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Q&A with McKay Allen on Call Tracking and Conversation Analytics
McKay Allen, LogMyCalls
This blog post is an interview with McKay Allen, Inbound Marketing Manager, at LogMyCalls. McKay is a noted marketing expert and has spoken at SMX, SES, Social Media Strategies Summit and other events across North America.
LogMyCalls is a call tracking company we’ve discussed before on our blog. They just launched a tool they’re calling Conversation Analytics. They’re calling it the biggest advance in call tracking in the last 20 years. We spoke to McKay Allen of LogMyCalls to learn about about Conversation Analytics.
McKay, we did an interview with you about call tracking in early 2013. You explained call tracking as Google Analytics for the phone. Can you quickly refresh our memory about call tracking?
SMBs, agencies, and enterprise-level companies use call tracking to determine which ads, keywords, and campaigns generate phone calls and which don’t. In other words call tracking can tell you how many calls are coming as a result of organic search traffic, specific PPC ads, direct mail campaign, or any other marketing activity.
This is incredibly valuable information. I have no idea how a local business would make wise marketing decisions if they didn’t use call tracking.
So what is Conversation Analytics? Why did you build it?
Well, call tracking is great. But it doesn’t go far enough.
Gartner says that there are 420 billion words spoken each day on the phone between businesses and customers/prospects.
We’ve spent the last 13 years listening to calls. And we know that there is a TON of valuable data contained in those 420 billion words if—and only if—they could be automatically analyzed. So, that’s what we set out to do—analyze calls.
Traditional call tracking, as we said above, analyzes what happens before the phone rings. Conversation Analytics analyzes what happens ON the call.
Conversation Analytics actually ‘listens’ to the call using sophisticated speech recognition technology. Then that data is run through hundreds of simultaneously running algorithms. These algorithms are essentially asking thousands of questions instantaneously, for example:
- Do phrases like ‘confirmation number’ and ‘credit card number’ appear within 15 words of each other?
- Did the caller sound agitated?
- Did the employee ask specifically for an appointment?
- Did the caller mention a specific competitor?
- What was the percentage of silence on the call?
You get the idea. Conversation Analytics looks for specific phrases, words, intonations, speech rate and context. It can then extract data like lead score, sales readiness, missed opportunities and dozens of other things.
For example, if the caller said ‘I need some new tires,’ that would be a good indicator of a high quality lead. Conversation Analytics would ‘hear’ those words and produce a high lead score for that caller.
What types of businesses are using this?
There are a lot of agencies and big companies that use it. But we also offer it for as low as $69/month and so a lot of small businesses are using it too.
How does a small or medium-sized business use it?
Most of them use it to identify missed opportunities. Based on the words said on the call, Conversation Analytics can determine when there was a Missed Opportunity on the call. In other words, the lead was ready to buy, but didn’t. Every time Conversation Analytics determines that there was a Missed Opportunity, a small business owner could receive a text message or an email that lets them know that there was a Missed Opportunity. They can thencall the lead back and rectify the situation.
Small businesses literally convert dozens of additional callers to customers each month because of this single Conversation Analytics indicator.
What else can it track?
There are about 50 pre-built indicators in the system already.
Conversation Analytics can track things like agitation, customer sentiment, competitor mentions, if there was an appointment set, if there was a request for more information, agent empathy, agent politeness, lead score, whether or not the caller is an existing customer, and a host of other things.
To learn more about Conversation Analytics download The Quick Guide to Conversation Analytics
