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From Click to Call to Sale: Creating A Frictionless Customer Journey

Pete Bahe Director | Customer Success, DialogTech

We packed up at Hero Conf today, where we were sponsors and presenters. For all of you that couldn’t make it, I wanted to highlight two of the most exciting things that I noticed during my time in Portland for this year’s conference.

The first was the general thirst for knowledge of all things mobile. It took awhile for the marketing masses to realize that mobile was actually here to stay, but now that they have the scent, they’re like a dog with a bone. When I tell a group of marketers that 1 in 2 searches is done on a mobile device, the acceptance is immediate. What everyone wants to know next is “So what do I do now?”

The second exciting thing I noticed was that “What do I do now” sentiment: the willingness to explore this new frontier in marketing. Marketers have been focused on clicks and only clicks for what seems like a very long time, but now that the power of calls has been revealed, it opens up a much bigger realm of possibilities.

When a caller searches on their smartphone, it usually means one of two things: they either have local intent, or they’re near the bottom of the funnel and are looking for the information needed to buy. These days people love to say “I never talk on the phone,” but when it comes to making a purchase or placing an order and vital questions are left unanswered on the website, the consumer is going to call. I do it all the time. But what today’s marketers need to do now is to remove the friction from that process—otherwise the consumer will just hang up.

That removal of friction is accomplished by creating continuity in the customer journey where it progresses from online to offline. When a consumer is looking, for example, at a Maytag washer online, their journey is orchestrated by marketers. The ads they see when they search, the landing page it takes them to—all of that is a pre-determined path created by a marketing department. But what many marketers don’t plan on is what happens when that consumer has questions, and picks up their smartphone to speak to your business directly, where they will then (hopefully) convert.

Unfortunately that’s often where the friction comes in, and I spent my time at Hero Conf explaining to today’s eager marketers how that friction can be eliminated. What if marketers could create continuity from the online portion of the journey to the offline portion, eradicating the cross-device struggle? What if rather than a customer calling about the washer they want to buy and getting stuck in a phone tree of endless options and redirects, their call could instead be answered with a rep saying “Hi, I see that you’re looking at Maytag washers. What questions can I answer for you?”

Well, it’s already possible. So is geo-location, which routes the call, for example, of a customer with a flat tire to the branch of the location of roadside assistance nearest to them geographically. Calling the wrong number, getting bounced around, having to explain what you’re looking for—all the friction of phone calls smoothed out to the simplicity of a click, with tons of data to help optimize even further.

HeroConf was a great place to have these conversations, but if you weren’t able to be there this week, check out this free guide: the Marketer’s Guide to Call Tracking for Google SEO and PPC. These are exciting times—keep up with them.