7 ways to automate CallRail with Zapier

Nurturing leads into customers is a delicate dance between direct conversations, friendly touchpoints, and timely follow-ups. While digital communication tools like email and social media are popular, sometimes there's no replacing a good old-fashioned phone call.

CallRail is a call-tracking app that turns your phone calls into actionable data. The tool facilitates phone and SMS conversations while organizing leads, storing important call information, and helping sales teams understand where callers are coming from.

But even the most sophisticated call-tracking software can't be a one-stop hub for your sales or customer service team. Your team might live in your project manager or CRM tool—and without a way to connect all your data in one place, the valuable information CallRail gathers can fall by the wayside.

Fortunately, a Zap—our word for Zapier's automated workflows—can help bridge that gap by instantly sending data from one tool to another. This automation can save you time on monotonous data entry (and prevent costly missed follow-ups). Here's how.

Table of contents

• Create a call archive

• Send offline conversions to Google Ads

• Send email follow-ups

• Track calls in your project management tool

• Log calls in your CRM

• Send notifications about calls

• Use webhooks with CallRail

Create a call archive

Phone calls are among the most important communication channels for sales teams, but they can be the hardest to quantify. Unlike email or text, there's no written record to refer to later. Did that call produce anything substantial that you should report to your manager or client? Do you need to follow up on the call later? 

Instead of playing a guessing game, use automation to create an archive of every call you make. That way, you won't have to spend any extra time on data entry—but you and your team can have a clear picture of your phone call data.

There are quite a few different ways to connect CallRail and Google Sheets, each tailored to a different workflow style. Maybe you want to send completed phone call data or updated tags to a spreadsheet. 

Or perhaps it would be helpful if a new data row is created and populated with call information as soon as you start a phone call; then you can take notes as you talk without all the monotonous setup. 

You can also set up a Zap that sends captured CallRail forms to Google Sheets. If you're using CallRail to track form submissions and calls, you can see all that lead activity in one centralized location.

One caveat, though: spreadsheets are great for storing information, but they're not built for acting on it quickly. If you want a more dynamic automated system that uses your business data as a foundation, you might consider switching to a spreadsheet tool that's purpose-built for automation. 

Zapier Tables lets you store data, trigger automations, and connect all your organization's apps and workflows to your spreadsheet data. Learn more about why you should ditch your spreadsheet for Zapier Tables, or get started with one of these templates. 

Send offline conversions to Google Ads

If you use Google Ads to run pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, it's important to keep your sales data up to date so that your ad campaigns are targeted to the right people. Every successful sales call should be reflected in your Google Ads account so you can get the highest return on your investment.

But recording every call in Google Ads just isn't practical, especially as your business grows. Instead, use one of these Zaps to send that information between CallRail and Google Ads, automatically.

Send email follow-ups

It's just good manners to send a friendly follow-up to prospects and customers after chatting with them via phone. These emails can be reminders of what you discussed, as well as a clear invitation to keep the conversation going if they have any additional questions or concerns.

But typing up a new email after each call can quickly eat into your productivity time—especially if you make several calls a day. It just doesn't scale.

Instead of taking a few minutes at the end of every call to manually type and send an email, put automation to work for you. These Zaps send emails automatically whenever you complete a phone call in CallRail. 

Save yourself hours while streamlining communication—and making the best customer impression.

Track calls in your project management tool

Odds are good that your sales workflows don't end after a single phone call. Keeping up with your follow-ups manually—without dropping the ball on any leads—can take a huge effort. It's best to log completed phone calls automatically so that every prospect can move to the next stage of your sales funnel or customer service workflow reliably.

These Zaps help you track CallRail calls in your project manager of choice. Anytime a new CallRail call starts or ends or you receive an SMS, these Zaps can create new tasks according to your specifications. 

Pro tip: Sending leads to your task manager is all well and good, but if no one owns that new task, you still risk it falling through the cracks. The simplest solution is to add a Paths or lookup table step to find and assign the right person to each task. That way, you can set up an organized lead follow-up process that plays to everyone's strengths and keeps your team's workload balanced.

Log calls in your CRM

If you spend most of your time on the phone, you understand how crucial it is to keep an accurate record of who you spoke to and when. Without a reliable information flow between your call manager and your CRM, it can be difficult to keep customer profiles up to date. 

But manually updating your CRM after every call can bog down your productivity—not to mention risk important information slipping through the cracks. 

Say you speak to Ms. Jones, who tells you she can't afford your company's product at this time. You have a busy day and forget to log that information in her Salesforce profile. The next week, your colleague includes Ms. Jones in that day's sales calls. Not only does your colleague waste their time on an uninterested prospect, but you risk annoying and alienating Ms. Jones from ever deciding to make a purchase in the future.

To avoid this kind of disorganization, automate that information transfer. 

Send notifications about calls

You and your team aren't always glued to the CallRail dashboard—so with automation, you can set up a hands-off notification system in your app of choice. That way, you and your team can always stay up to date on call details without needing to be logged into CallRail constantly.

These Zaps send a message to your Slack channel anytime a new phone call or SMS message comes through in CallRail. You might want to inform your team of every new message.

If you receive a high volume of calls and don't want to flood your Slack channel with notifications, you could add a digest step to send a summary of the day's (or week's) call activity in one concise message. Or, try adding a filter step to your Zaps so you only receive notifications for certain calls. For instance, you might only want a Slack notification for messages that are tagged as urgent or assigned to the Customer Service team.

Use webhooks with CallRail

If your tech stack includes an app that doesn't (yet) integrate with Zapier, you can use webhooks to create your own automation from scratch. Webhooks are automated messages sent from one app to another when triggered by a specific event.

Say, for example, you use an obscure CRM app to manage your customer data. You can use the webhook template below to send new completed phone calls in CallRail directly to that tool, automatically.

How will you automate CallRail?

CallRail is a popular tool for a reason. Its powerful features turn traditional phone calls into gold mines of data. But without reliable processes for getting that information where it needs to go, your team risks wasting valuable time and effort.

You're not limited to simple two-step Zaps, either. In fact, automation works best when it takes your team's entire call management process into account from start to finish. Here's an example of an automated call management system (visualized in Zapier Canvas) that a hypothetical sales team might use to track and follow up on CallRail activity. (To see a larger version, open the image in a new window):

In this example, new call notes are automatically generated when a call starts, so salespeople can dive into note-taking without any setup. Then, when calls end, a follow-up email is sent to the lead while call data is sent to a spreadsheet, Google Ads account, and CRM. Finally, a Slack channel gets notifications for calls tagged as urgent, and all other calls tagged for follow-up are added as tasks in monday.com.

Unlock the power of CallRail's data by sending it automatically to your business-critical tools with Zapier. With the time you save, you can spend more effort where it matters: nurturing relationships with leads and customers.

And this is just the start of what you can do with CallRail and Zapier. What will you automate first?

This article was originally published in September 2023. It was most recently updated in February 2025 by Nicole Replogle.