Call Tracking Q&A with Ashmita Chatterjee

For Rise, strategic partnerships are more than just an investment. Along with our clients, our partners drive us to keep innovating and excelling at what we do. One of them is Invoca. Their Call Intelligence Platform provides great insights to understand the role of calls in marketing campaigns which have helped drive customer acquisition and retention strategies.

After partnering with them for 5 years, we can proudly say that winning the Partner Collaboration Award only proves how determined we are to keep integrating the latest technologies with our services for better overall results.

And back in 2016, we were recognized with the Invoca 'Call on me Award', a recognition for top implementers and service providers of call analytics solutions. One of the leaders behind this achievement was Ashmita Chatterjee, our Vice President of Account Management responsible for guiding our talented analytics team. Read on to find out from her how this story started and what we expect to see next for call tracking.

How did this partnership start?

Prior to moving to Rise’s Account Management team, I was the Director of Analytics. Back in 2015, we had just begun our relationship with a few healthcare clients including Nicklaus Children’s Hospital and were setting up sophisticated measurement frameworks for their paid media for the complex healthcare industry.

We’ve all been in a position where we need to call a hospital or doctor’s office to make an appointment; some circumstances make a detailed online form submission increasingly difficult, and there’s a duty to provide appointment access to everyone.

From a business standpoint, however, we ran into questions about the customer journey and close loop tracking. If a user clicks through a Search ad, navigates to a Contact form, and then calls to complete their inquiry/appointment, how do we track that back to media spend? We’re dealing with a crucial digital media question here: where is your media performance streamlining the call-to-conversion process for users?

I led the vendor selection process and was consistently impressed with Invoca. At Rise, a core value of our work is being an accountable extension of our client’s team, and that was the immediate impression I got from Invoca’s team. Not only did they have the sophistication we were looking for in a call tracking partner (third party integrations, data granularity at scale, voice of customer), they were taking our clients’ missions as seriously as we do. That made my decision easy.

How did this partnership change our work?

At that time, the industry wasn’t seeing this level of sophistication in call intelligence. Data was in silos and media impact was often relegated to upper funnel metrics. Few brands had their own call tracking vendor, but it was becoming a cost center rather than a solution, and the opportunity to synchronize call data with digital media was forcing marketers out of necessary budget.

Simply, call tracking data was all over the place—not actionable nor scalable.

We worked with Invoca on an agency contract where the economies of scale allowed us to pass on saved costs. Rise’s customer-centric approach was made possible by Invoca through customized solutions for each client’s unique business needs, allowing us to integrate call data with client CRMs for closed-loop reporting.

We worked closely together with the client's needs in the center not wanting to push any other agenda. The collaboration focused on innovation and problem solving. We became experts with this service but also solved real business problems for our clients. We did a couple of webinars focused on real examples of solving measurement bottlenecks with Call Tracking. We also won the Invoca 'Call on me Award' - also known as the 'Top Industry Thought Leaders' award, based on our leading partnership with them.

This partnership brought conversion data back to focus and empowered Rise marketers and lead gen clients to make data-driven decisions about media spend with the entire journey in mind. Even clients with multi-location data could accurately, and granularly, track those touchpoints.

But now all of this is just table stakes, which is actually really exciting for the industry.

So what’s next for call tracking?

Conversation analytics. I have been a proponent of Voice of the Customer for almost a decade. Conversation analytics is the pull approach to VOC, compared to the survey style which is more of a push approach. It’s all data waiting for the sophisticated infrastructure that can tap into it. Listening to thousands of hours of conversation for feedback just isn’t scalable.

Invoca is really leading the charge in this space with their Signal AI product, and marketers can expect to see more automated intelligence developed for this purpose. Signal paired with Rise’s agile team promises some really exciting business opportunities. Think about granular customer service call data reported automatically with thousands of data points, alerting you to an uptick in shipping delays mentioned by customers (for example). Within minutes, you can have that data back to your fulfillment team to improve the customer experience. At scale, improving your customer experience and reducing these types of calls will inherently improve CPA as more digital media spend can be allocated to the calls driving business results.

Get one of the best teams to help you achieve growth by identifying risks and opportunities on time. Invoca’s technology paired with Connex provides automated optimization that will make the understanding of your data much easier. Contact Rise and learn more about this partnership and how we can work together to keep driving your business forward.