The Skai 5: Five Questions with Invoca’s Ian Dailey on Conversational Intelligence

Today’s brands know that being customer-centric is a path to success. Staying on top of the continuously shifting behaviors and needs of consumers can be hard, but companies with robust call centers have a giant data set worth mining for this information. 

Invoca’s active conversation intelligence platform enables companies to understand and immediately act on the information consumers share via conversations. This is cutting-edge technology that can help brands go-to-market by understanding the nuances related to common questions received by their call centers. Using this information, they can improve digital conversion rates by comprehending why and when consumers reach out for buying assistance.

Marketers can also tap into Invoca’s conversation intelligence to help measure and optimize their advertising programs. By connecting purchases and other conversions happening over the phone back to digital campaigns, marketers can gain visibility into true acquisition costs.

Skai clients can benefit from conversational intelligence via our partnership with Invoca. By integrating Invoca with your Skai account, you can automatically send your conversation intelligence insights directly to Skai for more optimized campaigns.

Five Questions with Ian Dailey, Invoca’s Senior Director Product Marketing 

Dailey is a seasoned professional with a strong background in product marketing for the B2B technology industry. He has worked at the intersection of technology, marketing, and media since 2003. Today, we chat with him about Invoca’s evolving conversation intelligence platform and how it can benefit brands and marketers with a better understanding of how consumers engage with their call centers. 

Invoca is a conversation intelligence platform. For those unfamiliar with this category of martech, can you briefly explain what it is?

Conversation intelligence uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze speech in order to derive data and insights from conversations between businesses and consumers. The conversation data from these platforms can be streamed between other technology platforms like CRMs, ad platforms, analytics solutions, and digital experience platforms in order to take action on the data and automate processes. It’s used by revenue teams in marketing, sales, customer experience, and eCommerce to improve buying experiences, increase conversions, and ultimately, drive more revenue. 

When combined with call tracking technology, conversation intelligence helps marketers deliver higher returns on their digital campaigns by connecting every consumer conversation to the digital journey. It operates just like many digital analytics tools by feeding phone-based conversions and other conversational data into platforms like Google Ads and Skai, providing an attribution feedback loop to be used in campaign targeting, suppression, and optimization. 

What insights are marketers missing who don’t have visibility into the conversations happening with call centers?

For businesses that sell high-stakes consumer purchases — things like cars, home mortgages, or even healthcare — human-to-human conversations are a critical part of the buying experience. Even with the recent explosion in eCommerce, two-thirds of consumers actually prefer completing high-stakes purchases by phone. 

But the problem for most marketers is that the data and analytics from phone-based conversations are locked in the contact center so it’s a complete black hole. They don’t have visibility into what specific ads/touchpoints drove the conversation, the nature of the conversation (e.g. was it a high-value sales lead or a costly customer service call?), and whether the caller converted or not. Without any call tracking technology in place, they may not know that a call happened at all. This leads to campaigns that are run on assumptions instead of data, and millions of wasted campaign dollars. 

How can marketers use these insights to benefit their programs?

There are a number of different ways that marketers can benefit from conversation intelligence. The most common way is to integrate this attribution data into platforms like Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Skai to get an accurate measurement of actual campaign performance. Many companies are often surprised to learn that their true ROAS on their digital campaigns are much higher than previously understood because they weren’t able to account for all the phone-based conversions that they had driven. With this data, marketers can activate it in an automated way to inform ad bidding, targeting, and suppression, and to enrich consumer profiles in order to personalize digital touchpoints.  

However, the value of this data doesn’t end with campaign measurement and optimization. Conversation intelligence also helps marketers improve digital conversion rates by identifying issues with the digital experience that are causing customers to reach out for human assistance — things like missing product information or broken website links. Marketers can also tap into AI to automate conversation analysis to get up-to-the-minute market insights like how frequently specific competitors are mentioned or concerns related to the pandemic. This intelligence can be fed back into the business to inform messaging and eComm improvements that are in tune with customer needs, enable easier self-service product information discovery, and more.  

How is call-tracking evolving when combined with Artificial Intelligence?

AI supercharges call tracking by automating call listening. Many businesses use manual processes to analyze customer conversations by having people listen to calls or having agents write down what happened. They might describe call outcomes (aka “dispositioning”), grade the agent call handling, quantify aspects of the conversational experience, and more. Obviously, these manual processes are slow, expensive, and almost always incomplete. The beauty of AI is that it can do all of these things automatically and in real-time.  

Why does this matter for marketers? Any performance marketer worth their salt knows that tracking clicks alone isn’t worth much. What’s really important is to measure the value of that click. In the realm of call tracking, AI helps with the exact same thing. With AI, marketers can get an immediate sense of the nature and value of each call that their marketing campaigns drive. In marketing terms, AI helps segment your inbound calls and can be used to power media optimization, better understand your customers, and illuminate the online-to-offline customer journey.

What should marketers know about the new category of conversational intelligence?

One thing marketers should keep in mind is that adding conversation intelligence to their marketing tech stack does not necessarily translate to more work. It’s reasonable enough to assume that adding new technology means yet another platform to learn and deal with every day. However, conversation intelligence should be seen more as a tool that enriches data in the platforms you already live in, making them more useful and effective. 

On top of that, conversation data is frequently used to automate processes like call dispositioning, keyword bidding, ad targeting, and even updating customer profiles. This has a huge potential to save marketers and the contact center time and money. This means that marketers can reinvest in their most successful campaigns and the contact center can spend more time focusing on high-value customers. 

The second thing to understand is that adopting conversation intelligence returns a surprisingly quick ROI. Newfound visibility into the conversational leg of the customer journey pays dividends right away because you can start calculating your true acquisition costs and ROAS. So before you even start optimizing paid media and automating processes, you get a payoff with visibility that was never possible before.  

Want to tap into conversational intelligence to optimize your digital advertising programs?

Invoca is just one of Skai’s many best-in-breed integration partners, one of over 100+ partner integrations already completed with popular marketing technologies.

Reach out today to set up a brief demo to learn more about our Paid Search, Social Advertising, Ecommerce Channel Advertising, and App Marketing platforms.