Call Tracking Numbers

[Rob]

Not the first time CallRail has been brought up here in the forums. Though I wasn't overly impressed with the demo. Maybe it was an off day for me.

It's mostly just "works fine" instead of "fancy auto industry specific features."

Given how some of the companies that promise the latter don't do well with the former, I'll take it. Some things I need to just not be broken.

 

[Alex Snyder]

As far as traditional recording tools save your money, no one will listen to calls. We investigated and built the entire project requirements for a transcription service with automated real time scoring. We opted not to do this as we felt it was it's own company and outside of Driven Data's scope. I strongly encourage any entrepreneurs to take this up. The business metrics are really strong. Any company that says they only use humans to score because machine learning is inaccurate isn't trying hard enough. Automated call scoring has been around in call centers for a long time.

So @jon.berna you’re saying recorded calls are worthless? Worthless without a transcription.



I watched the whole dynamic change when we launched CallSource’s transcription service in the Dealer.com CRM. The key wasn’t just the transcriptions themselves, but putting those transcriptions in front of managers. Neither sales managers nor GMs are going to regularly log into a call recording tool on their own accord. But in the CRM, on the dashboard they use already, holy shit was it powerful!

CallRail, CallRevu, CallSource, Twillio, etc will all see stronger utilization when their products are embedded or integrated within the tools dealers already use. But choose your partner wisely because many CRM systems don’t get the kind of manager utilization they boast.

 

[MikeHaeg]

This is a fun conversation

Full disclosure - My company is Call Box and our product is Car Wars. We help dealers on the phone. We do cool stuff. Other vendors do too. I just want to share some thoughts on how far we have come.

I’ll cover three areas - Call Categorization, Telephony, Integration.

it Tuesday. Has much changed since 2009 when it comes to call tracking?

YES - I’ve been doing this since 2010. The past few years have been remarkable. Jerry is right.

NO - Typical challenges still exist. The phone is a pain in the butt. Agents don’t convert calls to appointments. Dealers spend a ton of money to generate hot leads but don’t handle them properly.

I agree with you guys. The old idea of tracking calls and hoping for the best doesn’t work. You will get a bump because of the Hawthorne Effect, but calls will collect dust. Managers don’t have time to scour calls and find the good ones.

What’s changed?

The most important innovation is call categorization. This is different than “transcriptions.” Instead, isolating simple, critical call categorizations and layering in a human written summary is the sweet spot. Did the customer reach someone who could help? Was an appointment set with a firm date?

As far as traditional recording tools save your money, no one will listen to calls. We investigated and built the entire project requirements for a transcription service with automated real time scoring. We opted not to do this as we felt it was it's own company and outside of Driven Data's scope. I strongly encourage any entrepreneurs to take this up. The business metrics are really strong. Any company that says they only use humans to score because machine learning is inaccurate isn't trying hard enough. Automated call scoring has been around in call centers for a long time.

This to me is a product that solves a lot of problems and can be priced per user. The costs for doing the transcriptions are like .006 per 15 secs....basically 10 cents for a 4 minute call. https://cloud.google.com/speech/

Build it , it will sell!!! We would love to partner with you also because this is a great idea.

@jon.berna I appreciate these comments. You’re ahead of the pack. Again, a combination of humans and machines (AI, machine learning, neural nets, and IBM’s Watson) is really neat. A trained human can distinguish "Yeah, I'll uh tryta swing by this uh weekend" as a soft appointment, not firm. Machines still aren’t good at that.

Innovation from AI and machine learning is here though. We use it for voice recognition, gender detection, and finding angry customers. We use IBM’s Watson for transcribing customer voicemails as. These aren't perfect but good enough because voicemails are short and one-sided.

Telephony improvements help calls find the right person fast. If Agent Bob is out, don’t send leads to his voicemail. If Customer Carl has a car in service, make sure Agent Abby knows when answering. When the local telco inevitably goes down, route calls to agent’s cell phones.

Finally - integration. @Alex Snyder, you’re right. Pointing data to the right people at the right time is critical. The biggest advancements have come from combining phone calls + CRM for deep inbound/outbound integration. There has been nice progress with DMS data dips and paid search platforms too.

I love to chat about this stuff. Feel free to call or text me anytime at 214-68-8313. Carwars.com has some interesting insight too.