According to a recent study by Adobe, 80% of businesses (whether digitally advanced or not), rank seeing the whole customer journey as a very important investment in the next 3 years. Customer journeys are especially important to marketers, who are aiming to prove the ROI of their efforts, while simultaneously providing customers with personalized experiences that make them feel known and valued.

In today’s data-driven climate, personalization is no longer a “surprise-and-delight” tactic—it’s a necessity to secure customer loyalty. According to a recent Forrester report, 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience. Just think about the services you use every day—Spotify provides you with custom playlists based on your listening history, Amazon provides you with recommended products, and Starbucks gives customers special discounts and promotions on its rewards mobile app.

With personalization now becoming the cost of doing business, the responsibility to deliver a consistent, frictionless one-to-one experience across all channels (online and offline) falls on the shoulders of your marketing team. This is no easy feat. According to Forrester, US adults who are online have an average of 4.3 connected devices, which means the data you need to stitch together each consumer’s journey is fragmented. A seamless, personalized experience isn’t only judged by the messages they receive via the website, social, and email, but also by the voice interactions a consumer has across your brand’s disparate departments, like customer service, marketing, sales, and tech support.

The Current Approach to Personalization and Optimization

Today’s popular digital marketing channels allow you to collect a wealth of customer data (such as the channels and pages on your site they engaged with) you can use to determine preferences, personalize experiences, and drive revenue. This data flows seamlessly when the experience is all digital. For example, let’s say you invest in a Google AdWords campaign. As the campaign progresses, you’ll be able to view the impressions, clicks, website interactions, and form fills the campaign generates in real time. You can then use this data to increase spend for your most effective campaigns, eliminate spend for underperforming campaigns, retarget promising leads with personalized messaging, exclude customers who converted, or locate lookalike audiences.

However, there’s a glaring gap when it comes to one key part of the customer journey: inbound phone calls. It’s important that marketers can track the calls generated from every marketing channel, as well as understand who callers are, what they are saying, if they converted to an opportunity or customer, and more. Marketers often underestimate the value of calls in our digital world; however according to BIA/Kelsey calls help drive $1 trillion in revenue in the US each year. Most businesses are missing critical insights about this customer segment.

Tips to Harness the Missing Piece of the Customer Journey: Inbound Calls

1. Understand the Volume and Quality of Calls Your Marketing Drives.

Your martech stack tracks the impressions, clicks, and form fills your marketing campaigns garner, but it also needs to measure calls, which are often a major revenue driver. More specifically, you need to measure which channels are driving high-quality, revenue-boosting calls to accurately measure what’s working and have the data to make the right optimizations. By understanding the full ROI of your campaigns—calls included—you can increase your spend on the channels that are truly having the biggest impact on customer acquisition and revenue.

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2. Use the Online Journey to Personalize the Caller Experience.

Marketers should also know the channel, ad, and search keyword that drove each caller to your site, as well as the caller’s activity on each webpage. Additionally, you should be able to pinpoint the webpage that ultimately drove the phone call. You can use this data to route callers to the best location, department, or group of agents that align with the caller’s intent. For example, if you’re an insurance company and a potential customer calls from your auto insurance webpage, you can automatically send them to an auto agent—without making forcing them to bounce around from agent to agent. You can then arm the auto agent with the information on the search terms and website interactions that drove the call so that the conversation is seamless.

3. Use Voice Interactions to Drive More Conversions from SEO and Paid Search.

Analyze the FAQs and keywords customers are voicing, so you can tailor the customer experience accordingly. For example, you can provide detailed answers to these questions on your website, which will improve your SEO (including voice search conversions) and provide clarity before callers pick up the phone. You can also purchase keywords that align with the common phrases customers voice in their phone calls. Another strategy is to prepare your salespeople with a script that helps them address common concerns, allowing them to more effectively convert callers to customers.

4. Use the Results of Each Call to Retarget or Exclude Callers from Campaigns.

By analyzing the results of inbound calls, you can determine which your targeting campaigns to put each caller in (if any). If your business fails to convert a caller, for example, you can use the intelligence from that conversation to target them with the right search, social, or display ads. If a caller converts to an appointment or customer, you can target them with a relevant upsell campaign or exclude them from future ads to avoid wasting your budget. You can also put callers who convert into your lookalike campaigns to find similar audiences to target with ads that are proven to work.

5. Assess the Performance of Each Location, Down to the Individual Agent.

Marketers should monitor how inbound calls are handled at each of their locations. Analyzing voice interactions between consumers and your business locations enables you to see if agents are answering calls, if they are asking the right questions or following the right scripts, and what tactics are working best to convert callers to customers. You can then democratize best practices across your business while working with underperforming locations or agents to improve their closing rate.

6. Identify At-Risk Customers Before They Churn.

By analyzing what’s said when customers call, you can keep a finger on the pulse of your current customers and identify those who are frustrated. Your business can then provide the extra touch of personal service customers’ need to feel valued and known. Your customer retention rate will rise accordingly.

How Do You Get This Data?

For many marketers, inbound calls and the resulting conversations represent a wealth of untapped data on the customer journey. A call analytics solution can help. The right solution attributes calls from marketing sources, records and transcribes calls to every location, and uses AI technology to analyze conversations to provide a rich detailed view of how marketing is generating quality calls and how those voice interactions are impacting business. You can use these insights to better personalize experiences and maximize your revenue.

Want to learn more? Our on-demand webinar, “From Digital to Voice: How Marketers Personalize Experiences and Drive Revenue,” tackles this topic in depth.