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Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s a Conversation Intelligence Hero!
Invoca’s new “Conversation Intelligence Heroes” program gives our customers a platform to highlight their successes with conversation intelligence technology. It also has perks like personal branding opportunities, VIP invites to regional events, access to private beta programs, and more.
As part of the program, we’re putting a spotlight on our most inspiring heroes. Today’s featured hero is Jeff Arduino. He’s the National Director of Sales and Resident Experience at Spectrum Retirement Communities, a leading operator of retirement, assisted living, and memory care communities with 48 locations in 10 states.
Check out our Q&A with Jeff below, where he shares his career highlights, advice to younger marketers, and how Invoca has helped his team create better experiences for residents.
My education was in visual and language arts. Since that rarely pays the bills I found myself working in nonprofit fundraising and development, real estate settlement, and eventually senior housing.
In all my roles I’ve found myself at the center of sales and marketing — sourcing and connecting with potential leads, messaging the “why” behind whatever I was selling, and then working to keep existing business and grow new clients.
Just looking at my last 11 years with Spectrum Retirement Communities, I went from a frontline community-level sales director to an assistant executive director. Then from an area sales director covering just two properties to a regional covering 10. Now, I’m a national director of sales overseeing 40-plus sites and supporting regional and frontline sales teams.
Throughout my time as a regional and national director, I’ve been closely aligned with our marketing team. We’ve collaborated on our SEO/SEM strategies, virtual sales assistant conversion points, sales enablement efforts, CRM migrations, as well as partnerships with our digital agencies and third-party lead generation partners.
Besides work, I’m passionate about public policy, sustainability, and human rights — particularly those of underserved or represented populations like women, the elderly, ethnic and racial minorities, and the LGBTQ community.
As far as hobbies go, I enjoy reading books and comics, playing video games, hiking, rockhounding, and traveling. I’m a bit of a foodie and love to bake artisan bread, cook food from around the world, and experiment with cocktails.
We use Invoca to optimize our marketing and messaging, which became critical when the pandemic hit. Invoca enabled us to meet the COVID-19 crisis head-on with a response plan that was implemented in just 30 days — helping to keep people safe and informed and earning praise from residents and their families.
We also use Invoca to identify which of our calls are sales-related and automatically QA 100% of them according to our custom criteria. We let machine learning do the work and identify our agents’ strengths and areas for improvement. Rather than searching for the data, we get it at our fingertips in real time.
Below are some of our results:
Want to read more of Jeff and team’s incredible story? Check out the full Spectrum Retirement case study here.
Our big push in 2020 was to create a COVID phrase spotting signal and develop Invoca recorded hotlines for COVID questions and feedback. This was the most visible use case for our C-Suite team and ownership.
We were able to showcase the value of conversation intelligence through “heatmapping” COVID-related calls in the early days (i.e. March 2020) to help us both predict and address rising case numbers. The COVID recorded hotlines we created for individual communities actually predated government mandates for such outlets, including a requirement in our home state of Colorado.
This was a major instance of proving the ROI of Invoca to our internal team, as well as making a case for broader use cases beyond marketing to customer service.
Crafting a narrative first and then cherry-picking data to support it, rather than letting the data tell the story. Sometimes this is a failure of leadership above marketers or pressure from clients, but often marketers have the story and ending in mind before they’ve crunched the numbers.
Also, if a campaign doesn’t land, that’s not a failure; it’s just one step closer to an effort that will be successful.
Never stop learning, never put all your eggs in one basket, and try to stay on top of industry trends. So often there’s a push toward specialization but that only works if you grow with your specialty or if what you specialize in remains stagnant, which is rare.
There’s a lot to be said about generalization and knowing a little about a lot, particularly when it comes to leadership. Being a technical expert doesn’t mean much without people skills if you want to be a leader. As a leader and a manager, it’s not always important that you be able to precisely do the thing in question but that you know how to lead and support those who do.
Are you interested in becoming a hero? Turns out you don’t need to get bit by a radioactive spider. You just need to be an active Invoca customer and participate with the community in some of the following ways:
What do you get out of it? Below are some of the perks that Conversation Intelligence heroes enjoy:
You can register to become a Conversation Intelligence Hero here or scan the QR code below. Just remember: with great power comes great responsibility.
