Have you ever called a business and had to navigate through a complicated phone system to find the person or department best suited to help you? How about having your call disconnected and needing to dial back and explain your situation again? Now imagine how many customers experience these scenarios each day. It’s an extraordinary amount.
Many of the organizations I have worked with, whether small, medium, or enterprise-level, are always looking for better ways to improve their customer journey via phone calls. One popular method I would like to touch on is a webhook.
For those who are unfamiliar, a webhook is an API call that allows a data hub, like DialogTech, to gather information about a call and send that information to an endpoint at a business. This process is commonly used in a POST fashion, meaning that the information is stored at the endpoint to be used as needed at a later time. However, marketers and operations managers are going one step further and using a proactive GET methodology to help route callers to an appropriate end destination based on information they have already gathered about the caller.
Example 1: Call Routing for Repeat Customers
A return customer is calling in to place a new order. Using the webhook, information about that caller, including their caller ID, is sent to an endpoint within a business’ database. The business recognizes and matches this caller ID to an existing customer and has a process in place to route that customer directly to their assigned representative or a department that processes these requests. A response from the endpoint is sent back in the form of an XML file which contains routing instructions for the call. After receiving the routing instructions, the data hub (e.g., DialogTech), can route the caller directly to their representative or an appropriate department.
From an operations standpoint, using this webhook allows repeat customers to be immediately connected to the person they are most likely calling. On the marketing side, if this person were to arrive onto the site from a paid ad and call, not only does this process lead to a quicker path to conversion, but using call tracking the conversion can be attributed to the original marketing campaign.
Example 2: Call Routing for Support-Related Calls
A subscription-based company has a marketing organization that uses digital ads to drive offline call conversions. Being a subscription-based business, most calls from existing customers are not new or repeat conversions but related to questions or adjustments to their account. Using a webhook to identify whether a caller is a new or existing customer, marketing and operations can drive existing customers to a different endpoint so that their sales teams are not flooded with support calls that aren’t driving new revenue. Instead, only calls that have no match in the database are sent to sales. This keeps the sales team happy because representatives do not miss out on calls they should get credit for and this also keeps customers happy since they are automatically routed to the department best suited to answer and assist them with their questions.
For more information on webhooks or to see how easily DialogTech webhooks can be created, contact us for a demo today!
