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Purchasing an insurance policy can be a complex process for consumers. There are a lot of choices to make and the stakes are high. This means that insurance consumers will do most of their research online, then make a call to get help from an agent to choose the right policy. This multi-channel buying experience also makes things complicated for insurance marketing and sales teams — how do you get visibility into the whole buying journey from online research to offline conversion when the policy is quoted and written over the phone?
Many insurance companies use conversation intelligence or call tracking software to connect the online-to-offline customer journey, optimize marketing strategies, and improve close rates. Here’s how it works.
For considered purchases like insurance policies — which are expensive, intricate, and highly personal products and services — consumers want to talk to a human after they research and compare options. And these conversations are highly valuable. When customers pick up the phone after researching online, they’re often ready to buy, and that’s why these conversations drive more than $1 trillion in sales in the U.S. alone.
The untapped opportunity for insurers is to connect voice and other digital initiatives with the rest of their marketing efforts rather than treating them as siloed experiments. Seizing this opportunity requires that companies have access to accurate, actionable and timely data that allows them to deliver an optimal experience no matter how a prospect or customer chooses to communicate with their brand.
Many if not most customers will call an insurance company at some point before making a coverage decision. Since what you consider conversions — whether that’s a quote given or policy written — frequently occur over the phone, you’re missing out on a big piece of the customer journey if you don’t have direct insight into customer conversations.
By using a call tracking or conversation intelligence platform, insurance companies can get instant insights into what’s happening on those calls, whether it’s in a local agent’s office or in the contact center.
Cloud-based conversation intelligence software like Invoca enables insurance marketers to tie customers’ digital journeys to phone calls using online data collection via unique, trackable phone numbers. This means that you not only will know the outcome of every call, but you can also attribute it to the digital campaign that drove the call in the first place and get the visibility to accurately measure your marketing performance. Our research has found that marketers on average overestimate their paid media CPA by 64%, simply because they’re only counting online conversions and not including conversions that happen over the phone. That’s money straight out of your marketing budget’s pocket.
By collecting and connecting digital data such as UTM source, medium, paid search keyword, and Google ClickID to the phone call outcome, you can understand exactly which marketing tactics are driving your high-value phone calls, and just as important, you can weed out ineffective campaigns that are draining your budget.
Visibility and accurate measurement are just the beginning. With conversation data in hand, you can also optimize and automate your marketing campaigns to realize more revenue and reductions in CPA. We’ll show you how to do that below.
Okay, you’re a marketer and it’s reasonable you’d assume “conversation intelligence” is just marketing-speak for “call tracking”. But there is a difference between call tracking and Invoca’s Active Conversation Intelligence platform.
Call tracking as you knew it just a few years ago did just what the name implies — it tracks and counts calls. It provided campaign-level attribution for calls but could do little to actually analyze conversations, accurately identify call outcomes, or give you attribution at the keyword level. Today, conversation intelligence is the overall solution that allows you to understand the motivations of each individual caller, including the intent, outcomes, sentiment, and decisions made, and then take action on that data in real time.
Call tracking is still a part of the deal and functions as a tool within the Invoca Active Conversation Intelligence platform that provides attribution for phone calls and conversions that happen on the phone to marketing sources. Integrations with your ad and bidding platforms allow you to use call tracking to automate keyword bidding and optimize ads.
Integrations with other technologies allow conversation data to be streamed back and forth—for example, sending conversion data to Google Ads, or customer data to Salesforce — enabling you to automate and take action on conversation data in other platforms in real time.
Like any marketing team, insurance marketers can use conversation intelligence to attribute purchases and other conversions happening over the phone back to digital campaigns to optimize them and personalize digital touchpoints. There are some additional layers of complexity for insurance marketers, however, due to compliance regulations that can vary by region (particularly in health insurance) and that your marketing campaigns are frequently regionally focused. But when it comes down to it, one of your primary goals is to optimize your digital campaigns and make the most efficient use of your budget.
Invoca conversation intelligence helps insurance marketers optimize paid search with its Offline Conversions integration. It does this by giving you closed-loop attribution for phone calls and conversions driven by your paid search and display spend.
The platform captures valuable data about the digital journey, like marketing campaign and ad creative, and ties that data to phone calls. For example, you can see exactly which paid search campaign and keyword led to a call. When a call is placed, Invoca captures identifiers that enable you to report individual call events and conversions back to ad platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or Kenshoo. This gives you a reliable and precise method to get visibility for everything from mobile call extensions to the performance of your landing pages.
Since call conversions are reported in your ad platform in much the same way as online conversions, you can treat this call data exactly how you would typically treat digital data. You can:
Using Invoca conversation data to inform Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm is where many of our insurance customers end up getting big results with not a lot of effort. For example, health insurance marketplace eHealth used the integrations with Google Ads and Adobe Experience Cloud to optimize their paid media against events that are happening on the phone, resulting in a 20% decrease in CPA and a 20% increase in conversion rates — just by feeding Invoca data to Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm. They were also able to realize up to 60% reductions in the cost of acquisition for click-to-call campaigns. Watch this video to learn more about their results.
Compliance is a major concern, especially with health insurance providers and insurers. It’s critical that you use a conversation intelligence platform like Invoca that is fully HIPAA compliant with all conversation analytics features enabled. You have to look into this carefully when choosing a vendor, as some require that transcription and call recordings are turned off to be compliant, and that means you won’t be able to use the most advanced conversation analytics features.
By using phrase spotting and AI-powered conversation analytics like Invoca Signal AI, healthcare marketing, sales, and contact center teams can also monitor contact center agents to assure they are handling calls properly. During the COVID-19 crisis, some Invoca healthcare customers used this technique to assure that contact center agents were not dispensing care advice to customers asking about the virus, as this can only be done by a healthcare professional.
Learn more about how healthcare and health insurance companies use Invoca conversation intelligence to manage challenges related to the COVID crisis in this blog post.
Insurance companies frequently operate in many different regions or use independent agents to serve their customers, while using national and local marketing campaigns to drive leads to them. This can further complicate marketing attribution and call routing for corporate marketing efforts. Lucky for you, Invoca’s solution for multi-location businesses makes it easy to personalize customer interactions, instantly route callers to the right locations, and attribute call outcomes to local or national campaigns.
Invoca simplifies and automates conversation intelligence and call tracking for insurance businesses with independent agents, franchise locations, or contact centers with:
Automated phone number detection and management: Automatically detect phone numbers across all of your company and agents’ websites and decide exactly which numbers to promote and track. This eliminates the manual work of keeping destination phone numbers updated, which saves time, resources, and money.
Streamlined data management and reporting: Easily map each Invoca platform user to their office location and so that everyone — from the agent to the CMO — gets exactly the data they need.
Easy user management: A call tracking platform can have thousands of users across locations. Add, remove, or update Invoca platform users across all locations with a single, self-service file upload.
With Invoca you can easily enable both corporate and local marketing with conversation data to drive better leads more efficiently, no matter how many agents or locations you have.
A holistic voice strategy involves recognizing the strengths and limitations of AI: voice apps will supplement rather than replace one-on-one conversations between customers and agents, making it easy for customers to seamlessly move from speaking to a voice assistant to an agent. It also involves leveraging voice as a rich source of data and using these insights to optimize other digital investments, personalize customer experiences, improve conversions and drive revenue. The integration between Invoca and Adobe Experience Cloud makes it possible for marketers to bring call attribution and analytics into Adobe to measure complete marketing ROI, lower acquisition costs, and drive more revenue. Specifically, pulling Invoca data like whether a product was mentioned or a purchase was made during a phone call into Adobe Analytics helps marketers achieve the following:
We’ve entered a new era of customer communication. Insurance companies, in particular, have a great deal to gain from creating digital experiences that account for today’s reality: people are using their voices to communicate with brands both through voice assistants and conversations with agents, who are in the business of relationship-building. Conversations between people are central to building trust and emotional connection. Voice-controlled AI is not quite there, and I don’t know if it ever will be. So, while it’s smart for brands to experiment with and invest in voice experiences, they must be ready to pick up the conversation where voice assistants leave off.
Are you ready to take your marketing to the next level? Schedule a free demo today to learn more.
