Congrats Invoca Summit 2021 Award Winners!

As we wrap up Invoca Summit, it’s time to reflect on the phenomenal success of our customers and partners this year. We had a record number of nominations for the 2021 Invoca Summit Awards and some of the most innovative use cases we’ve ever seen, so we had a lot of tough choices to make to narrow it down to these 10 winners! 

The Rookie of the Year is a customer who has been live on Invoca for less than one year and realized a measurable and meaningful impact within a few months of going live. This year’s Rookie of the Year is Verizon Business Group! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at Intoxalock and Direct Energy.

We were particularly impressed with Verizon’s Business Group’s (VBG) rapid expansion of Invoca across marketing, analytics, and digital teams. They have activated their conversation intelligence across four business groups through integrations with Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Search Ads 360. As a result of using Invoca, they have been able to gain visibility into key insights that are helping them optimize spend and personalize caller experiences.

“Until recently Verizon Business Group has lacked insights into our end-to-end customer journey across digital and telesales. Because of our partnership with you, we’ve been able to drive greater ROI with media investments, optimization and help our lead generation teams,” said Kellyanne Perez-Vera, Senior Digital Specialist at Verizon Business Group.

The Visionary of the Year is the customer that makes the most of their investment through a strong vision—and the ability to execute on it. They demonstrate how to fully leverage the technology in new and innovative ways to meet business objectives and bring transformation to their businesses. These visionaries are the first to sign up for feature beta programs, they love having input into product direction and execution, always manage to leverage Invoca in unique and creative ways, and continually inspire our platform and product teams to make improvements that impact the broader Invoca community. This year’s Visionary of the Year is BBQGuys! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at eHealth Insurance, and Starkey.

Choosing a winner in this category was tough! We selected this winner based on the depth and breadth of adopting Invoca and meeting business objectives. BBQGuys started out with a marketing use case, using signals to optimize paid search and campaign spend and expanded its use with Invoca for Sales. They were one of the first beta customers for Invoca for Sales, have created signals around key brands and products to understand how they’re handling calls and were early adopters in using scorecards to understand and coach agent performance. 

“Our partnership and collaboration with Invoca has been a game changer for us. As we grow, Invoca has also grown with us, allowing BBQGuys to gather new untapped data and analytics to better serve our customers and maximize our marketing efforts,” said Chris Erckert, Channel Director at BBQGuys.

The Thought Leader of the Year is a customer who speaks publicly about their expertise and the innovative ways they are leveraging conversation intelligence to drive value and business results. They provide public testimonials, participate regularly in thought leadership opportunities and are widely considered subject matter experts in marketing and conversation intelligence. This year’s Thought Leader of the Year is Amplifon! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at AutoNation and Rogers.

Amplifon stood out to us for their incredible thought leadership and their contribution in the conversation intelligence space. Amplifon’s advanced use case has guided their expertise to extensively train their AI model with a new "appointment set" Signal. As a result, one of their business units increased its call center efficiency by 15%, reduced spam calls by 65% and improved media efficiency by 16%.

“Invoca is a very powerful tool that can be the linchpin for your entire data structure and digital strategy. The Invoca motto is, ‘integrated data drives automated results’ and that is exactly what happened to us,” said Nataly Huff, VP Marketing at Amplifon Miracle-Ear.

The Pay-Per-Call Marketer of the Year demonstrates excellence in partnership and business development by consistently providing growth opportunities and value to their brand partners. This year’s Pay-Per-Call Marketer of the Year is Digital Market Media! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at CJ Affiliate by Conversant and Apollo Interactive.

We chose DMM because they drive success for their clients through a blend of  a proprietary and scalable digital marketing technology and a true partnership approach. Through insights from the Invoca platform, they’ve been able to improve the quality of leads they provide to their clients, while  ensuring compliance and quality. They have recently added their own onshore and fully remote call center facility that incorporates Invoca’s conversation intelligence and as a result, they grew their revenue by 1,000% YoY, call volume by 60% and conversion rate by 110% YoY.

“Two years ago we focused on switching all of our lead generation efforts to internal. We’ve always been a remote company, and when we launched our call center in 2019, it was a fully remote call center. Because of COVID we had to make sure we continue to stay ahead of the game with technology to stay connected and efficient. We are looking to companies like Invoca to help us really enable our completely remote workforce,” said Kyle Andersson, Director of Operations at Digital  Market Media.

The Conversation Intelligence Innovator of the Year is a customer who makes pivotal changes in their marketing and sales strategy using insights uncovered with Invoca’s AI tools. This year’s Conversation Intelligence Innovator of the Year is Spectrum Retirement Communities! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at ADT and VITAS Healthcare.

What impressed us about Spectrum Retirement’s use of Invoca was the speed with which they were able to implement new use cases and use Invoca to pivot their business during the pandemic. They had to radically shift their business away from marketing to crisis response and they placed Invoca at the center of this strategy. With a new Covid phrase-spotting Signal, they were able to not only track call volume and measure trends by location, but also understand resident concerns and create offerings based on that insight. 

As a result Spectrum successfully routed over16,000 Covid-related calls, received hundreds of positive customer reviews, and reduced resident turnover by 20%.

“In the last year or so, we’ve done a lot of things using this platform, which started out for us as a marketing and call tracking tool, and now we’ve turned it into a sales push. We discovered some things during Covid with the help of the conversation tracking and signal discovery — and we’ve pushed things forward on the sales side as well, which ultimately turned into Invoca for Sales,” said Jeff Arduino, National Director of Sales and Resident Experience at Spectrum Retirement Communities.

The Revenue Team Collaboration of the Year did the best job collaborating across the marketing and sales team to optimize campaigns and initiatives and to share insights and data to drive revenue. The winner of the Revenue Team Collaboration of the Year award is Aspen Dental Management, Inc.! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at Viasat and AutoNation.

We chose Aspen Dental because it exemplifies this kind of deep collaboration and not only has had incredibly high executive engagement across marketing and the contact center, but is also uniting its sales and marketing teams to drive toward a shared set of goals.

“We’ve done a lot this year, everything from testing Invoca for Sales beta, to priority routing, to streamlining our IVR. I’m excited to see what else is to come as we continue to leverage the Invoca platform, generate insights in order to be able to drive business performance,” said  Richard Wong, Director of Media at Aspen Dental Management, Inc.

The Best Upgrade of the Year award is given to a customer who has transitioned to Invoca from another platform and has realized value quickly. Similar to Rookie of the Year, this organization has embraced Invoca’s conversation intelligence and has seen a swift and meaningful impact within months of upgrading from another platform to Invoca. This year’s Best Upgrade of the Year is MoneySolver! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at RingCentral and Affordable Care.

MoneySolver rapidly expanded its original marketing use case to marketing, affiliate, and sales teams in order to align on one source of truth and track results together. Coming from DialogTech, the MoneySolver team quickly got up to speed, got comfortable with the platform and added Signal AI and multiple integrations. Now the Executive team uses Invoca data widely for visibility and to inform decision-making.

“We are over the moon with the results we have seen since switching to Invoca. Now we can optimize call performance through the use of Signal AI and actionable conversation data. Best of all, Invoca has helped us to work smarter, not harder — and the results have been amazing. We can’t wait to see how far we can go together in 2022,” said Christina Rosa, VP of Marketing at MoneySolver.

The Break-Through Partner of the Year is a partner or agency that has introduced a new and exciting turnkey integration that brings new value to the broader Invoca community. This partner is using out-of-the-box thinking for ways to use Invoca conversation intelligence. The winner of this award is DAC Group! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at ContentSquare and Criteo.

DAC Group was previously a DialogTech partner with great enterprise customers and relationships they've since brought to Invoca. They are already working with Invoca by collaborating on mutual customers and have clearly shown their commitment to the continued partnership.

“Thank you to Invoca for the recognition of our continued strategic partnership together, of putting together client programs that are destined for success, and for not letting a merger & acquisition slow us down,” said Lynn Duffy, Associate Director, Strategic Insights, DAC Group.

The Partner Collaboration Award is given to the technology or agency partner who consistently demonstrates a strong commitment to supporting opportunities through collaboration on events, webinars, lunch and learns and other promotional activities to drive visibility, awareness and ultimately, business results. The winner of this award is Media Experts! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at Tealium and Ai Media.

The Media Experts team stood apart because of the high level of shared marketing and thought leadership we’ve accomplished together. They co-sponsored multiple e-books and virtual marketing events, such as the 10 Paid Search Tactics E-Book and virtual marketing events with Search Engine Land and AMA. They are also the first agency going through our new certification program, Invoca Academy. 

The Partner Innovation Award is given to the technology or agency partner who consistently delivers the most creative use cases or integration ideas helping to bring cutting edge solutions to market, driving the next generation of tools for the industry. The winner of the Partner Innovation Award is Five9! We'd also like to recognize our finalists at SproutLoud and Medallia.

We chose Five9 because they built an integration with Invoca that allows our mutual customers to make smarter call routing decisions that increase positive call outcomes, maximize marketing investments, and drive more revenue. By integrating their call dispositions and agent details into Invoca, customers can improve visibility into agent close rates, revenue, and performance to help them identify and rescue missed sales opportunities. Together we are moving the needle by seamlessly integrating conversation intelligence across the entire enterprise digital revenue stack.

“Five9’s ecosystem of partners is an important part of how we are re-imagining CX for our customers, and invoca truly helps us to deliver a complete CX solution for our platform. We look forward to growing with you and continuing to be the most innovative platform for our customers," said Amanda Miller, Partner Sales Manager, ISV at Five9.

Congratulations to all of this year’s Invoca Summit Awards finalists and winners! We hope to see you at Summit again next year.

Think you have what it takes to win an Invoca Summit award? Save the date for Invoca Summit 2022 and we’ll let you know when nominations are open!