It may seem counterintuitive in today’s digital-first world, but for multi-location businesses, healthcare providers, and franchises, success is tied directly to the experience they provide callers.
Phone calls are the main way customers and patients first contact local businesses in automotive, healthcare, financial services, insurance, home services, legal, and other industries. And every time a location or local agent mishandles a call, they run the risk of losing that appointment or sale.
It’s one of the biggest challenges for national and regional customer experience (CX), sales, and operations leaders overseeing performance at multiple locations. They know how important caller experiences are to their success, but they don’t know:
If the locations they manage are answering calls
Where, when, and why phone leads fail to convert
What CX issues are occuring and their impact on KPIs and revenue goals
What actions to take to improve results
Introducing Invoca for Multi-Location CX
To solve this challenge, we’ve launched Invoca for Multi-Location CX. Part of the Invoca conversation intelligence platform, it’s a ground-breaking solution for multi-location brands to centrally monitor, measure, and improve the experiences and conversion rates of callers. Invoca for Multi-Location CX works for every call to every dealership, service center, hospital, clinic, store, branch, franchisee, or other location, including calls handled by — or transferred to or from — a contact center.
Invoca provides national and regional CX, sales, and operations leaders with a centralized platform to analyze and optimize caller experiences at every location they manage. With Invoca’s data and call routing technology, they can:
Read on for a deep dive into the importance of local call experiences to revenue performance and how Invoca is helping leading multi-location and franchise brands convert more callers to customers and patients.
Invoca has helped us tap into phone conversations so we can understand each buyer’s unique needs. As a result, we can deliver a truly peerless car-buying experience.
Marc Cannon, EVP & Chief Customer Experience Officer at AutoNation
Phone Calls to Business Locations Are Make-or-Break Moments in Customer and Patient Journeys
When consumers search for a business location or healthcare provider near them, they often contact them by calling. Imagine somebody shopping for a car, an accountant, a plumber, or a storage unit. Or someone who needs to book an appointment to fix their furnace, repair their brakes, tour a rental property, or see a doctor or dentist. Most people find them online, often on their smartphones, and they call to set an appointment, plan a visit, or get a quote.
In high-touch businesses, phone calls are a critical step in the customer journey. The numbers speak for themselves. According to Google:
Most searches are on mobile devices, and consumers using mobile search to find businesses are 39% more likely to call them.
Each month, search results showing local businesses drive over 2 billionphone calls, website clicks, direction requests, and other connections to US businesses.
On average, another 80 million calls a month are driven directly from Google Search ads — and that doesn’t include all the searchers who called after clicking through to a website.
Phone calls to businesses convert to customers 3x more than web clicks.
Trillions of dollars in annual revenue — and the success of many multi-location brands — hinge on the experience locations provide callers. Each time they fail to answer a call or deliver the right experience to convert them, the business loses that customer or patient.
Lack of Centralized Visibility and Management of Caller Experiences at Locations Is a Big Challenge
Multi-location brands struggle to centrally track and manage the billions of annual calls that go to brick-and-mortar locations and local agents. Locations, franchisees, and agents often operate in silos without national oversight, resulting in inconsistent performance, CX issues, and lost customers, patients, and revenue.
It’s a major challenge for national and regional CX, sales, and operations leaders at multi-location organizations. They are responsible for CX and revenue at dozens, hundreds, or sometimes thousands of dealerships, service centers, hospitals, clinics, stores, branches, communities, franchisees, and other locations, but they are losing revenue and patients because they don’t know:
How well each location or agent answers and converts calls
When and how to staff locations to handle peak call times
Where CX and compliance issues occur and why
How to coach underperformers to improve their results
What strategies and talk tracks work best and should be standardized
Issues also occur when multi-location brands can’t coordinate and automate caller experiences across their locations, including:
Unanswered Calls: Calls to busy or closed locations go unanswered when they could have been rerouted to an available location or contact center agent.
Poor CX and Conversion Rates: Callers are sent to a location ill-equipped to assist or convert themwhenthey should have been sent to a contact center agent who is trained to help.
Operational Inefficiencies: Location staff and local agents waste time helping callers that should have been handled by a better agent/department or an IVR.
Centrally Measure, Standardize, and Improve Caller Experiences At Every Location with Invoca
With Invoca, national and regional CX, sales, and operations teams have a centralized solution to analyze, automate, and optimize caller experiences at every location they manage. It combines cloud-based call routing, conversational IVR, AI-powered speech analytics, and automated call scoring capabilities to help them grow revenue by:
Reducing missed calls and lost opportunities
Standardizing and improving caller experiences
Converting more callers to customers and patients
With Invoca, we let the machine learning do the work and score 100% of calls to our communities, identifying each agent's strengths and areas for improvement.
Jeff Arduino, National Director of Sales and Resident Experience at Spectrum Retirement
Get Up and Running Quickly and Easily With No Disruptions
Invoca’s cloud-based solution is easy to deploy and use:
Works for 100% of Inbound Calls: Invoca works for every call to every location or agent, including calls handled by — or transferred to or from — a contact center or answering service.
Works With Every Telephony Provider: Customers don’t need to buy or manage any new hardware or devices, and they can keep using any functionality from their existing telephony provider.
No Disruptions: Staff answering calls don’t need to be trained on or logged in to any new system.
Easy to Use: Non-technical CX, sales, and operations staff can centrally control call routing and create IVRs quickly and easily with no coding or assistance from IT.
Invoca Provides a Single Source of Truth for Every Conversation
Centralized Location Performance Reports: View real-time and historical reports on how many calls each location receives, how well they answer and convert calls, the days and times calls occur, and more. Compare performance for all locations or filter reports by region, state, city, or individual location and share them automatically with relevant stakeholders.
Sample Invoca report on location call handling
Database of Call Recordings, Transcriptions, and Insights: Access a searchable database of every call to every location, including PCI- and HIPAA-compliant recordings and transcriptions of the conversations. Get direct access to the voice of the customer, learn why messaging and promotions succeed or fail, use call recordings to refute caller disputes, and more.
Sample call in Invoca with recording, transcription, and relevant insights
Automated Call Handling Scorecards and Streamlined Coaching: Invoca’s AI analyzes 100% of inbound calls to measure the specific elements and KPIs that matter to each business, such as greetings, objection handling, if locations asked callers for appointments, and more. View performance and compliance scores for each location and call and streamline coaching by adding comments to specific moments in transcriptions for locations to review and improve.
Sample Invoca report with call handling scoring
Caller & CX Insights: Invoca automatically detects each caller’s intent, product or service interest, and other data points that matter to your business. Unsupervised machine learning proactively analyzes calls to surface new caller trends and issues, making them easy to spot and correct.
Easy-to-Use Portal to Control, Standardize, and Automate Caller Experiences
Intelligent Call Routing: Easily create rules in Invoca to automatically route each caller to the best location or agent to assist them. Popular call routing strategies for multi-location businesses include routing caller’s to their closest location and rerouting callers from locations to call centers during peak call times or when locations are closed.
Ring Group Call Routing: Reduce unanswered calls by having Invoca route callers to a list of phone numbers sequentially, simultaneously, or via round robin until someone answers and accepts it. Route calls to a location first, but if they don’t answer, forward the call to a contact center or IVR. Route calls to a prioritized list of local agents so top performers get more calls or distribute leads equally. Have calls ring multiple agents’ phones at the same time until someone answers.
Sample Invoca ring group routing treatment
Conversational IVRs: Create custom IVR phone menus in minutes powered by natural language processing (NLP) to automatically qualify and route callers to the right location, department, or agent based on intent. IVRs can also answer questions, assist callers during busy times or when locations are closed, collect consumer and patient data, and deflect the wrong types of calls from tying up locations or agents. Invoca IVRs are simple for anyone to build in minutes and can understand both voice responses and keypresses, providing better caller experiences.
Sample conversational IVR in Invoca — no coding or IT help needed to create
Pre-Call Whisper Messages: Have Invoca play custom audio messages that only the person answering the call hears before connecting them with the caller. Convert more calls to customers and patients by providing locations with valuable insights on callers to improve conversations.
Invoca Success Story: AutoNation
With over 300 locations, AutoNation is America’s largest auto retailer. AutoNation uses Invoca to train its staff to convert more callers to on-site visits and service appointments:
Invoca records and transcribes every inbound call and uses AI to analyze conversations to score agent performance for the KPIs that matter to AutoNation — including if the agent is greeting a caller correctly, if they’re asking them to set an appointment, and if they’re mentioning a recent promotion.
AutoNation managers use insights from Invoca to identify sales agents’ weaknesses and coach them to improve their performance.
Agents also use Invoca’s real-time feedback on their performance to train themselves and adjust on the fly without having to wait for their next meeting with their manager.
“Providing a great customer experience is at the core of our mission, and that’s why our sales managers constantly provide feedback to our agents,” said Anand Rao, SVP of Digital Business at AutoNation. “Invoca’s call recordings and transcriptions are invaluable coaching tools. Insights from Invoca have helped guide a great deal of our training. They’ve also helped us close the customer feedback loop so we can understand how our customers think, what matters to them, and their sentiments.”
AutoNation also uses Invoca to create IVRs callers can use to quickly self-route to the relevant department and get the help they need. When calling to set up an appointment, the IVR gives the caller the option to receive a text with a link to do so online instead of holding the line for a representative. This reduces hold times, frees up agents, and increases customer satisfaction.
Spectrum Retirement is a leading operator of retirement, assisted living, and memory care communities, with 48 locations. Spectrum uses Invoca’s AI to QA 100% of sales-related calls to identify if the community asked the callers who their decision-makers are, their budget, their availability to schedule a tour, and more.
“With Invoca, we let the machine learning do the work and score 100% of calls to our communities, identifying each agent's strengths and areas for improvement,” said Jeff Arduino, National Director of Sales and Resident Experience at Spectrum Retirement.
Invoca also gives sales teams access to the recordings and transcriptions of every call so that they can:
Review the conversations for key moments
Add coachable comments in the transcriptions for agents to review
Reinforce good agent habits and locate opportunities for improvement
“Having this data in one platform for every location in real-time is a huge time-saver, and being able to tag calls in Invoca with comments has changed the game for how we coach agents," said Arduino.
With Invoca, Spectrum Retirement has added several percentage points to its occupancy, exceeding pre-pandemic levels.
Get Started Managing and Improving Caller Experience and Conversion Rates Across Locations
Invoca provides national and regional CX, sales, and operations leaders with the call data and technology to significantly improve conversion rates across locations. Let us give you a personal walkthrough of Invoca’s solution for multi-location and franchise brands. You can also read more success stories from Invoca users on how they are acquiring more customers and patients by improving CX and conversion rates.
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