The challenge
Sam’s main challenge was that he had no visibility of the marketing activities or channels that were generating enquiries. “We knew that our advertising was generating calls,” says Sam, “and we spent a significant amount of money on pay-per-click (PPC), and social media. But we couldn’t say how many calls we received were generated from that spend. There was this huge gap in our data. I was asking the digital agency if their campaigns were driving our calls, but they couldn’t tell me because we weren’t able to attribute them. This meant that I struggled to understand if our spend was going on the right channels, or if it was efficient. We found that up to 50% of leads were attributed as offline sources in our customer relationship management (CRM) system.”
The time from enquiry to setting up a plan can vary greatly. Some customers know exactly what they want and are ready to go ahead immediately, while others take time to consult with family. Understanding this journey was a priority for Sam.
Additionally, with ambitious growth goals, Sam needed to identify where their enquiries originated to maximise the impact and efficiency of his marketing budget.
The solution
Sam was no stranger to call tracking software having used another provider in a previous role. “The way data was presented made it difficult to interpret and gain any valuable insight, so I struggled to see any value in the previous platform”, he says. “I wanted to look at it with fresh eyes and find a more straightforward, more intuitive platform where I can actually say, ‘OK, this is the cost of having the subscription and this is what I will be able to gain from it. That will offer value’, which I couldn’t demonstrate with the previous call tracking provider.”
Sam found what he needed with Mediahawk.
HubSpot integration
Using our HubSpot integration, he’s able to pull marketing data straight into his CRM system, ensuring that all enquiries are attributed to the correct sources. This means that the data gap they previously had was filled, and the sales and marketing teams had accurate data and complete visibility over the activities and channels driving their enquiries and sales.
“It’s nice to have that extra bit of context in HubSpot. If our digital agency wants to find out how many leads were generated from PPC-driven calls – which was the gap we previously had – we can easily track that back.”
Speech Insights
Sam also saw how Mediahawk’s AI-powered Speech Analytics could help them gather more detail about the conversations the team were having. It would provide the marketing team with a better understanding of the products and services their prospects were interested in, and more nuanced detail about their customer journey.
Sam tested it out. “We ran a mail campaign recently. Leaflets were sent to different geographical areas and different publications. They each had a unique static phone number so that we could track how successful they had been.” Sam explained, “we wanted to use Speech Analytics to give us more insight into our audience, and how well they understood what we were putting out on that collateral.”
Using AI to refine customer understanding and sales processes
Mediahawk’s Speech Analytics includes Speech Insights – a powerful feature that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically analyse calls and present insights for individual calls and across a broader level.
“One of the questions we used Speech Insights for was to ask ‘were they in a position to buy by the end of the call’, because we wanted to know whether this was going to be the first touchpoint. Someone might pick up a leaflet, look at it, and just enquire out of curiosity. Or whether they’re actually ready, having had one phone conversation to make that decision, to set up a funeral plan. Our customer journey can sometimes be a two minute conversion, or it could be a two month conversion – so that was important for us to understand.
“We also wanted to be able to see whether our sales team were following the appropriate processes around identifying any vulnerabilities for those inbound calls that had come from those campaigns. It was a good opportunity to test that, using the Speech Analytics AI to pull that information out, without having to individually review every single call.
“And then finally, we wanted to test our audience’s understanding of the direct cremation concept, as well. Although demand for direct cremation is growing, we were worried that some people didn’t understand what it was, and opted to include some messaging to explain it on our leaflet. We used Speech Insights to back that up by asking whether the caller actually understood what a direct cremation is – did they read the message and then digest that, or did they already have prior awareness of it? Because if we were looking at calls and found that nobody understood what it was, then we knew the messaging was wrong.”
The results
Filling the data gap and ensuring their marketing budget was used effectively were crucial for Sam and his team to achieve their ambitious targets. With Speech Analytics, they were able to save time by reviewing accurate, AI-generated answers to their questions. This simplified complex interactions, streamlining their workflow and improving efficiency. It also allowed them to quickly gather vital data on the products and services their prospects were interested in to make more informed decisions and drive better results from their marketing efforts.
Better visibility of marketing performance
“The key thing for us is the visibility”, says Sam. “We can now say much more accurately what revenue we’ve generated from our spend. Before using Mediahawk, we were missing up to 50% of our data because we weren’t tracking the calls that were generated from our paid search. Now the agency has the data to be able to say that our budget is being used effectively, because we can see it’s generated calls and then converted to sales.”
This data gives Sam the confidence to invest more of his budget into those channels that are driving calls into the business, armed with the knowledge that this will generate the pipeline of enquiries the business needs.
Deeper insights into the customer journey
“The data from Speech Insights demonstrated that it’s very hard to make an assumption about whether someone’s going to make a purchase right away. We had a varied selection of people – some who were ready to make a transaction at the end of the call and some who weren’t. This wasn’t actually a surprise because that’s the nature of our industry, but it’s validated our thinking and is in line with the performance of the channels that we’ve already invested in.
“We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t anything drastically different in behaviours between a PPC enquiry compared to an enquiry that comes from a traditional mailer. They’re two very different mediums, but in reality it generated a very similar result. We can very clearly see this now from the data in Speech Analytics.”
