Here at Amplitude, Agency Partner, Jeff Ferguson, recently enjoyed an insightful, compelling conversation about call tracking and conversation analytics with McKay Allen, Inbound Marketing Manager of LogMyCalls. McKay’s expertise has been featured in popular publications such as Search Engine Journal, Mobile Marketer, Search Engine Watch, Direct Marketing News, 1to1 Media, and SES Magazine.
In addition to covering call tracking and marketing and conversation analytics with McKay, we discussed LogMyCalls’ new release of Conversation Analytics.
Jeff Ferguson: Just what is call tracking? And how does it work?
McKay Allen: SMBs, agencies, and enterprise-level companies all use call tracking to determine which ads, keywords, and campaigns generate phone calls. Call tracking can tell marketers how many calls their PPC ads generate, their SEO efforts produce, and their direct mail efforts push (to name a few).
Call tracking allows marketers to close the loop on their marketing spend. Call tracking works by displaying unique local or toll-free phone numbers, dependent on the online referring source, campaign, keyword, or offline marketing channel. This allows LogMyCalls to track which phone numbers – and thus which campaigns – are producing phone calls.
Jeff Ferguson: Are phone calls really a big deal?
McKay Allen: Yes. Absolutely. Google said just last month that 70% of local mobile searches result in a phone call. There are over 30 BILLION calls made each year to businesses in North America. That’s substantial.
In fact, it takes FOUR web leads to produce the revenue produced by only ONE phone call.
Jeff Ferguson: So, you provide call tracking, but you also argue it doesn’t usually go far enough?
McKay Allen: 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 our sales team might have told you, there aren’t really that many differences between us and our competitors.
Call tracking is call tracking is call tracking. It’s great, but it isn’t enough.
Call tracking analyzes what happens before the phone rings. But there’s a lot that happens after the phone rings….like, really important things. Gartner Research says there are 420 billion words spoken on business phone calls every day. That’s a lot of data that isn’t being analyzed.
That’s why LogMyCalls launched Conversation Analytics, to analyze that data.
Jeff Ferguson: What exactly is Conversation Analytics?
McKay Allen: After 15 months of development, we launched Conversation Analytics in early October. It is the most substantial development in call tracking in 15 years.
Traditional call tracking, as we previously discussed, analyzes what happens before the phone rings. Conversation Analytics analyzes what happens DURING the call.
Jeff Ferguson: Interesting. And very cool. Just how does Conversation Analytics conduct this analysis?
McKay Allen: Conversation Analytics actually ‘listens’ to each call, using sophisticated speech recognition technology to do so. Each call is then passed through hundreds of simultaneously running algorithms. These algorithms are looking for specific phrases, words, intonations, speech rate and context. These algorithms are asking thousands of tiny questions about each call, for example:
- Are words like ‘credit card’ and ‘confirmation number’ appearing within 10 words of each?
- Or, are words like ‘tomorrow’ and ‘appointment’ appearing within 10 words of each other?
- Does the caller sound agitated?
- Did the employee use the phrase ‘monthly special’?
- Did the employee show empathy?
- Did the caller mention a competitor?
- How much silence was there on the call?
- Did the caller indicate a willingness to set up an appointment/purchase/etc. etc.?
Obviously these questions will vary depending on the specific things our clients want to measure and their individual industries, but you get the idea.
Jeff Ferguson: So, what types of things can Conversation Analytics track?
McKay Allen: Conversation Analytics can extract data like lead score, sales readiness, missed opportunities, agitation level, cancellations, complaints, compliments, politeness, repeat inquiries, appointments sets, purchase language 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.
Jeff Ferguson: What are the real-world benefits of Conversation Analytics for one’s business?
McKay Allen: Here are just a couple of ways you can make more money with Conversation Analytics.
- Missed Opportunity Notification: Let’s say you’re the VP of Marketing or Sales at a medium-sized business. You want to know how many opportunities your sales team is missing. In other words, how many good leads are not turning into sales? To find the answer to this question, you would simply set up a Conversation Analytics indicator for “Missed Opportunity.” This indicator will produce an indicator strength for each phone call. This is a number between 0 and 100. This indicates the level of confidence the LogMyCalls algorithms have that a specific call was, in fact, a Missed Opportunity. For example, if the Missed Opportunity indicator is 83, that means that LogMyCalls is very confident that the call was, in fact, a Missed Opportunity. Then, you would set up a Webhook to trigger when the Missed Opportunity score is above 60, 80 or any other threshold you choose to assign. This trigger could send you a text message each time a Missed Opportunity occurs, or it could send a text message to the agent that answered the call. Or, it could fire a Webhook to a CRM that alerts a sales person to call the lead back. All of this data could then be sent via Webhooks to keep track of Missed Opportunities over each week, month, etc.
- Follow-Up Email After a Call: Let’s assume Harry has been a hot prospect for a while. After Harry calls your business and gets a lead score over, say, 70, Webhooks can be used to post call detail information to your company’s CRM. This can automatically synchronize CRM information related to the call event, and trigger an email to the prospect. The Webhook will update the CRM’s customer record with the fact that he called, he is a hot lead, and an automated email was sent.
Put simply, Conversation Analytics can actually analyze the words said on every call – and then help you automate marketing and CRM actions.
You can view a helpful slide deck and whitepaper about Conversation Analytics and its many benefits to your business.
