CallRail vs CallSource: Which is a better fit?

Colin J.: Hi, I'm Colin, head of marketing for an outpatient clinic, and I give CallRail three out of five stars. Prior to using CallRail, we were not using a call tracking system. We looked at Invoca, we looked at Call Box, and ultimately decided to use CallRail for multiple years. We decided to use CallRail because it seemed to have scalability with what we were looking for. It had some integration with a couple of outside systems that we were already using, so it made the uptake a lot easier than some other platforms. We also liked the dashboarding functionality that CallRail offered and the ability to buy other numbers directly through the platform, to customize those numbers to track them. Then obviously the dynamic number insertion, the DNI, or DNS on the website, was something that was very attractive to us. Getting started with CallRail for us was very easy. Basically, we used WordPress as our CMS, so we were able to use the CallRail integration with WordPress and select a pool of numbers for SEO, select a pool of numbers for paid search, and then use some offline numbers. Effectively, we went in and we created a lot of numbers. Had we switched from another provider, porting numbers is very easy. We've ported several numbers out of CallRail the past year or so, and that process has been very quick and simple. My recommendations for anybody considering CallRail include making sure that you know what your scalability limit is. CallRail really struggles when you have more than 30 or 40 businesses. If you are a franchise model or something of that nature and you expect to grow rapidly, CallRail might not be a good solution for you. It also struggles when phone volume is in excess of 20,000 calls. For us, we're seeing 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 calls a week, which means that we were very limited with the amount of data that we could see when we were using CallRail. We ultimately switched providers. If you're getting 500 phone calls a week now, or 200 phone calls a week, or something of that nature where it's very manageable, CallRail might be a great solution. If you are seeing 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 30,000 phone calls a month, CallRail is likely not going to be able to scale with you, especially if that's exacerbated by multiple businesses. CallRail doesn't do a great job of looking at specific businesses. That's how it's set up. You have to actually integrate your different businesses, and then that makes reporting a little bit challenging. But if you are a single location with limited call volume, CallRail can be a great solution.

Katie: My name is Katie, I'm a marketing manager in the automotive industry, and I would give CallSource a five out of five rating. We use CallSource to track our phone lines, pretty simple concept, but it helps us troubleshoot problems with customers as they call in and express them especially. CallSource records the phone calls so that you can go back and listen to them, see where they found you on the internet, see who they're trying to get in touch with, who they perhaps talked to on the phone. And most importantly, listen to the call to understand the issue at hand and how it was handled on the phone by the representative from our company. What I really love about CallSource is their integration with our Google Analytics. So they can set up goals that can tell you that a phone call led to a sales appointment or a service appointment. They also take this data into their own backend tools that help you see where your traffic is coming from. Help you know where people finding your phone numbers and how are they getting in touch with you, and that is incredibly helpful when you are deciding your marketing strategy. And phone calls are not dead and they are still part of our lives and we need to know where they're coming from. We need to be able to listen to them and CallSource provides that with seamless interfaces and integrations with our other tools. The only improvement I would make to CallSource is their backend tools, where you can switch between stores that you're looking at and see different data points. It can be a little bulky and not as simple as I would want it to be able to find exactly what I'm looking for. So that'd be the only thing that I would improve. It already has so much capability, but it could just use a new interface that makes it simple and more intuitive to interact with.