No matter what you do for a living, you’re also a consumer. That means you already know the path to making a purchase isn’t always a straight line. It’s complex and getting more so all the time.

Consumers are in a hurry just like everyone else. They’re also technologically savvy and like to keep up on the range of options available to them. Technology can also help and frustrate you as a marketer. With so many device and communication channels available, it can be challenging to stay up-to-date along with the customers you’re trying to reach. If you have ever wished for a tool that measures the way people interact with your brand using legitimate authority, then you need to learn more about call intelligence.

Understanding Big Data

While not every marketer realizes it, the biggest goal of any activity in marketing is to obtain and make sense of big data to see the same view that the customer sees. This is the reason that many marketers use a variety of digital tools to improve customer engagement, optimize their journeys, and ultimately increase the number of conversions.

The need to make sense of big data is driving more marketers to increase the speed of the sales cycle, boost loyalty through social outreach, and install a range of automation platforms and analytics tools to provide buyers with the most relevant and personalized experience possible. This all works well until the customer decides to make a phone call. It can make marketers in a digital world panic because they aren’t completely sure what to do.

The Phone is More Relevant Than Ever

better marketingNumerous studies have cited that at least two-thirds of the population, which roughly equates to 4.77 billion people, currently own a mobile phone. Most of these users have their smartphone by their side all day and sometimes all night as well. This helps to explain the 85 billion phone calls that businesses receive each year from people using a mobile device.

A big reason behind the increased numbers is the click-to-call technology that enables smartphone users to reach a business they have been browsing with just the touch of a button. The technology is so popular that industry analysts expect the spending to enable it to reach to $13.7 billion by the year 2020.

This isn’t to say that call tracking or Call Intelligence can resolve every issue with customer views. Human psychology plays a large role as well. This is especially true of the Millennial generation born between the approximate years of 1980 to 2000. In a recent study conducted by ResponseTap, more than two-thirds of Millennials stated that they perform all research online. However, they still prefer to speak to a live person to confirm information before they follow through with a purchase. A Hubspot report from 2014 confirms that inbound calls convert 20 percent more often than clicks.

It’s important to note that consumer behaviors online and offline aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, so marketers shouldn’t view each in isolation. However, phone calls thought to be untrackable must be tracked to complete the full picture of each customer. This can happen with click-to-call links. While it’s true that digital metrics are easier to measure and therefore report, companies can’t afford to ignore the importance of the phone call.

Understanding Intelligent Call Tracking

better marketingCall tracking technology makes it possible for marketers to understand what took place during a customer’s online sessions before he or she decided to make a phone call. This includes such data as pages visited, ads clicked, and at what point the customer abandoned the website to make a call instead. When marketers understand why their customers call, they can tie sales revenue and other variables to a specific campaign. This improves return on investment (ROI), the thing every marketer wants.

Currently, less than five percent of marketers utilize the power of call intelligence. By getting in now, you can be miles ahead of the competition before they even consider the need for it. Instead of taking a passive approach to analyzing data to improve call results, marketers can use call intelligence to optimize callers’ experience in real time by using machine learning.

Definition of Call Intelligence

Call Intelligence provides marketers with exceptionally rich insight into the journey taken by the customer by connecting it with his or her phone call. By integrating call tracking at the visitor level with data sources from second parties like CRM purchase history and third parties such as DoubleClick, marketers using Call Intelligence have the information they need to make the best possible decisions for current and future campaigns.

Plugging these data sets into a centralized hub enables marketers to track a buyer’s journey across various channels, devices, and sessions. This brings them closer to obtaining a detailed and accurate single customer view. Call algorithms can route the caller to the most appropriate agent to answer the customer’s questions based on his or her profile, past conversion history, source of marketing, and current intent to buy.

This level of personalization allows proactive and immediate action by the sales representative while the customer is still on his or her buying journey. Once the interaction has ended, call intelligence makes it possible to feed that data back into a machine to predict how a future call might transpire.

How to Make Calls as Relevant as Possible

better marketingBy the time a customer makes a call, he or she has high intentions of following through with a purchase or lodging a complaint. The people answering the phone should have the same information available to them that the marketing team does. Actionable insights can mean the difference between a customer who quickly hangs up and one who contributes to the company’s ROI.

No one especially enjoys listening to a script, or even worse, a call center representative who doesn’t know what to say when not on script. Marketers should strive to turn every call into something contextual, relevant, and seamless for the caller. The easiest way to achieve this is to track individual visitors rather than campaigns. By making the telephone an essential part of the customer’s buying cycle, it brings together data points that have acted in a separate manner until now.