In the last week, we have all experienced how quickly the COVID-19 situation can and will evolve. As school closures, bans on public gatherings, and other social-distancing and quarantine measures are put in place, the impact on your business — and more importantly, your customers — will continue to grow. During this challenging time, we all must remain sensitive to the rapidly changing needs of our customers. The Invoca team is focused on sharing best practices in technology and helping you have productive conversations with fellow marketers, so you can deliver the best customer experience in the most challenging of circumstances.
Learn more about what Invoca is doing to ensure business continuity here
Now more than ever, your customers need their concerns addressed and questions answered to put their minds at ease. This is particularly true in travel and hospitality, healthcare, health insurance, senior care, and home services, as well as any business that works face-to-face with people during the COVID-19 outbreak.
During this rapidly changing crisis, marketers need to step back on a regular basis and think about what has changed in the minds of their customers over the last few days. Are they more or less likely to contact your business? Do you need to reach out to address widespread concerns, or is quieting communications more appropriate right now? In order to be prepared to respond and communicate with your customers quickly and effectively at scale, you must first understand what their concerns are.
Some companies are using our conversational analytics tools — specifically keyword spotting — to monitor their inbound calls for mentions of coronavirus and related terms. Keyword spotting is a technology in which predefined spoken “keywords” are automatically identified from any conversation or voicemail.
By automating this type of listening, our customers are isolating calls in which coronavirus is mentioned, making it easier to find and listen to call recordings in order to better understand customer concerns. Once new conversations are flagged, the data can be analyzed to understand COVID concerns by company location, by region, or be trended day-over-day.
In order to help you monitor and adapt customer communications without interrupting your business, we have also developed a predefined keyword spotting Signal for coronavirus-related inquiries that we can deploy on your platform upon request. If you would like assistance with this, please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager.
Here’s an example of the setup if you want to create this type of keyword spotting Signal yourself in Invoca.
Here’s a recording of a call in which “coronavirus” was mentioned by the caller.
Here’s a report showing mentions of “coronavirus” by company location.
At some point, you may need to close a call center or have employees work from home, whether out of caution or local calls to shelter in place. Should a geographic call center closure be necessary, you can easily reroute your calls in the Invoca platform to another call center without making any other changes to your existing ads or campaigns. If you have employees working from home, calls can even be routed to their home phone numbers to minimize impacts to your call center operations and the quality of your customer service.
Most of us will be personally affected by this epidemic in the coming months, and it will also impact all of our businesses. The best thing that we can do is to respond in ways that are most beneficial to those around us. At home, that may mean intentional social-distancing, even more hand-washing, and keeping a close eye on the health of our families. At work, it means thinking in new and innovative ways about how you can assist customers.
From an Invoca perspective, we are hosting small industry-specific video chats over the next two weeks for marketers to share thoughts and best practices on how they are handling these events. We are hosting groups dedicated to healthcare, insurance, senior living, and financial services, starting this Wednesday, March 18th. If you’re interested in participating, or if you have any questions or concerns, please contact me directly.
Stay healthy, everyone!
