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When it comes to buying products and services, consumers today have more choice than ever before. Amazon reportedly lists more than 350 million products across its own catalog and marketplace sellers. McKinsey has found that nearly 75% of US shoppers have tried new shopping behaviors since the pandemic began. For brands that sell their products and services directly to consumers, competition for new customers is fiercer than it’s ever been.
At the same time, consumers have become accustomed to convenient, seamless buying experiences. Experiences like same-day delivery, one-hour curbside pickup, and personalized touches all along the way are no longer novel — they’re just expected.
That’s why, as a consumer, it feels jarring when the experience is disjointed. When the website is confusing, when the product information is hard to find, or when the payment process is clunky, they’ll turn to the competition. PWC found that 32% of consumers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. And this happens all the time because it isn't easy for businesses to create these seamless buying experiences.
It’s difficult to get right for day-to-day eCommerce purchases, but it’s even harder to get right if you sell high-stakes products like automobiles, home services, or insurance policies. For these businesses, their buyers are seeking assurance and often want to speak with an expert that will help them feel confident that they’re making the right decision. This assurance can only come from a conversation with a real, live person. And while this buying journey — from finding and researching products online to calling in to make a purchase — may seem totally natural to the consumer, it presents challenges to the teams charged with optimizing that experience.
For far too long, contact center sales and digital marketing teams have operated separately, approaching customer acquisition through their own siloed view. If marketing thinks their job ends when the consumer picks up the phone, and sales thinks their job starts when the agent answers the call, then you’ve got a recipe for a major disconnect for the consumer. Think long hold times, repeating information over and over, agents that can’t answer their questions, and irrelevant retargeting ads. Ultimately, this means low conversion rates, lost sales, and newly acquired customers for your competitors.
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So why is this happening? Is it that marketing is from Mars and sales is from Venus? No, the real reason is that revenue teams are simply flying blind. Without a complete view of the buying experience and a shared understanding of the customer reality, there’s not much they can do to address this challenge.
Invoca enables marketing and sales teams to join forces under a set of shared data and metrics to create connected buying experiences that will improve close rates and accelerate revenue growth. With the ability to connect the digital buying journey to contact center interactions and conversions, you can create the ultimate seamless experience your customers demand.
For contact center sales teams, improving close rates begins with a comprehensive understanding of the actual customer experience — particularly the agent experience. Quality assurance (QA) pros know the pain of evaluating agent performance all too well. Manually scoring agent call handling, while a powerful tool for measuring and managing quality, suffers from a number of limitations:
Invoca addresses these QA challenges using AI and automation. With automated quality assurance, QA leaders can get to insight faster by defining call scoring criteria to quantify agent performance and track compliance. Rather than manually scoring a tiny fraction of agent interactions, Invoca scores all of them. With the ability to quickly identify interactions that need review and agents that need coaching, management benefits from a comprehensive and objective view into agent and team performance. Here's how it works.
You begin by defining scorecards to evaluate sales or support agent performance, assigning points for each element like “proper greeting” or “asked for the sale.” You can assign different values relative to the importance of each criteria, and then set pass/fail thresholds per scorecard. Most users begin by recreating their existing quality scorecards inside the Invoca platform. Individual score criteria are triggered by spoken phrases or other Invoca AI Signals.
You then decide when you want the scorecard to be active. This can be defined in many different ways to ensure that scores are only being reported under the proper circumstances (this will help with reporting). In the example below, a call will only be scored under this scorecard when it’s a new sales call that lasts longer than 3 minutes.
Once you turn your scorecard live, every call that matches the qualification criteria will be automatically scored, with data populating your dashboards and reports. Now you’re able to dive into individual calls and quickly understand where your agents are falling short and where they need specific coaching to improve performance.
Another common challenge in quality management comes down to the complexity of contact center operations. If your inbound calls are routed to multiple contact centers, BPOs, after hours answering services, or individual locations, then your visibility probably dries up as soon as the call is transferred. Or perhaps you never had visibility at all if your calls are being placed directly to a local dealership, branch, or franchise location. In these cases, effective quality management becomes a near impossible task.
With Invoca, QA managers gain visibility into the entire call experience, even when calls are handled by an outsourced call center or individual location. With Invoca, inbound calls are actually being placed to us, which we forward to the appropriate call destinations. This enables Invoca to stay on and record the entire duration of the call, no matter where it goes or how many transfers occur. This not only provides immediate analytics on the whole experience, but also saves tons of time that might otherwise be spent collecting, normalizing, and joining call data from other systems.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on contact center operations. With agents primarily working from home — and 71% expected to continue in this mode to some degree once the pandemic is over — it’s become more challenging to monitor contact center operations.
This shift to work from home presents new challenges to agent supervisors, team leads, and QA analysts. The days of walking the sales floor and overhearing customer interactions may very well be a relic of the past. With agents spread out, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and effective coaching become more challenging, leading to wide variation in agent performance.
With Invoca’s automated call scoring, QA analysts and sales management can understand and monitor call handling trends by agent or location. With this they can easily isolate agents that need focused attention and coaching, with coaching moments automatically identified.
On the sales performance dashboard you can customize your analytics to provide a comprehensive view into call handling trends. Invoca’s dashboard enables you to combine Signal data (e.g. call outcomes like purchases, appointments, quotes, service cancellations, and more) and scorecard values with other data captured from the customer journey or contact center platform. This means you can view macro trends like comparing total volume of sales versus customer support calls, or more granular data like average call score by agent, location and more.
If you focus on agent performance, you can create a leaderboard ranking agents by average call scores. For a quick view into team performance, this leaderboard can be filtered to show agents that share a particular supervisor, for example. By integrating sales data, you can even compare scorecard performance to average close rates to understand total revenue and average sale amount by agent. From here, you can select a specific agent that might be lagging on these key metrics to dive into a filtered set of calls to review.
Assuming they meet the right criteria, new inbound calls will be automatically scored using the appropriate scorecard. Call scores are accessible for individual calls in the Conversation Review interface, where you can see the specific point values have been assigned to each element of the scorecard. Using this, QA analysts can quickly identify exactly what went right and share great examples of call handling with the team. Or in the case of this call, identify exactly what went wrong (agent didn’t mention the current promotions) and why they got dinged.
From here, you can use this information in aggregate or at the granular call level to inform your offline agent coaching and calibration meetings. Or you can choose to collaborate and coach agents directly within the platform.
For front-line agents, Invoca offers a slimmed down and user-friendly interface where agents can interact with managers or self-coach by reviewing their own calls scores, transcripts, and recordings.
As a QA analyst or supervisor, you may want to give an agent kudos for a job well done or provide personalized coaching. To do this, QA leads can bring up the commenting features and “@mention” any created users in the Invoca system.
Managers can comment to agents, agents can tag their managers, managers can collaborate and share examples amongst themselves. Invoca’s robust commenting functionality allows for commenting on the entire call recording, specific timestamps within the recording, or on specific lines of the transcript as shown in the screenshot above.
By the time consumers reach out to a brand by phone to make a purchase, they’ve probably spent a fair bit of time doing research online, particularly on the brand’s website. This leaves a trail of digital intent data that often goes completely unused by the contact center, but data that could be used to improve close rates.
Beyond impacting the conversational experience through agent coaching, Invoca helps sales and marketing teams collaborate to create connected buying experiences by using consumers’ individual intent data captured through digital channels to influence the call experience.
Invoca’s website tag captures dozens of privacy-friendly digital intent data points as consumers search for and explore your website. As this is happening, our dynamic number insertion (DNI) code is presenting unique Invoca phone numbers to individual consumers for their specific sessions. This data can be used in two ways:
Whenever a customer decides to call, Invoca can use all of those digital intent data points to dynamically route calls to different destinations — either by directly forwarding the call or by passing data to an automatic call distributor (ACD).
If you’ve got a customer who has added a product to their cart on your website, you can use this data to route the caller to a high-priority queue so their call gets answered immediately by a sales agent. No waiting, no time to get distracted online and abandon their purchase. Just immediate satisfaction and higher close rates!
Or perhaps you sell different product types, some of which have bigger margins and are much more profitable to your business. Now you’ve got a consumer who is visiting one of these high-margin product pages and decides to call. With Invoca, you can use data on the page they’re currently browsing to route this caller to agents that excel at selling these high-value products. Now the caller gets all those product-specific questions answered AND they purchased the extended warranty.
This data can also be used to provide your agents with information they can use to tailor each of their conversations and offer a more personalized touch. Imagine if your agents knew exactly what product the caller was interested in before they even opened their mouth. Invoca can integrate with leading contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) providers to feature real-time screen pops that show information like which web page the caller was on when they called, the Google search keywords that brought them to your site, and more.
To celebrate the launch of Invoca for Sales, we’re inviting leading sales and marketing leaders — as well as NASCAR driver Julia Landauer — to talk about how they’re using data to shift into high gear in 2021.
Join us for Drive with Data, a two-hour on-demand launch event for B2C sales and marketing leaders and learn how to:
Click here to get the on-demand content.
