Does anyone offer free phone order tracking for all their affiliates? If so please explain how and why. I have had a lot of affiliates request it, but it is not in the budget for the program. The only solution is to have them pay for it.
If you take orders over the phone then it shouldn't be hard to implement phone tracking. What tracking software/network are you using to track your affiliate sales online?
He is back with a slightly different name. However Chet is known to many of you as Chet. He is a veteran who is very knowledgeable and he has told me that he is going to be participating in our discussions as often as he can.
MyAP, we do not have a problem with the tracking from our phone, we have to upload them weekly, relatively small amount of time. The bigger issue is the phone system. We can not have extension numbers that will automatically track, that is something that the call center would handle and the concern is, that they simply will not do it. The only option is to get individual toll free numbers so they automatically track when the call comes in. I know that our affiliates drive a lot of phone orders and I want to be fair to them and give them what they earned.
When I worked with a callcenter what I did was setup a seperate shopping cart just for the callcenter people to use. I then had that cart have a mandatory field called "Reference Code" which the call taker asked the customer for. The order could not be processed without it. I made it mandatory so the callcenter wouldn't forget to ask for it.
The reason I made it a seperate cart was so the online customers didn't have to enter a mandatory reference code when placing an online order.
I've implemented it similar to what Chet said but didn't have a separate cart.
What I did when I managed Irvs Luggage affiliate program was...
If a visitor was entering the site referred by an affiliate or a repeat visitor carrying an affiliate cookie a line would be auto added under the phone number that said Priority Code 12345, with the number being the affiliate ID. So if it was a regular non-affiliate visitor nothing would show up under phone number.
Getting phone reps to remember to ask was a problem. But because we called it priority code it compelled some customers to automatically give it, thinking they needed it or it would help them get through faster.
__________________ Linda Buquet :: Affiliate Recruiting, Promotion & PR
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Thanks a lot for the help. I will discuss those options with the marketing director. I ma not very confident in the call center though. There is always an exit code or standard code that would be much easier to do then to actually ask another question. My faith is not good on that. They always seem to find a way around it and those will look bad for our affiliates when we know that a certain percentage of sales comes from phone orders, and they get a less of a percent of sales. I would not be able to tell them exactly how many ph orders they had on MyAp but they could figure it out.
Now I am just ranting on here.
I will bring those both up and I am sure we will find a solution.
Getting phone reps to remember to ask was a problem.
That is why I made a seperate cart... to make the field mandatory for the callcenter so they "had" to ask for it for the order to go through... everything else was basically the same though. I started off using the same cart as online orders but it seemed the reference code was never entered...
__________________ Linda Buquet :: Affiliate Recruiting, Promotion & PR
The free forum support we provide is made possible by all the 5 Star programs at the top of the right sidebar & in the directory below. Please visit & support our merchants.
Phone order tracking
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