14 CRITICAL METRICS WE EXTRACTED FROM PHONE CALLS IN Q1

Transcription

1 14 CRITICAL METRICS WE EXTRACTED FROM PHONE CALLS IN Q1 BETTER LEADS ASK FOR THE BUSINESS MORE CONVERSIONS ENGAGE WITH MISSED OPPORTUNITIES LogMyCalls.com - a service of ContactPoint S. Dixie Dr. Suite H St. George, Ut Phone:

2 Contents The Data: Explanation of the Infographic....2 What is Conversation Analytics? Q&A About the Q1 Call Report % of Total Calls Analyzed Resulted in a Conversion % of Calls in Q1 Were 'Good' or 'Great' Leads. 10 Agents Only Ask for the Business 13% of the Time % of Sales Inquiries are Missed Opportunities..14 Conclusion: Looking Ahead..16 Additional Resources About LogMyCalls S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

3 The Data: Explanation of the Infographic LogMyCalls Conversation Analytics is the most significant addition to the marketing analytics landscape in years. It extracts deep, contextual data from phone calls that businesses can use to make more money. Conversation Analytics uses sophisticated speech recognition technology and hundreds of thousands of proprietary algorithms to extract data from phone calls. This is data based on the words and phrases actually said on the call. In Q1, Conversation Analytics analyzed millions of call segments from dozens of industries. This data includes conversion data, lead score data, and a variety of other metrics extracted from phone calls. This report contains a few of those high level analytics. We initially released the data in infographic form. Now, in this White Paper we ll discuss a few of the specific data points on the infographic in more depth. But first, we ll explain what Conversation Analytics is S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

4 What is Conversation Analytics? Call tracking has been around for about 15 years. It tells marketers which ads, campaigns, and keywords generate calls and which don't. It's used by agencies, SMBs, and enterprise-level companies. It improves their ROI and gives them valuable insight into their marketing data. Call tracking is good. But it stops gathering data when the phone rings. Why is that a problem? Because there is a lot of useful stuff that happens after the phone rings...like, pretty much everything of importance. Call tracking analyzes what happens BEFORE the call. Conversation Analytics analyzes what happens ON the call. Gartner says that over 420 billion words are spoken on phone calls between businesses and customers/prospects every day. Those words contain buyer sentiment, customer intelligence, sales performance data, close rate and conversion data, and a host of other information. And until we launched Conversation Analytics, NONE of these words were being analyzed. We launched Conversation Analytics to analyze these 420 billion words S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

5 Conversation Analytics uses sophisticated speech recognition technology and thousands of proprietary algorithms to analyze the content of the call. Conversation Analytics analyzes the call content in near real-time. Conversation Analytics is business intelligence for the phone. The Analytics Once Conversation Analytics analyzes the call it spits out a variety of 'indicators' for each call. There are nearly 50 indicators already built-in to Conversation Analytics, things like: agitation level, percent silence, cancellation, complaints, compliments, dissatisfaction, objection language, conversion, commitment to buy, payment language, reservation made, agent empathy, phone etiquette, lead score, etc. Again, Conversation Analytics derives this data strictly from the words, phrases and other cues actually said on the call. Example of how Conversation Analytics works S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

6 Question & Answer About the Q1 Call Report What is the Q1 call report? It is a few of the data points we extracted from every call that ran through our system in Q1 of These are millions of call segments from dozens of sectors and industries. The calls ran through our Conversation Analytics engine and metrics came out the other side. The infographic and this White Paper represents an aggregate look at that data. Why did you produce the infographic and this White Paper? There are a lot of reasons, but primarily, we thought the data was amazing. Data like this has never been extracted or shared before. Ever. No one has ever been able to analyze call content on an aggregate basis and make determinations about what happened on the call. And, because we released Conversation Analytics itself in Q4 of 2013, this was the first full quarter of data to which we had access. Additionally, we thought (and we turned out to be right) that this data would make a few waves online. It is so compelling, so new, and so powerful that we suspected, rightly, people would care. How was the data extracted? Using our Conversation Analytics engine. Maybe the best explanation about how Conversation Analytics works is the video on the home page of our site. Conversation Analytics uses speech recognition combined with hundreds of thousands of proprietary algorithms to extract data from phone calls. The calls run through the analytics engine and data is spit out--data like lead score, conversion rate, sales skills, and other metrics. There are over 45 'baseline' metrics we can extract from phone calls. Among these are a handful of what we call 'Composite Indicators.' These are the most important high level metrics. These are metrics that can change your business. To learn about the metrics themselves and get a more detailed answer to this question, read our White Paper: 45 Cool Analytics We Can Extract from Phone Calls S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

7 Is there additional data you didn't include in this report? Yes. There is a TON of other data we didn't include. For this first Conversation Analytics infographic and White Paper, we wanted to include the highest level data that would, we thought, be the most interesting to our readers. Do you plan to do other infographics? Oh yeah. We have an infographic planned each month through the end of the year S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

8 29% of Total Calls Analyzed in Q1 Resulted in Conversion To gather the data used in the infographic we did a statistical analysis of all of the calls our system analyzed in Q1. These were calls across dozens of industries hundreds of clients. The data itself is pretty straight forward: 29% of the total calls analyzed in Q1 resulted in a conversion. The only question we perhaps need to address is, simply, what is a conversion? A conversion consists of any of the 4 following events: 1) Appointment Set - In some industries the best 'conversion' is a booked appointment. For example, you don't buy something over the phone when you call a dentist's office, you set up an appointment. The same is true at a tire dealer, auto repair shop and doctor's office and dozens of other industries. Our speech team literally spent hundreds of hours trying to figure out every possible way a phone call could indicate that a future appointment was set. They listened to thousands of phone calls, looked at data from the millions of phone calls we've analyzed, and spent hours upon hours on the phone with clients, to figure out the exact phrases people use on the phone that would indicate an appointment has been set. Phrases used on the call are just one component of the algorithms Conversation Analytics runs on call data. It also listens for acoustic cues, voice tremors, and firm scheduling data. But, phrases are the most important factor. We'll list about 20 different phrase combinations here. Keep in mind that this actually represents fewer than about 5% of the phrases and cues Conversation Analtyics looks for to figure out if an appointment was set on the call. In other words, if a few of these specific phrases appear in the appropriate context, Conversation Analytics feels confident that an appointment was made: - Available o'clock if you are available o'clock 1664 S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

9 - o'clock work for you Followed by a Reply: ok okay yep yeah perfectly yes sure alright - Scheduled first thing - Time set aside for you - Same time - Want same time - Timeframe works what timeframe works timeframe best better good - Squeeze you in will squeeze you i - Appointment afternoon noon morning o'clock You can see that these combinations can get very complex. There are many variations of the same phrase and many possible replies to each variation. Again, keep in mind that the phrases listed above are only a few of those that Conversation Analytics looks for when determining if an appointment was really set on the call. 2) Reservation Made - You make reservations in the hospitality industry, at equipment rental and car rental businesses, and at restaurants. 3) Intended Purchase - This is usually in context of bigger ticket items. For example, the person on the phone might say 'let's go ahead and do it' or 'we're going to send you the contract.' In other words, the purchase wasn't actually made on the call because a contract or another formal agreement needs to be signed, but it is clear, based on the call, that a purchase is intended. 4) Actual Purchase - Something is actually purchased over the phone. A conversion could be any of these events. So, to summarize, in 29% of the calls we analyzed in Q1, one of the four things discussed above happened. Takeaways from the Data - This number (29%) was a little higher than we anticipated. We had sort of guessed that the average conversion rate might be in the 20% range, but 29% was probably higher than what we thought. Some industries--and companies within those industries--might be higher or lower, but typically about 29% of your phone calls are going to convert. - This is the most important metric you could possibly gather from your phone calls. You can use this number as a basis for all the other analysis you 1664 S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

10 do. You can extrapolate this number out to make revenue projections and judge the value of your marketing. - 29% may not seem terribly high, but if you think about it in terms of your larger lead gen model, it's actually very good. For example, Marketing Sherpa says that about 2% of your web leads in a given period will convert. That means an inbound caller is 14X more likely to convert than a web lead. That's actually a big deal. - What's your company's conversion rate? If you don't know, you need this data. - What factors influence conversion rate? There are several, but the most obvious are probably sales skills (which Conversation Analytics tracks) and lead quality (which Conversation Analytics tracks). If you want to improve your conversion rate, you need to improve these ancillary metrics. - Why wouldn't you track this metric? No doubt you know your web lead conversion rate. Why wouldn't you also want to track your phone lead conversion rate? 1664 S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

11 29% of Calls in Q1 Were Great Leads This infographic and WhitePaper are unique because they reveal data never before revealed...in fact, they reveal data that has never before been extracted from phone calls. This is data that has never been gathered, much less shared, before. The data was extracted from actual inbound phone calls made from propects to businesses in dozens of sectors and industries. Conversation Analytics uses speech recognition technology and hundreds of thousands of proprietary algorithms to extract actionable data from every phone call. It literally listens to the call trying to pick out words and phrases that would provide information about what happened on the call. For example, it can tell if a caller purchased something, set an appointment, became upset, or, in this case, was a good lead. Lead Scoring for Phone Calls This is revolutionary data. By now most marketers are familiar with lead scoring for web leads. Marketing automation tools like Hubspot and Marketo evaluate leads and provide an actual lead quality 'score' for each lead. This allows marketers to evaluate campaigns, not just for the number of leads they produce, but also the quality of those leads. Well, we've taken this same logic and applied it to phone calls. When a prospect or customer calls we can--based on a variety of factors--determine if they are a good lead, bad lead, or a great lead. We actually give the lead a score from The higher the score, the better the lead. For the purposes of this Q1 Call Report, 'Good' Leads are leads that have a lead score between 60 and 80. Great leads have a lead score between 80 and 100. In Q1, 29% of the millions of calls we analyzed had a lead score between 80 and 100. They were great leads. Takeaways from the Lead Score Data - You'll notice in the image above that 28% of the leads are 'Good Leads.' That means that 57% of the total calls that flowed through our system in Q1 were 'Good' or 'Great' leads S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

12 I think that's a good indication that, while marketers are succeeding in driving good calls, there is always room for improvement. An agency, for example, would love to produce 70%+ 'Good' leads for their clients. - This data becomes especially valuable when you start to slice and dice it based on ad source and campaign. If you determine that 18% of the calls generated by Google AdWords are Great leads, but a whopping 43% of leads produced via direct mail (or whatever) are Great leads, well...you know where to spend your money. We're going to start revealing some of this data in aggregate in the next several months. And I can assure you, the findings will rock the marketing world. - Great leads don't necessarily equate to a conversion. There are plenty of Great leads that didn't buy. In most cases the problem was the agent who answered the phone. In many cases those agents simply failed to close the business. It was a sales skills failure. - Lead score data like this is incredibly valuable to agencies. We have some clients that are now starting to change their revenue model because of this data. They're billing clients more for calls that are 'Great Leads.' Your clients, you'll find, will happily pay more money for great sales ready leads. - Why don't marketers demand this data? In 2014 you wouldn't consider using a marketing automation tool that didn't provide lead scoring. Why would you consider using a call tracking solution that didn't provide lead scoring? Seems silly S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

13 Agents Only Ask for the Business 13% of the Time Conversation Analytics can determine if the agent (the employee answering the phone) asked the caller directly for the business. In other words, did the agent issue a direct invitation for the caller to buy something? Conversation Analytics can determine, based on the specific words used on the call, if this has happened or not. In this case, Conversation Analytics determined that across all of the millions of calls analyzed in Q1 the agent only asked for the business 13% of the time. There are more than 600 phrase combinations that Conversation Analytics looks for to determine if someone asked for the business. Here are a few of those combinations: - Can I let me let's I will I can get you ya'll you guys your company started? - Credit Card to hold need a card require card card to hold - Do you want wanna to schedule move ahead and schedule please schedule set appointment get it on the calendar let's schedule something - Morning or afternoong Does morning or afternoon work? better best possible prefer morning prefer afternoon - Put you down want me to put you down guarantee get you started - Want me to go ahead book reserve order get going Why is This Important? Data we've extracted previously indicates that issuing a direct invitation to take an action, makes the caller substantially more likely to purchase something. In fact, our data shows that a caller is 10.4x more likely to purchase something if they are asked directly by the agent to do so. That's a big deal. Asking the caller for their business matters. And it matters a lot. And because it is so important, it is pretty disturbing that this only happens 13% of the time S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

14 That means 87% of the time the agent does not ask the caller to become a customer. Usually, in fact, the caller will ask a question or two about pricing, the agent will answer those questions, and then the caller will get off the phone. That's how it generally goes. 87% of the time the agent DOES NOT ask the caller to become a customer. Wow. Takeaways from This Data - Stunning - 'Asking for the Business' matters A LOT. It matters, our data shows, more than any other single element on the phone call. Simply asking the caller for their business is the single most important thing you could do. And yet, it is done only 13% of the time. - It is Easy - How hard is it to ask a direct question to a caller? For example, if someone calls a hotel inquiring about a room, how hard is it to ask them, 'So, can we get that booked for you?' or something like that? Evidently, it is pretty hard, because it is done ONLY 13% OF THE TIME. - Opportunity - The great thing about this data is that it is utterly within your control. Your marketing budget doesn't have to be increased, your CRM doesn't need to be upgraded. You simply need to require your team to ask for the business on every call. Remember, asking the caller directly to become your customer will increase the likelihood that they will become your customer by 10.4x. - What's Your Number? - This 13% 'Ask for the Business' rate is across all calls that came through our system in Q1. What's your number? How frequently are your agents asking for the business? You should probably, you know, track this really important data. - Sales Training - This data has incredible application to sales training companies and sales trainers. We can now--using data--tell you which elements of the phone call actually make a sale statistically more likely. This data hasn't been published before simply because it hasn't existed before S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

15 46% of Sales Inquiries Are Missed Opportunities Of all of the amazing data Conversation Analytics extracts from phone calls, perhaps the most useful is missed opportunity data. It was this missed opportunity data that surprised us the most when we analyzed the millions of call segments that flowed through LogMyCalls in Q1. We released this information in an infographic earlier this week. It contained some very high level aggregate metrics we extracted from phone calls about conversions, lead scores and missed opportunities. This infographic represents the first time ever that this data has been, not just published, but extracted. No one has ever been able to pull data out of phone calls like this. Ever. That's why what we learned about Missed Opportunities is so fascinating. This data shines light on a massive opportunity for marketers. How Did We Get This Data Conversation Analytics is able to use speech recognition technology and hundreds of thousands of proprietary algorithms to literally comb through phone calls and pull out words and phrases that give us an indication of what happened on the call. We can determine if there was a sale made on the call, if a reservation was booked, if a lead was good, if a lead was bad, and if there was a missed opportunity. Again, Conversation Analytics can determine this based on the words and phrases said on the call. A Missed Opportunity is a high quality lead that didn't end up converting. In other words, it is a caller that didn't convert to sale, reservation, or appointment, but should have. And a stunning 46% of sales inquiries across dozens of industries and millions of calls in Q1, were Missed Opportunities S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

16 Takeaways from This Missed Opportunity Data - Opportunity for More Revenue - If 46% of the sales inquiries (which was 42% of the total phone calls) are Missed Opportunities, that means companies are leaving a very substantial amount of revenue on the table. And they could seize this revenue without spending a dime more on marketing. That's fantastic! - It's a Big Number - 46% of sales inquiries are Missed Opportunities. That's pretty staggering when you think about it. There are opportunities for new selling, upselling, and even higher dollar value selling that are not being taken by sales teams across America. - Agency Implications - If you're an agency that produces phone calls for your clients, think of the POWER of this data! What if you were able to alert your client whenever they had a Missed Opportunity? What if that client called the lead back to correctly sell them services/goods? If your agency simply provided Missed Opportunity data to your clients, wouldn't that alone be valuable enough for them to continue working with you? Missed Opportunities are directly tied to revenue. It isn't some vague metric. You can literally change your clients' businesses if you extracted this data from phone calls and provided it to them. - Revenue...Not Leads - Too many marketers, if you asked them what their 'job' is, would tell you something about generating leads, or demand, or awareness. But, honestly, none of those things are a marketer's job. A marketer's job is to generate revenue. This Missed Opportunity metric allows marketers to directly tie their actions to revenue. - Agency Retention - If you have a client that wants to leave you, simply show them Missed Opportunity data. Listen to the calls if you must. If they're not capturing 50% of the good leads you send them, it is your fault. You will retain more clients if you effectively utilize this metric. - What is Your Missed Opportunity Rate? - Do you know how many Missed Opportunities your business is losing each month? If you don't...well...you should S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

17 Conclusion: Looking Ahead This was our first attempt to extract aggregate data from the calls passing through Conversation Analytics. And the data did not disappoint. Some of the insights Conversation Analytics pulled out of phone calls was nothing short of breathtaking. And the exciting thing: this is only the beginning of the deluge of data Conversation Analytics will deliver. Conversation Analytics is truly business intelligence for the phone S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT

18 Additional Resources The Quick Guide to Conversation Analytics 45 Cool Analytics We Can Extract from Phone Calls About LogMyCalls LogMyCalls is the next generation of intelligent call tracking and marketing automation. LogMyCalls allows marketers to track marketing ROI, close rates, lead quality, and call quality. With award-winning features like Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI), full-scale Google Analytics integration, and Conversation Analytics, LogMyCalls is the most robust call tracking solution on the market and the best fit for dentists. Sign up for a 30 FREE Trial by visiting LogMyCalls/30-day-trial or call mallen@logmycalls.com Phone: Google+: LogMyCalls YouTube: youtube.com/vlogmycalls Facebook: facebook.com/logmycalls 1664 S. Dixie Drive, Ste. H-107, St. George, UT