The Mission
Viasat is the world’s leading satellite broadband provider, offering communications solutions for customers who can’t be reached by traditional cable or fiberoptic services. This includes residential and business broadband services in rural areas, government services including the U.S. Department of Defense, and even connectivity for commercial airlines.
Customers like these often cannot get service from traditional internet providers, but they are Viasat’s bread and butter. “We look for those rural customers or the ‘needle in a haystack’ customers as we like to say,” said David Salcido, Director of Digital Marketing at Viasat.
In the past, approximately 90% of Viasat's marketing budget went to offline advertising, primarily national television. In early 2020, Viasat made an aggressive shift from offline advertising to digital marketing. Even with its shift to digital, most of its sales still occur on the phone, and this posed a number of marketing attribution challenges.
We had no visibility into our sales data as far as our campaign data went. What we really needed was more granular tracking from the first touchpoint all the way to the conversion.
David Salcido, Director of Digital Marketing at Viasat
The Challenge
Once Viasat was conducting nearly all of its marketing via digital channels, it needed to find new ways of attributing call volume and sales back to its digital marketing channels and ad spend to figure out which clicks were driving calls, and which are driving sales. “Just when you thought that our marketing challenges at Viasat couldn't get any more difficult, they actually do,” said Salcido.
On top of having those hard-to-reach customers in rural areas and an aggressive shift to digital, they also faced a lack of integration between marketing technology platforms. “We had no visibility into our sales data as far as our campaign data went. What we really needed was more granular tracking from the first touchpoint all the way to the conversion.” Since nearly all of Viasat’s sales happen in the call center, it was not easy to track.
Viasat also faced a new challenge when COVID-19 hit North America — a massive increase in call volume to its call centers. With a surge of people working and learning from home, many needed new or upgraded internet service. An increase in calls seems like an unqualified success in what has been a challenging time for many companies. However, Viasat services a very niche market. Many of the calls it was getting were from unqualified customers who lived in areas that are better served by conventional broadband or in areas that it serves but were already at their bandwidth limits and could not take any more subscribers.
The increase in call volume was impacting the service quality for prospective subscribers and current customers alike as the call center was overwhelmed and sales queues were clogged. They had to begin turning away callers, many of whom could have been qualified customers, and all callers were experiencing long hold times. “This was very problematic because when coupled with the increased call complexities due to customer concerns surrounding COVID, it led to a troubling ecosystem for our call center.”
The Resolution
Using Invoca’s conversation intelligence platform, Viasat was able to fully integrate its marketing tech stack to get a 360-degree view of the customer journey and mitigate its call volume issues while significantly increasing conversion rates.
Creating a Closed-Loop Marketing Ecosystem with Invoca
“Our solution was to integrate and pass the data between our different systems to close the loop and get a 360-degree perspective of not only the customer but the customer journey, how we were reaching the customers, and the different touchpoints along the way,” said Salcido.
Google Ads was used to optimize paid search campaigns at the keyword level, their Facebook integration with Invoca allowed visibility into which creative and tactics were performing most effectively to drive orders, and Google Campaign Manager was used to see view-through conversions as well as online orders. “All these integrations led to a much better picture of the customer journey,” said Frank McGinn, sales analytics manager at Viasat.
Once they had Invoca Signals set up and all of the pre-existing integrations in place, they gained full visibility into the marketing campaign picture from the initial impression to ad click to call to order. “Invoca allows us to be more efficient and place our spend in the campaigns and tactics that are driving sales. Previously, we only really had insights into calls, but the conversion Signals helped to close that loop and bridge that online-to-offline gap.”
Viasat’s marketing team expanded its use of Invoca to optimize its organic efforts as well. “This was very exciting because it finally enabled us to connect our paid media with our organic search for full visibility into our marketing ecosystem.”
Optimizing the Customer Journey with Invoca’s Adobe Analytics Integration
Adobe Analytics is Viasat’s central system for visualizing the customer journey. To gain a complete picture of the digital-to-call journey, they integrate Invoca with Adobe Analytics. This allows them to see when there is fallout from online orders, meaning that customers are choosing to call rather than complete their purchase on the website. They can then use Invoca’s AI to detect trends from those phone conversations to identify the issue causing fallout — for example, they can see if they need to fix an issue on the website, or update pages with FAQs to proactively answer customer questions.
Invoca’s Adobe Analytics integration has really improved how we track the customer journey. If our web team sees a drop-off at any step of the buying flow, we can dig into Invoca to see why they’re calling, and address the issue. Having that visibility is key for us, and it’s helped us make the customer experience a lot more seamless.
Frank McGinn, Sales Analytics Manager at Viasat
In addition, Viasat passes closed-won data from Salesforce to Invoca to Adobe Analytics. This allows the team to track which campaigns are driving calls that ultimately result in closed sales. It also allows them to see which packages site visitors have already purchased — they plan to use these insights to create personalized website experiences.
“Passing closed-won data from Invoca to Adobe Analytics has opened a lot of doors for us. The next step is to use it to improve audience segmentation, and drive gains with personalized content. I’m very excited for what the future holds,” said Frank McGinn, sales analytics manager at Viasat.
Managing High Call Volumes to Prioritize Qualified Leads During the Peak of the COVID-19 Crisis
In March of 2020, Viasat experienced a significant increase in call volume and orders as people switching to working, learning, and doing more from home needed fast, reliable broadband service. “While we were targeting customers in underserved areas, we were advertising to all customers in the country, including in cities. This meant that we were getting a high volume of unqualified callers,” said Salcido.
With Invoca, Viasat saw an opportunity to fix the problem by prioritizing the highest quality leads as well as existing customers. They used PreSense’s advanced call routing feature to detect high-value leads and deflect unqualified callers. If the caller was known to be calling from an unserviceable area, they would be redirected to an automated message. If the caller was identified as an existing customer, they would be automatically routed to customer care.
“Invoca eliminated that guessing game and really allowed us to see who was calling.” In addition to the call routing, Viasat was able to further reduce unqualified calls from reaching their call centers by more precisely targeting their serviceable geographic areas with their online marketing.
“With Invoca, we're able to provide a better customer experience and stellar results for our business.” Viasat was able to save 452 contact center agent hours per week. “To put it into human terms, we would need 11 more call center employees just to answer those calls.” By deflecting unqualified callers, routing current customers directly to customer care, and focusing its marketing only on its addressable markets, they were also able to increase the handled call conversion rate by 74%.
With Invoca, we’re able to provide a better customer experience and stellar results for our business.
David Salcido, Director of Digital Marketing at Viasat
Results
- 74% Increase in Handled Call Conversion Rate
- 452-hour reduction in handled calls per week
Invoca allows us to be more efficient and place our spend in the campaigns and tactics that are driving sales. Previously, we only really had insights into calls, but the conversion Signals helped to close that loop and bridge the online-to-offline gap.
Frank McGinn, Sales Analytics Manager at Viasat
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