4 ways to use insights from customer calls to your competitive advantage

With an abundance of digital channels available, it may seem that customers prefer online or self-serve options to communicate. While people use these channels frequently, more than half of people (60%) still say they prefer to call local businesses over the phone. What's more, real person-to-person phone calls have proven to be one of the best sources of customer intel for businesses.

If your business still relies heavily on calls to communicate with customers, you're in an enviable position compared to businesses that've moved to primarily digital channels. You can mine your calls for a treasure trove of insights and use those insights to fuel your marketing strategy. Using CallRail's AI-powered Conversation Intelligence® (CI), you can now do this more easily and quickly than ever before.

Perhaps what is most exciting, though, is the myriad of ways you can use these call insights in your marketing efforts. This article will highlight several examples of how CI can generate critical marketing intelligence – and how you can use it to save time, fine-tune your ad strategies, and boost the customer experience.

Call Recording - Conversation Intelligence - CallRail

Get faster, more accurate insights

Traditionally, listening to every single customer conversation was a time-consuming task that required significant resources to extract insights. Call transcription services – and even the use of AI to transcribe calls – have been around for some time. But there's always been a tradeoff: AI tools were often inaccurate and human transcribers were expensive and took several hours or days to turn around a single call.

But AI technology has come a long way in recent years. For example, Assembly.AI, which has been trained on 650,000 hours of human speech, has achieved a near-human level of accuracy with its speech recognition capabilities. The technology is much more accurate than most. Compared to other models, it made 43% fewer errors in noisy environments, like shared workspaces and conference rooms.

At CallRail, AI-powered Conversation Intelligence has been analyzing calls to help businesses convert leads and optimize marketing spend since 2016. But, with continued advancement in AI-powered speech recognition, CI has also gotten a lot faster and more accurate. Our latest release is built on Assembly.AI's state-of-the-art speech recognition model, ensuring that CI can deliver near-human accuracy with its transcripts.

With powerful AI technology incorporated in CI, it's much easier, faster, and more accurate to extract important insights from customer conversations without listening to every call. CI is now also more powerful in the types of intelligence it can deliver from your call data – such as call summaries and the overall call sentiment. For instance, CI can take a 30-minute call and provide you with three sentences that summarize the call as well as the sentiment of the call – whether positive, neutral, or negative.

CallRail - Conversation Intelligence - Call Sentiment

CI can also spot other important information – such as keywords that qualify calls as hot leads or what terms and phrases customers frequently use in calls over a certain period (such as a week). To gain more context into these keywords, CI also allows you to click a keyword tag in the summary and be instantly transported to the point where they appear in the recording and transcript.

"Using CallRail, we don't have to listen through all our calls. Conversation Intelligence auto-tags calls as qualified or not, then pushes data back into our advertising channels so we can accurately track the performance of qualified conversions." –Aaron Metzger, Founder and CEO of Genius Digital Marketing

Pro Tip: Use CI's keyword spotting to identify your customers' top keywords and phrases on calls. Then refine your SEO and keyword bidding strategies to improve your return on ad spend.

Use your calls for marketing research

AI monitoring and listening tools process a massive amount of voice data to understand what your customers say about your business. Intelligence gleaned from these types of tools can help you uncover new trends, track and respond to customer sentiment, and provide other valuable insights that you can apply to improve your marketing efforts.

Here's a look at a few of the research opportunities monitoring your calls with CI provides.

Identify new areas of opportunity for your business

With CI, you can monitor and analyze customer calls for emerging trends. For instance, a personal injury law firm might find the phrase "scooter accidents" frequently surfacing on calls. While the law firm may have been aware that their city has experienced a spike in electric scooter rentals, they may not have made the connection that accidents would also increase. However, they can use this new insight to launch a marketing campaign targeted explicitly toward those injured in a scooter accident and win an entirely new line of business.

Analyze and respond to customer sentiment on calls

Understanding customer sentiment is important in ensuring excellent customer service and identifying areas where staff can improve on calls to avoid negatively impacting the customer experience. For instance, you can determine from a call whether the sentiment was anywhere from neutral to slightly positive to fairly negative. Managers can use call sentiments to train agents by listening to particularly positive interactions or to intervene with additional training after reviewing how an agent handled negative interactions..

Better understand the customer journey

When customers have multiple touchpoints with your business before converting, it can be hard to figure out what touchpoints are really driving conversions. Call Tracking lets you research and better understand your customers' journey. For instance, by looking at web visitor tracking data, you can determine what campaigns, keywords, and ads played a role in converting a lead to your business. This allows you to determine what campaigns or ads are effective, even when they're not the final point of conversion.

Pro Tip: Using what you learn about your customers' questions and interests, you can then apply those learnings to your content strategy and develop topics that you know are top of mind for your customers. This way, your content will be more likely to resonate with what customers care about most.

Optimize your campaigns

If you want to get the biggest return on your marketing investment, you need to continually optimize your campaigns. When you use CI, you get multiple types of intelligence that can help you improve campaign performance.

"With Conversation Intelligence, I have new insights into what's working in our campaigns and what's not. Sometimes, even a simple word change can make all the difference." - Ryan Cook, Director of Client Relations at Wit Digital

Optimize your SEO and keyword bidding strategies

CI automatically identifies Call Highlights in calls and maps their frequency to spot emerging trends. You can then compare how the most frequently spoken terms and phrases compare to your target keywords and adjust your SEO and keywords accordingly.

Better align your offers to customers' needs

Using CI, you can examine what customers want based on call conversations and compare that to what you offer. For instance, let's say your home service business bids heavily on "home maintenance" and "contractor" keywords, but you notice an uptick in conversations about "renovation" and "remodeling." CI may have revealed more valuable keywords – and a new specialty for your business.

Qualify leads to optimize ads and retargeting tactics

CI automatically optimizes your marketing campaigns by qualifying leads based on keywords tags you set up for it to look for. CI can also help you convert those leads by tagging words and phrases like "your best price," "this week," or "next steps" that alert you those leads are ready to buy. You can then send an email retargeting the lead with a 20% discount, for example, to further motivate them to buy now.

Additionally, through CallRail's direct integration with Google Ads, you can automatically qualify leads so that Google Ads understands not only which keywords and ad creatives are driving calls, but which calls are turning into a conversion. Google also uses this intelligence from CallRail to automatically optimize your Google Ads bid strategy.

Pro Tip: Use CI to help with the creation of SEO content to save time. For example, if you received 200 phone calls in one week, you can use CI to extract the top questions asked, then translate that into campaign themes, topical SEO campaigns, and more.

Automate more of your marketing

As a marketer, there is always too much to do and too little time to do it all. Using AI tools can help you get more done in less time. AI can also help you automate your marketing to improve the overall customer experience. Here are a few examples:

Power personalization

By marrying user data and predictive analytics, AI allows you to automatically deliver the right message and offer at the right time to customers. For example, if you’re an auto dealership, by combining data on what car a customer previously purchased from you and other demographic data, you can serve them offers specific to their car model and other interests. These personalized messages can increase conversion rates and order or deal sizes.

Automate conversations with chatbots

AI-powered chatbots make it much easier to always be responsive to customers. They can act as first-line customer service or salespersons, allowing you to always be responsive to customer inquiries and never miss an opportunity to nurture a lead, even when your staff is tied up.

Automate ad copy generation

Marketers can now also use AI to generate highly relevant ad copy for multiple platforms simply by inserting a URL from a website or landing page. Unbounces’ first-of-its-kind AI tool analyzes the content of a given website and uses AI to generate ad copy matched to the page and tailored for platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Bing. This saves marketers significant time and helps them achieve better results from their campaigns.

“Creating tailored and effective ad copy from specific pages can save time for marketers. At Unbounce, we have always been keenly focused on pairing marketers with tools that can help them be more effective and ultimately more successful.” –Darby Sieben, Chief Product Officer of Unbounce.

Qualify leads and automate follow-up

You can use CI to set up marketing automations with Key Term Spotting that qualify leads and route those leads to sales staff to ensure leads are followed up on, and ultimately, that you convert more leads to customers. This is especially important if your marketing team or agency is evaluated on how many customers actually buy. For instance, if a prospect mentions certain words during a call, this can trigger an automation rule that qualifies the lead and escalates the call immediately to a salesperson or ensures a timely follow-up with an automated notification to the sales staff.

Pro Tip: Use CI to identify customer sentiment on calls, like price concerns, and use this intelligence to feed them related offers, such as a discount, on the product or services discussed.

Make calls your competitive advantage

Your calls hold a treasure trove of valuable marketing insights. Use them to your advantage.

Try CallRail + Premium Conversation Intelligence for free.