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When it’s time to implement a call tracking and analytics solution like Invoca, it may seem like marketing and the call center have distinctly different concerns. Marketing wants attribution and call outcome data for campaign optimization. The call center wants to serve customers better and faster. The call center wants to save money and be more efficient. Marketing wants to spend money to drive more calls and conversions. In the end, the call center doesn’t want its operations upended by marketing, and, well, that’s totally understandable. Oil, meet water, right?
In our experience, it turns out that the call center and marketing have far more in common than can be seen from the surface. There’s crossover in unexpected places, and when marketing comes at your call center with a new call tracking and analytics solution, it might be a blessing in disguise that benefits both departments and creates new connections. Here are a few ways that call tracking can positively impact operations in the call center and marketing.
If your call center has its own solution in place for counting calls, monitoring call quality, and measuring all the KPIs that are important to the department, then you don’t have to make any changes when the marketing team adopts Invoca. It has no impact on your telephony system, and any tracking platforms that you are using can remain in place. If zero disruption to your call center operations is what is desired, zero disruption is what you get. Marketing gets all of the call data that it needs for attribution and optimization, and you can keep doing your thing.
In fact, if you’re currently supplying marketing with conversion data and call outcome classification, Invoca can relieve the call center of gathering and processing call data for marketing, allowing you to use your valuable resources more efficiently.
If your call center chooses to add Invoca to its technology stack, you will find that it helps make your operations considerably more efficient. Here’s how that works.
After implementing Invoca, many of our customers discover call center processes that negatively impact customer experience, cause calls to convert at a lower rate, or that the call center is getting too many of the wrong type of calls.
For example, CHG Healthcare began using Invoca to get better attribution for calls being driven by digital marketing campaigns. While much-improved attribution came as no surprise, the call center issues that Invoca helped them uncover opened a lot of eyes outside of marketing. As they began monitoring call traffic with Invoca across two different divisions, they noticed something unusual. The first division that they rolled Invoca out to was only answering about 30 percent of its incoming calls. Another was only picking up about 17 percent of the time. All the while, a third division was picking up over 70 percent of its calls. This was a huge issue because calls that went to voicemail rarely converted.
The root of the problem was that the two divisions with low answer rates were routing calls in completely different ways. “We had no idea it was happening, but once we figured it out, fixing it was a no-brainer,” said Sam Schwendiman, marketing operations manager at CHG. The changes then made to call routing improved the call connection rate by nearly 50 percent.
If your call center team’s goal is to convert callers into customers, you don’t want to get flooded with customer service calls. Excessive invalid inbound call volume has a number of causes ranging from poor website experiences, underperforming customer service divisions, poor optimization of paid search, and even phone fraud. Analyzing call outcomes with Invoca can help your call center identify not only that this is happening (you probably know that) but why you’re getting these calls. And knowing the “why” makes fixing these issues much easier.
Toll-free pumping and other phone fraud tactics are a huge pain for call centers and can prevent you from properly serving your customers (and hitting your numbers) when they get out of control.
Because of the way the phone system is structured, toll-free numbers are susceptible to toll-free call pumping, where unscrupulous independent infrastructure operators who get paid for handing off toll-free calls to other networks “pump” numbers with bad calls. Invoca has many features that can greatly reduce the number of fraudulent calls that reach your call center, and we can absorb the telecom costs of the few that do get through. Invoca also works directly with law enforcement and the telecommunications industry to help curtail phone fraud.
Listen to this Reply All podcast “The Case of the Phantom Caller” for a really fascinating look at how Invoca helped solve a very crafty (and kind of creepy) phone fraud racket.
Call routing costs may seem out of your control, but Invoca can actually help call centers reduce these charges. The traditional means of routing a call to a destination phone number uses the public switched telephone network, or PTSN. Using this method, you pay for calls that are routed through the PTSN to your inbound carrier and then to your call center system.
Invoca helps you reduce these costs by routing calls over the internet via session initiation protocol, or SIP. When you use Invoca with the SIP integration, calls are delivered from Invoca to your call center via SIP and not through your inbound carrier. Essentially, the SIP integration saves your call center from having to pay expensive telecom fees. You just pay the Internet bandwidth to connect the calls.
In addition to this, SIP can provide more scalability and redundancy to make sure every call connects, which your customers and call center employees will certainly appreciate.
The call center and marketing aren’t exactly arch enemies or anything, but the way most companies are structured makes them pretty solidly siloed. It’s not always easy for you to get insight into what marketing campaigns might be driving calls, and it’s often a struggle to share relevant call data, like call outcomes, with the marketing department. It’s a common situation where the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, because they’re literally in different states.
Invoca can help you make this connection with marketing, and it will benefit both divisions. Since your customers are jumping across channels from online (marketing) to the phone (you), it’s critical that the call center knows where they have been, who they are, and why they are calling. Without this information, friction is increased because the call center has to deal with:
With Invoca, the call center can retrieve real-time insights about a caller, including their previous online engagement history. This data can be used to automatically route and filter calls so callers are sent to the person or department that can best help them without sending them through the phone tree.
With this information in hand, call center reps can more efficiently and effectively work with the customer to make a sale. For example, if a customer has an item in their shopping cart and calls before completing the purchase, they can be routed directly to an agent who knows what they have in their cart and why they are calling. DISH Network, for example, found that many of its online shoppers were abandoning their carts when it came time to provide private information like social security numbers. To make sure it could convert these customers, it used Invoca to seamlessly direct cart abandoners to a call center experience specially tailored to their needs.
By setting up a few rules in the Invoca call routing logic, calls are automatically routed to the correct department based on the customer’s product interest, and support calls are sent to customer service. Invoca can also provide call center reps with a whisper message (a short system-generated audio clip played to the call center agent) before connecting to the caller to provide even more information about the nature of the call.
All of this put together makes for a frictionless customer journey. All along the way, the caller feels like you know what they need and know who they are, so they leave as a happy customer and you see better conversion rates.
What does this all mean to you? More calls answered means more chances for conversions to happen and a more efficient and cost-effective call center operation.
Get a free Invoca demo to see how it can work for your call center.
