Your gut is right about a lot of things, like which running back to draft to your Fantasy team — there’s no disputing that. But you shouldn’t trust it to make million-dollar decisions at your organization. Relying on hunches can be extremely costly and can lead to operational inefficiencies, lost revenue, and churned customers. That’s why the most successful organizations examine their data and let it guide them toward the best possible solution. According to McKinsey, data-driven organizations are:
With numbers like this, it seems like a no-brainer to back every decision with data. But, as you know, it’s not always that easy — it can be a challenge to capture the right data at scale and democratize it across your whole organization.
In addition, revenue teams often measure themselves with completely different metrics — the marketing team measures CPA, MQLs, and ROAS; the sales team tracks win rate, SQLs, and ARR; and the customer experience gauges LTV, NPS, and churn rate. With this alphabet soup of acronyms, it can feel like your teams are speaking completely different languages and you need some kind of Rosetta stone to unite them under a shared set of company goals.
To solve this all-to-common problem, leading companies use revenue execution platforms. This solution tracks the full digital-to-call experience and gives your teams a single source of truth about your conversion funnel. It also provides deep insights into who your customers are, what makes them happy, and any barriers to purchase they’re hitting.
In this post, I’ll cover what data revenue execution solutions can capture and how you can democratize that data across your organization to unlock new revenue opportunities.
Revenue execution solutions offer a complete view into your conversion funnel, tying each customer’s online interactions to their subsequent phone conversations with your company. This gives you closed-loop attribution and allows you to identify inefficiencies in the buying journey, as well as common trends that customers are expressing when they call.
Below are some of the data points you can capture with a revenue execution platform:
In the section below, I’ll cover how you can use revenue execution platforms to identify new revenue opportunities and improve collaboration across your organization.
Now that we got the basics out of the way, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. In this section, I’ll show you five ways you can use Invoca’s revenue execution platform to democratize data across your organization to unlock new revenue opportunities you may not even know about.
It’s no secret that there’s often friction between sales and marketing teams. It can be a blame game — marketing accuses sales of fumbling the hot leads it’s driving, and sales retorts that those leads were ice cold. This is because each team is operating based on its own data set, and there is no shared view of the buyer experience.
Invoca helps marketing and sales teams better align by illuminating the full digital-to-call journey and providing a single data source that gives both teams the same transparency. You can track the marketing source that drove each call, where it was routed, the quality of the lead, what was said in the conversation, and if sales ultimately closed the opportunity. This will help you understand where the friction is in the conversion funnel and take the necessary steps to remove it.
For example, if you discover many of your phone calls are non-sales-related inquiries, you can allocate your budget to other campaigns or keywords to drive higher-quality calls. On the other hand, you may find that your marketing team is driving high-quality leads who are ready to buy, but your agents aren’t closing the deal. In this case, you can tighten up your sales scripts and give your agents better coaching. As a result, there will be less finger-pointing and more revenue growth.
In an ideal world, all of your customers would buy on your website — online sales are the most cost-effective way to generate revenue, as they don’t require contact center agents. But it’s inevitable that some of your website visitors will call you with questions about their purchase. Invoca enables you to detect where these moments of digital abandonment take place. If you want additional detail into the online-to-offline journey, you can connect Invoca to your website experience analytics platforms like Decibel, Fullstory, and Quantum Metric.
Once you’ve identified the pages that are driving digital abandonment, you can use Invoca’s AI to automatically identify trends from the calls. This will allow you to discover the “why” behind the digital abandonment on each page. You may learn that your checkout process is overly long and complicated, the online shopping cart was stalling due to a server or backend issue, or the page lacked critical information the caller needed to make a purchase.
After you’ve diagnosed the issues, you can collaborate with your digital experience team to make the appropriate changes to correct them. For instance, you can get a support ticket out to fix the technical issue with your shopping cart or update your product pages to answer callers’ FAQs. This will have a two-pronged effect — you’ll increase your online conversion rate and you’ll also improve the contact center experience by deflecting unnecessary calls and freeing up your agents.
If you’re anything like the average company, you miss about 25% of your inbound phone calls — and you don’t even know it’s happening. Some of those calls are valuable leads that your marketing team drove with digital ads — when no one picks up the phone, that budget is wasted. Reducing your missed calls is an easy way to close more deals and put money back into your organization’s pocket.
Of course, reducing missed calls is easier said than done. You need the right data and a complete view into the phone call channel — and that’s where Invoca comes in. Invoca Lost Sales Recovery gives you deep insights into your missed calls so that you can diagnose what’s causing them and respond to the lost sales calls that matter most.
For example, Invoca can sort your missed calls by marketing channel or campaign. This allows your marketing team to optimize their bidding schedules to match the staffed hours at your locations, resulting in more answered calls.
You can also view your missed calls by hour of the day or day of the week. This allows your operations team to understand staffing gaps or routing issues that are contributing to unanswered calls. They can then correct any issues and ensure there are enough agents available to handle your call volume during peak times.
Businesses with more than one location, like franchises, chains, and dealers, get transparency into exactly how many calls are being answered by each location, region, or line of business. This metric can be used to track revenue performance over time to incentivize high-performing locations, or to make the case for staffing up or training at lower-performing locations.
Finally, Invoca can help you identify the unanswered calls that were most likely to convert. For example, you can isolate callers who pressed “1” to speak to a sales agent or called from high-intent website pages, such as an online shopping cart. This ability to automatically classify and prioritize what calls you need to follow up on will help your agents more efficiently recover lost sales — before your customers dial up a competitor.
In today’s business landscape, the customer experience is where sales are won or lost. According to our research, 76% of customers will stop doing business with you after just one bad experience! What some brands fail to realize is that the customer experience spans every channel that customers use to engage with your brand — including the phone call experience. If your call experience feels disjointed from your online experience, and your agents aren’t able to get your customers the help they need, this could cause churn and a loss in sales.
With revenue execution platforms, you can connect digital and phone call journeys to create seamless omnichannel experiences. For example, DIRECTV uses Invoca PreSense to send its sales agents a screenpop with each caller’s digital journey information. The agents receive the screenpop just before the call is connected and it gives them valuable information, such as: who the caller is, the geographic location they’re calling from, any digital ads they may have engaged with, the webpages they visited before placing the call, and if they’re a repeat caller.
With this data, the agents can proactively understand the caller’s needs, pull up the relevant information, and tailor the conversation accordingly. For example, if a customer placed a call from the DIRECTV Sports Pack page, the agent would be able to proactively pull up information on the package, and prepare for questions about how the caller could bundle it with their existing packages. This creates a seamless digital-to-call experience that makes each caller more likely to convert.
PreSense also reduces call handling times, since agents already know the context of each call and can jump right into the conversation. This improves efficiency and allows call center agents to handle more sales inquiries. Invoca’s pre-call data helped the DIRECTV sales team improve their close rates by an impressive 110%.
Check out the short video below to learn more:
You can read the full DIRECTV case study here
Your customers’ expectations aren’t static — they’re constantly changing as technology gets more advanced, your competitors launch new products or services, and the economic landscape shifts. Do you have an effective way to understand your customers’ needs? Without a direct line of sight into the voice of the customer, it can be challenging to get these insights.
How does tapping into the voice of the customer look in practice? Let’s take the example of Spectrum Retirement Communities. To proactively react to customer needs during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team configured Invoca’s phrase-spotting signals to identify trends from over 16,000 conversations relating to COVID-19. This allowed them to discover what residents and their families were concerned about and quickly pivot their response efforts. Those pivots included adjusting information on the company’s website, updating its communication strategy, and ensuring every facility adhered to the latest safety guidelines.
The result of these and other tough but necessary decisions for the business? Keeping the COVID-19 curve flat across Spectrum Retirement’s 50 properties, said Shannon Johnson, the company’s director of marketing operations. In fact, the company saw an infection rate of just 1% among all its team members and residents during the first six months of the pandemic.
“A key reason we’ve kept the curve flat was that we were able to use Invoca data to develop effective communications that helped people understand what they needed to do to stay safe,” Johnson explained. “Whether you called our hotline, or you wanted to visit our website, or you received an email or letter from us, you got the same messaging.”
Read the full Spectrum Retirement case study here
Want to learn more about how revenue execution can help you democratize data and stretch your budget? Check out these resources: