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When you think of market research, traditional sources for information gathering like customer surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups might pop to mind. But in a digital world powered by automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), businesses and marketers are not limited to these methods. They can also use advanced technology tools to explore an array of valuable data resources — including their call data — quickly, easily, and deeply.
In this post, we’ll look at the importance of analyzing call data as part of your market research efforts, and how Invoca can help you to do that at scale. We also offer a host of business research questions you may want to consider asking when utilizing your call data for market research.
But first, let’s quickly cover what market research is and what you can learn from it when you invest in the right tools and take the time to do it well.
Market research, as its name suggests, is the process of gathering and analyzing information relevant to a specific market, product, or service. The goal is to gain insight into your customers, competitors, and target market. That information is vital for developing an effective marketing strategy, whether your business is a mature company that’s been around for decades or a fast-growing startup.
Market research involves actively listening to your customers, analyzing their comments and concerns, and acting on the results. And one of the best sources for market research data is from phone calls. That’s because the voice of the customer really comes through in these interactions. And by reviewing your call data at scale, you can:
Phone calls with customers provide a trove of market research data that offers insight into:
But you need modern technology to unlock the full value of that data. Even if you record some or all of your calls with customers, listening to, analyzing, and trying to identify trends and patterns in data within those calls is time-consuming and resource-intensive without the right tools.
Technology, like AI-powered call tracking, can help you get the most from your call data. Artificial intelligence (AI) takes recording, transcribing, and analyzing conversation data in phone calls to an entirely new level. AI can accomplish relatively simple but often laborious tasks like recording and analyzing phone call data at scale. It’s the key to opening the treasure chest that is your phone call data.
In the following sections, you’ll find a host of market research questions you may want to ask of the data you collect from the everyday calls that come into your call or customer service center — and are captured by AI-powered call tracking solutions like Invoca.
You want to know if your product or service resonates with customers, of course. Sales figures provide an important metric for gauging your success, but you should still seek more granular data related to customer perceptions of your product. By digging deep into your call data, you can answer critical business research questions on this topic such as:
Knowing your customers, especially their buying behavior and preferences, is an essential part of marketing (and sales!). Answers to the following questions can help you understand why customers are calling, what problems they might be experiencing with your product or service, and how they rate your offerings:
Phone call analysis can usually tell you a lot about your competition — and how you stack up against them. Valuable data about competitors can include insight into their products, pricing, advertising, and marketing, and consumers’ opinions of them. By reviewing and analyzing your call data at scale, you can dive into an array of competitor-focused business research questions such as:
Some business research questions that you can include in your market research can help you identify ways to reduce your cost of customer acquisition and increase your return on ad spend (ROAS). For example, by understanding how customers who made a purchase first heard about your product, you can more accurately attribute conversions to your marketing campaign.
This type of information might be revealed through an analysis of your call data:
You can also get more granular insights by seeking answers to questions that can help you glean demographic, firmographic, and psychographic information about customers and prospects. These types of inquiries can also help you generate ideas for new products and services and surface growth opportunities your business may want to pursue:
Hitting the right price point is critical to business success. You can make the best product in the world, but if your customers can’t afford it, you won’t be selling it for long. Or, if you set the price too low, it will undermine your profitability and also jeopardize the long-term survival of your business.
When conducting market research, getting data about additional features and customers’ perceptions of value can open the door to price growth and make you more competitive with peers. It helps if marketing or customer service agents are trained to ask some open-ended questions of customers during calls, as well, so you can gather as much detail as possible from call recordings.
Here are some market research questions about pricing you might find answers to in your call data:
Invoca’s solutions can be valuable tools for AI-driven marketing departments that want to deliver data-intensive market research and actionable insights at scale to the business.
Invoca’s Signal AI Studio, for example, allows businesses to use either out-of-the-box algorithms or create and train custom algorithms to identify conversion events, outcomes, and any conversational topic of interest in every phone call. This data can be streamed across hundreds of platforms immediately following each phone call to aid marketing in optimizing digital ad bidding strategies. The data can also complement existing data held in the business’s customer relationship management (CRM) system and other customer data platforms.
Invoca uses AI and machine learning to power Topic Explorer, as well. This first-of-its-kind tool automatically sorts through thousands of customer conversations in real time to group them into topics. This exposes identifiable trends in first-party data that businesses can act on immediately.
For instance, say that an automotive dealership deploys Topic Explorer to review thousands of calls received since late 2022, when it began marketing 2023 models. Topic Explorer searches through all of the calls and groups them by topic. As a result of this review, the auto dealership’s marketing team realizes that a common term appears in a large percentage of the conversations: “subscription.”
Further analysis of the phone call data reveals that many customers are interested in a subscription program. However, the dealership’s auto manufacturer didn’t offer one in 2023, unlike some competitors. Armed with this data, the dealership’s marketing team can approach the manufacturer and show concrete evidence from the voice of the customer that a subscription program is needed — hopefully persuading them to roll out a program for 2024.
A good marketing department deploys market research surveys to elicit actionable insights for campaigns and inform overall brand strategy. The best marketing departments supercharge their market research by incorporating the incredibly rich vein of data contained in everyday conversations with their target audience.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you capture insights from customer phone conversations? Check out these resources:
