So what is Call Intelligence and how is it used?
Call Intelligence is a measurement of the various factors (or variables) that impacted the journey of your prospective customers to the point of contacting you by phone and a sale being booked.
By learning the touch points that influence a customer’s decision in contacting you over the phone; by learning how and what questions are posed by a potential customer, and learning how your agents respond to those questions in completing a sale, you can take steps to implement more of what works in generating a sale.
Measure Referring Sources
Let’s start with page content and the ability of various referring sources to generate phone leads. How should you measure and attribute a lead to a referring source when a caller has previously made repeat visits to your site? Should you weigh last touch more than the first touch? Or should you weigh equally? There is no single answer that would fit for all customers, and this holds true even for those that are operating in the same business vertical.
What is important, however, is to have a plan in place that measures referring sources and any leads thereof. For example let’s say you are operating in the travel industry and specifically you are in the business of renting vacation homes in Florida. You buy on Adwords an Exact search term such as Key West Vacation Home. You get a phone call lead and the AvidTrak Call Tracking platform attributes the call to Key West Vacation Home. But wait a minute. What if you also had a Facebook page and on that page you had recently posted a professional video of Vacation Homes in the Key West that you offer and your video had been shared and had many likes. Should Facebook not receive some of the credit for building awareness of your product offering?
In an ideal marketing world, where Google and Facebook played nice with each other, we would have tools that would deliver a complete picture that would allow Facebook’s tracking pixel to communicate with Adwords, and Adwords would neatly capture Facebook’s pixel in the paid click URL that sends traffic to your page. What we get instead in the real world, of course, is a Facebook View Through report and a separate Google Analytics Report that tells us about traffic sources and leads from various channels. To cope with a situation where platforms do not cross communicate, we suggest that Advertisers use call tracking numbers for each respective referring channel and then use the phone lead data to ascribe a value to that channel. A word of caution: Sample size is important so try to gather a large sample. Also keep in mind that correlation is not the same thing as causation.
What we have been recommending to our clients is that they should use Google Analytics and AvidTrak Call Tracking data together to come up with cross channel attribution. We do temper expectations by advising this method will be a trial and error approach with iterations to derive a workable model that suggests the required mix of channels that correlates with an increased phone call lead flow.
Evaluating Calls that Lead to Sales
The purpose of the phone lead after all is to generate sales. But generating a sale requires matching the product that you offer with a prospective customer’s need at a price point they are willing to pay at a specific point in time. Indeed, making that match requires knowledgeable sales people who are capable of understanding the customer’s need and offering solutions that fit the need.
If you have gotten your marketing mix optimized, and you find that your Sales Lead funnel remains full, but you do not see a corresponding increase in sales revenue, here are some possible scenarios to consider:
- Not all sales people are equal in terms of closing. Have you hired correctly? Have you trained adequately?
- Is the increase in lead flow caused by scraping the proverbial bottom of the barrel and caused for you inadvertently sub par leads?
- Is your page content aligned with your product offering? Does your web page content unintentionally communicate that which you do offer?
- Have long wait times delivered a User experience to the Caller that has primed her to exit the call queue?
If you are using Call Recording and Call Transcripts you can determine Intent, Sentiment and Emotion of a prospective buyer. For example, if you have bounced around a prospective client before connecting him to an agent, you may hear irritation in the voice and pick up words such as “long wait” and “annoying” in the transcripts. You can measure intent by picking up words such as “Quote” “Discounts” “Purchase.”
Car companies use 3rd Party Survey firms to validate a car salesperson’s capability in maintaining customer experience. If you can use a 3rd party survey to validate your agent’s performance it would be beneficial for you. But if you do not have a budget to evaluate customer experience you would need to listen to recorded calls of potential sales opportunities that were won and lost. The factors that you would look for should be:
Engagement. What was the duration of the call and were there periods of long silences in the call?
Did the agent keep putting the prospective client on hold with a “let me check on that; sorry I will need to put you on hold”
Are your agents using ambiguous terms that do not make sense to a customer, confuse them and prevent a decision in your favor?
Setting up false expectations: If you are seeing cancellations after order placement, then ensure that your agents are not setting up expectations that cannot be fulfilled.
Summary
Figure out the marketing mix that is working best in filling the sales funnel for you
Evaluate your leads to determine if you are getting genuine leads, or are you getting leads that would be considered unqualified
Review missed sales opportunities to gather and validate agent performance
Implement training programs and best closing practices to align lead flow with sales closure
