This blog entry is an interview with McKay Allen, Inbound Marketing Manager at LogMyCalls. McKay is a noted marketing expert and has spoken at SMX, SES, Social Media Strategies Summit and other events across North America.
What is call tracking?
SMBs, agencies, and enterprise-level companies use call tracking to determine which ads, keywords, and campaigns generate phone calls and which don’t. In other words, call tracking can tell you how many calls are coming in as a result of organic search traffic, specific PPC ads, direct mail campaign, or any other marketing activity.
This is incredibly valuable information. I have no idea how a local business would make wise marketing decisions if they didn’t use call tracking.
There are about a half dozen serious call tracking companies. LogMyCalls is one of them. Each of these companies has strengths and weaknesses and, contrary to what a salesperson at any one of these companies (including ours) might have told you, up until a couple of weeks ago there really weren’t that many differences between these companies. Call tracking is call tracking is call tracking.
So who should use call tracking?
Honestly, any business that receives phone calls should know what marketing efforts produced those phone calls. It is especially critical for local businesses.
What is “Conversation Analytics”?
Well, call tracking analyzes what happens before the phone rings – it tells you which marketing channel generated phone calls.
But it isn’t enough. There’s a lot that happens after the phone rings….like, really important things.
Gartner says there are 420 billion words spoken on business phone calls every day. That’s a lot of data that isn’t being analyzed.
So, that’s why we launched Conversation Analytics, to analyze that data. It is the most substantial development in call tracking in 15 years.
Traditional call tracking, as we said above, analyzes what happens before the phone rings. Conversation Analytics analyzes what happens ON the call.
Conversation Analytics actually ‘hears’ the call, using sophisticated speech recognition technology. That content is then run through hundreds of simultaneously-running algorithms. These algorithms are looking for specific phrases, words, intonations, speech rate and context. Conversation Analytics can extract data like lead score, sales readiness, missed opportunities and dozens of other things.
For example, if the caller said ‘I need auto insurance this week,’ that would be a good indicator of a high quality lead. Conversation Analytics would ‘hear’ those words and produce a high lead score for that caller.
Wow.
Give us a few examples of how it works.
Well, here are a couple specific ways you can make more money with Conversation Analytics.
1. Missed Opportunities. Based on the words said on the call, Conversation Analytics can determine when there was a Missed Opportunity on the call. In other words, the lead was ready to buy, but didn’t. Every time Conversation Analytics determines that there was a Missed Opportunity, you could receive a text message alerting you. Or, an alert could be sent to your CRM that mandates that the lead receive an immediate call back.
2. Lead Scoring. When Conversation Analytics determines that a caller was a really high quality lead—again based on the words the caller said during the call—an alert could be sent to your email marketing platform that would automatically move that lead into a different email campaign that is lower in the funnel. Or, it could even put in them in a CRM call list to receive a future phone call.
And Conversation Analytics can track things like agitation, customer sentiment, competitor mentions, if there was an appointment set, if there was a request for more information, agent empathy, agent politeness, whether or not the caller is an existing customer, and a host of other things.
Long story short: we can extract data out of every call you receive every day.
To learn more about Conversation Analytics download The Quick Guide to Conversation Analytics
[google_authorship_badge]
