In the days of yore, buying pants was simple. You would hop on your penny farthing bicycle, ride to the general store, and throw down a nickel for this season’s freshest trousers. But advances in technology have changed the way we buy — with the advent of the internet and smartphones, consumers can now comparison shop, read reviews, call in with questions, and purchase online.
Pants shopping is no longer a straightforward transaction, but a labyrinthian journey — the sheer number of touchpoints can feel staggering as you scroll through six different websites to find your desired pants, watch a YouTube review of the pants, add the pants to your online shopping cart, realize you’re $10 short of the free shipping threshold, scour the website for another item, find some socks that look passable, and finally click “Buy Now.”
Buying pants is complex enough, but when it comes to making a high-stakes purchase like a new car or insurance, the number of touchpoints can increase tenfold!
As a marketer, it’s imperative to track the entire journey your customers take to purchase your product, whether you sell khakis or luxury SUVs. Your customers expect a seamless buying experience from you, and to deliver it, you need to first understand how they’re engaging with you and how they progress through the funnel. Only once you’ve mapped out the customer journey can you make the right tweaks to simplify it and remove barriers to purchase.
But today’s customer journey is more complicated than ever, and mapping it out is no easy task. While many brands have the right tagging set up to track web interactions, it can be a challenge to tie these to offline interactions like phone calls. This is a major missed opportunity since 68% of customers will call when making high-stakes purchases, and the insights from these conversations can be extremely valuable for helping you improve the buyer journey.
In this post, we’ll show you how you can use conversation intelligence AI to capture valuable new insights about your customers and how they shop.
Conversation intelligence AI captures deep customer journey insights so you can see exactly how a caller interacts with your campaigns and website before they pick up the phone. It gives you granular data including keyword, landing page, campaign, and Google click ID to accurately optimize your conversion paths, correct customer experience issues, and drive more high-value phone leads.
In addition, once the caller is connected, conversation intelligence AI automatically analyzes their conversation to extract valuable customer journey insights. You can learn what products they’re interested in, if they researched competitors, if they experienced barriers to purchase, if they expressed urgency, if they converted to revenue, and much more.
Watch the short video below to see how it works:
Now that we got the basics out of the way, let’s dive into the new insights you can glean from conversation intelligence AI, and how you can use them to streamline the buyer journey.
With conversation intelligence, you can track each customer’s online journey before they call your business. Many customer journeys begin with a Google search, and Invoca allows you to see which search keywords the caller entered before they placed their call.
How to use this insight to improve the customer journey: With this data, you can allocate more of your marketing budget to keywords that are driving high-value calls and reduce spending on keywords that are driving non-sales-related calls.
Conversation intelligence not only tracks the search keywords the caller entered, but it also tracks the specific search ad variations that they engaged with before visiting your website. If they entered your site from a display ad, it tracks that information as well.
How to use this insight to improve the customer journey: With this data, you can understand which ad variations are resonating most strongly with your customers and tailor your messaging accordingly.
Web visitors usually visit multiple pages before they call your company. Sometimes, they need to visit multiple product pages to get the information they need to buy. Other times, they may have trouble finding the right phone number to reach your nearest business location. Invoca illuminates the full online journey before the call, allowing you to see how leads are engaging with your site.
How to use this insight to improve the customer journey: When you track how leads are moving through your site before they call, you may identify issues in your conversion funnel. Perhaps your site is hard to navigate or you’re not giving them all the necessary information they need to buy. Correcting these inefficiencies can help you boost future conversions.
It’s essential to place click-to-call buttons on your website — they create a seamless path for your customers to get in touch with a live agent. Conversation intelligence solutions automatically track which click-to-call buttons high-value callers engage with, allowing you to understand the customer journey on a granular level.
How to use this insight to improve the customer journey: Since click-to-call buttons play a critical role in the conversion funnel, it’s important to understand if you’re placing them in the best position on your website. With conversation intelligence, you can see which click-to-call buttons are driving phone leads, and which should be repositioned or removed.
It’s important to meet your customers where they are and allow them to engage on their terms. Whether they want to buy online or call to make a purchase, it’s your job to make their journey as easy as possible. Sometimes, customers will call you not because they want to but because they’re experiencing an issue — conversation intelligence gives you full visibility into these moments, so you can eliminate friction in the path to purchase.
How to use this insight to improve the customer journey: When callers who want to buy online have to abandon their shopping carts to call, it damages brand loyalty and ties up your phone lines. Having insights into abandonment allows you to improve the online buyer journey — you can correct issues with your online shopping cart, streamline any forms callers need to fill out, and make sure your site visitors have the right information they need to make purchases.
Phone conversations are a rich source of data about your customers — by tapping into them, you can learn what product each customer is interested in, if they mentioned any competitors, if they experienced an issue with your website, if they’re facing any barriers to purchase, and much more. Reviewing the thousands of phone conversations you have with customers every day may seem insurmountable, but that’s where conversation intelligence comes in. Tools like Invoca use AI to analyze phone calls at scale and identify trends.
How to use this insight to improve the customer journey: Below are just a few examples of how you can put conversation data in action:
Not everyone who calls your business is a lead, and not every lead has the same value. Conversation intelligence uses AI to automatically detect which calls are leads and which are non-sales-related. In addition, the solution can be used to assign an approximate value of each lead based on the products and services the caller inquired about.
How to use this insight to improve the customer journey: With this data, you can make the right optimizations to drive more high-value calls, and minimize unnecessary calls. For example, you can allocate more budget to the marketing campaigns driving high-value phone leads, and cut spend from campaigns driving non-sales-related calls. You can also stream Invoca data into Google Ads in real time to enable more efficient Target ROAS bidding.
Phone calls are a critical piece of the customer journey — they’re often the first human interaction your customers have with your brand. Most businesses do some form of quality assurance to ensure their contact center agents are handling calls correctly and sticking to the right talk tracks. However, there is one fatal flaw in many QA processes — managers only have the bandwidth to listen to a small sample of calls. This can lead to sampling bias, and make it difficult for managers to identify the right coaching opportunities for agents.
Conversation intelligence corrects this all-too-common issue by using AI to analyze 100% of phone calls based on your business’s custom criteria. As a result, managers and agents alike can rest assured that QA scores are fair and unbiased.
How to use this insight to improve the customer journey: With automated call quality assurance, you can ensure your agents are sticking to the proper scripts, expressing empathy, and successfully converting callers to customers. In addition, it pinpoints each agent’s strengths and areas for improvement, so you can tailor your coaching sessions accordingly.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you improve customer journeys? Check out these resources: