’re about 20 people and now we’re over over 200 across the entire company, between all of our departments. It’s really exciting to see that growth. I think from a competitive standpoint, we definitely have the competitive edge in terms of kind of how we innovate and how we just care for our customers. We have tons of review sites on, review sites that you can look up CallRail and most of them are five star reviews and we’re one of those top people on G2 Crowd and websites like that if you’re into that sort of thing.
But in terms of things that some of our competitors offer that I think we can do better at, I think we can continue to do better at the … From the kind of call quality and in the more machine learning kind of data science side of being able to maybe allow customers to create custom rules around how specifically they want to classify a call. We do that. We do that very well with Keyword Spotting. But if you’re not using Keyword Spotting, we don’t really have a way to do that today unless you just want to manually classify a call. So that’s definitely an area that we’re always looking at figuring out how we can grow in terms of allowing our customers to understand when that customer actually became a lead and what to do with it and to understand the overall quality of that interaction a little bit better.
So that’s something that some of our competitors, they appear to be really, really heavily invested in that more data science machine learning aspect. There’s a lot of, they do a lot of marketing around those things. I believe that we’re really good at that in terms of how accurate we are at determining whether it call is a lead. But there’s always, of course, there’s always places that we want to go. I think the other part of that is one of the things that we want to really make sure that we continue to do well is to continue to help healthcare practices, help small to medium businesses, help our customers understand attribution as a whole, like their whole marketing attribution or their whole lead funnel more and so that they can grow their business faster and make better decisions faster.
That comes from not only a call, not only understanding where a call came from, but also understanding where a form came from and potentially other types of interactions in the future. So really just kind of doubling down on that, on building the value of the whole marketing attribution piece. That comes with understanding if you’re a practice that has a marketing department or somebody in charge of marketing, we are continually working on understanding and building features for cost per lead and trying to understand the actual revenue attached to a specific lead and to just really give you a lot of tools to gain understanding of where your customers are coming from and the quality of all, of every customer that you have.
RJ Martino: I think you’re speaking my language. I talk to the practices we work with and I say we need to judge everything on cost per acquisition or cost per patient.
Adam Hofman: Right, yeah.
RJ Martino: The only way you can really do that is if you have a standard set of rules or a standard measuring stick.
Adam Hofman: Right.
RJ Martino: So that’s what CallRail has done for us. We say everything has to be measured, whether it’s a TV commercial, a billboard, a social media post, a video, something on YouTube or on our website, we’re measuring everything. The common measuring stick for us is cost per conversion.
Adam Hofman: Right.
RJ Martino: A conversion is anytime someone has transitioned from being an anonymous visitor to someone who gives us their contact information or calls us. So CallRail for us is that measuring stick and we measure everything. If we’re doing the marketing effort, it has to run through CallRail because you guys have done a great job at building a dashboard for me to quickly see what is the cost for each one of our different campaigns.
Adam Hofman: Absolutely.
RJ Martino: So thank you and you guys are doing a phenomenal job there. One of the things that we’re seeing on-
Adam Hofman: [crosstalk 00:28:50].
RJ Martino: One of the things that you’re seeing a lot more of is text messaging as a form of communication. Obviously, there’s some barriers on the healthcare space, but CallRail, do you guys have any solutions for text messaging?
Adam Hofman: Yeah. So any one of our tracking numbers is set up to be text enabled. So through our software, you can send a text message to a potential patient that might text you a question and you can create quick replies. You can kind of do all the basic text messaging functions. I really wish that we could figure out a way to do it from, all from the comfort of your own phone or anything like that. That’s something that I can see being very helpful. But for right now it is, you can send a text message through our CallRail mobile app. You can send a text message through when you’re logged in on your computer to anybody who reaches out to you via text message.
RJ Martino: The other thing we’re seeing is just more and more fragmentation that is there’s … It’s Twitter today. Facebook. It’s LinkedIn. It is integrating with HubSpot. It’s integrating with my other form management tool, integrating with our electronic health records software. Talk about is integration important for CallRail? Do you guys integrate it with things now?
Adam Hofman: Yeah, absolutely. We integrate with a ton of things and that list will keep growing and we’ll keep optimizing those things. So our more heavily used integrations are things like Google Analytics, Google AdWords and Salesforce and HubSpot is definitely a huge one. People using Unbounce landing pages. So we have a wide list of integrations. The other part of that is you mentioned maybe a software that was not part of our integrations list. We have a Podio integration. We have a Zapier integration as well, that allow you to really just use those tools to connect to something that you might be using that doesn’t integrate directly with CallRail. Then we also have a open API and do web hooks so that if you wanted to completely customize some integration or some dashboard for one of your customers, you could technically build that via the API and just send those things to those integrations if that’s … If you have a developer who knows how to do that and if that’s the kind of route you want to take.
Obviously like any questions that you have on those integrations, you can … Our support team is always super available and ready to answer. But yeah, I mean, our list of integrations is as long already and will be growing even more in the future.
RJ Martino: So drawing lines in the sand on which you guys don’t do. One of our physicians is using your tool set, finds that he’s got a problem with the intake or with the training. Do you guys get involved in any of the custom consulting or what we call patient experience side and actually making the experience better or is that the line in the sand? Do you guys stop there?
Adam Hofman: Yeah, we don’t do any kind of like bespoke like consulting on here’s how you increase your quality of the person who’s answering your phone or anything like that. Yeah, we don’t do that. I don’t think that that’s probably coming anywhere down the pipeline but we’re really just focused on building that tool that allows people to make better marketing decisions and to tie all these leads back to the marketing attribution or marketing that is associated with them and really just a invest heavily in that attribution side of things so that these medical practices and businesses that we work with can make better decisions and grow faster.
RJ Martino: Man, this is … You’ve done a great job explaining the product and how we can implement it into our practices. If you were standing in front of a physician group who has committed to wanting to grow, they have committed to … We’re gonna take growth seriously. Is there anything you would kind of tell them? What are some kind of closing words for them that you’d tell them?
Adam Hofman: I would say sign up for CallRail if you haven’t already and start tracking, start using CallRail to track your marketing efforts and just to use it for six months and see the crazy amount of difference that you’ll see in the quality of leads that you’re bringing in and just your general understanding of how your business is performing from a marketing standpoint.
RJ Martino: Very good. Very good. I love it. Adam, man, I can’t tell you how much we all appreciate that you came on and shared this information with us.
Adam Hofman: Yeah. Thank you for having me.
RJ Martino: If this resonated with one of our listeners, tell us how to get in touch with you or how to get in touch with CallRail.
Adam Hofman: Yeah, get in touch with CallRail on callrail.com, sales@callrail.com is probably the two best options. Sign up for a free trial. Email me directly, Adam@callrail.com. Or just you. You can shoot me an email with any questions that any of your listeners have too.
RJ Martino: Awesome. Dude, I appreciate it. You have added so much value to our life and look forward to building a relationship with you as well. So everybody-
Adam Hofman: Yeah, we’re looking forward to it too.
RJ Martino: Adam Hofman with CallRail. Get in touch with them today and thanks again.
Adam Hofman: Yeah. Thank you.
RJ Martino: All right.
Adam Hofman: All right, bye.
RJ Martino: Guys. I hope you got a lot out of Adam and CallRail. He talked a lot about his product. I kept on track on their product and how it could be helpful to our audience. But I think if you listened, you also figured out that this could potentially be a big problem in your organization. In fact, if we look kind of one of the top problems that we have whenever we’re consulting with healthcare organizations is the intake process. What’s funny is when we identify it, we use tools like CallRail, but when we bring it to our key stakeholders, they know. You know if this is a problem. You know if you needed to like this for intake, for making sure your intake experience is good. But you also need it if you’re doing any form of marketing. I mean, this is one of those baseline tools from my perspective that you just need to be able to measure cost per conversion.
So I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I hope that you enjoy the podcast in general. So if you know someone who would appreciate this, please share it with them. If you know anyone that you’d like to recommend for the podcast, I’d love to talk to them. Use the website, use the contact information to or send it over to me. Please share, rate and write a review on your podcast. Whatever podcast app you use to listen to your podcast, please share, rate, write a review for us. That would be great. I appreciate your time and like always keep on thriving.
Speaker 2: (singing)