Throughout 2021, the customer experience became the new battleground for businesses. The pandemic caused a massive shift in the way businesses operate and connect with their customers. Many businesses pumped budget into developing digital channels to satisfy new customer needs and improve the customer experience.
But with the focus fixed on online measurement and optimisation, offline channels are being neglected. And that’s a huge problem.
While measuring and optimising digital channels can help you make better business decisions, a singular focus on online channels won't give you the full view of the customer journey needed to help you best meet customer expectations and improve campaign performance.
If you don’t commit to measuring and optimising offline channels too, your efforts to deliver the experiences your customers expect unfortunately don’t go far enough. When you don’t have the full customers journey mapped and tracked, you don’t really know which campaigns, channels or keywords are really driving new business. Or which parts of the customer journey are causing friction and leaving a sour taste in customers’ mouths.
So, how do you start getting the full picture?
You need to pay close attention to crucial point at which online and offline channels converge – the phone call.
But let’s face it, not a lot of companies, irrespective of the sector, are ploughing resources into improving the phone call experience, or making any attempt to include call data in their analytics.
And this year, if you want to get ahead, that has to change.
Let’s look at three reasons why...
1. Not every purchase starts and ends online
Only 11% of customers on average can be classed as ‘only online’
The customer journey is complex and, while many customers journeys may happen online only, it’s important to recognise that this isn’t the case for everyone.
After all, many customers jump from one channel to another before they make a purchase. They might research a potential purchase on a smartphone or make a call, then make a purchase in a few days’ time. Or they might gather all their information from your website and make a phone call to make their purchase. Either way, their journeys are multifaceted.
And, if you don’t have the customer journey accurately mapped and tracked, it will be difficult to identify what you’re doing well and what areas need improvements.
By adding call tracking to your tech stack, you can get a more comprehensive view of the end-to-end customer journey, and you’ll be able to build a clear bridge between digital spend and offline phone conversions.
After identifying the importance of phone calls, and including call data in their measurement, Scott Dunn’s were able to achieve a significant boost in sales that was tied back to marketing spend. Armed with a much deeper understand of how their customers interact with them and how digital campaigns were performing, they were able to make optimisation decisions that have driven up bookings by more than 50% – all while slashing their CPA by over a third.
With marketing budgets at their lowest in recent history, it’s important to nail your attribution and make every penny of your budget work as hard as possible.
2. Your customers’ expectations have gone through the roof
We’re the Netflix/Amazon/Uber generation. And as a result, customers have come to expect all experiences to have as high a level of seamlessness, usability, and personalisation as these services do. This expectation filters through to every channel your customers are using – both on and offline.
Phone calls are packed full of information and the technology now exists for businesses to extract insights, at scale, to help to create the frictionless experiences customers crave.
What common terms and key phrases are creating friction in the customer journey? Being able to understand that and then learn from it should be seen as an exciting prospect and a priority for this year. By really understanding what happens on a call, and how your agents make customers feel, you have the ability to refine your approach to phone calls and deliver a smoother experience.
By making an effort to understand what happens on calls, you can uncover exactly what agents need when it comes to dealing with specific situations and feed this knowledge into training programmes. With this level of intel, improving the quality of conversations you can have with customers and better catering to their needs becomes a breeze.
Since using Conversation Analytics to unlock the insights held within their phone calls, Flight Centre has been able to identify customer pain points to inform decisions on switching off landing pages that weren’t previously performing and improving ones that justify additional investment. As a result, their quality of calls has improved massively, and they’ve seen their year-on-year bookings from phone enquiries shoot up by 79%.
3. It’s time to bounce back
There’s no doubt that that most businesses have never seen the level of disruption they’ve experienced in the past couple of years. The string of lockdowns has really shaken the foundations of many sectors and had a huge impact on many businesses’ top-lines.
Thankfully, it seems likely that restrictions are set to become a thing of the past as of the end of Q1. Which for many will allow for attention to shift from holding on to what they have to recuperating lost revenue.
The insights trapped in your conversations with customers can be used to help you understand which tactics result in your biggest wins, so you can double-down on the initiatives that will help you hit sales targets faster and grow average order values.
With Conversation Analytics you can identify calls that indicate a sale, or pipeline progression. By isolating these calls, you can pinpoint exactly how agents deal with specific situations that can either make or break a call.
Understanding things like the language and conversational trends that overcome objections and are likely to trigger conversion can help create more effective sales scripts and significantly increase your chances of converting hard won marketing leads into paying customers.
2022 is the year to unlock the insights trapped in your calls
The intelligence trapped in your call data has the power to help you market more efficiently and curate revenue boosting customer experiences. In 2022, unlocking it needs to be a top priority.
Start a conversation with us today to find out how easy it is to begin treating calls like clicks and include call intelligence in your reports.
