Invoca Releases Signal Discovery to Give Marketers Access to an Untapped Source of First-Party Customer Data

By STS News Desk On Oct 2, 2019

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First-of-its-kind solution powered by unsupervised machine learning helps marketers uncover and apply an unprecedented level of customer insights from inbound phone conversations

Invoca, an AI-powered call tracking and conversational analytics company, unveiled Signal Discovery, the latest extension to its Signal AI product suite. Signal Discovery is a first-of-its-kind tool that analyzes businesses’ calls to automatically uncover conversational insights about their high-intent buyers, which marketers can use to inform customer acquisition strategy, drive revenue growth, and improve the buying experience.

On average, 40 million calls are driven by Google ads each month, yet conversations have largely remained a black box of information for marketers looking to optimize this revenue channel. This is especially significant for industries like financial services, telecommunications and insurance where consumers research online, but pick up the phone when they’re further along in the purchase process.

Signal Discovery gives marketers an unprecedented view into first-party conversation data from high-intent consumers — such as specific product or promotion inquiries — which they can analyze and take action on. As just one example, this data empowers marketers to retarget consumers who called and indicated they were close to purchasing but didn’t buy.

“While marketers have historically been focused on digital channels and readily-accessible data sets, conversations remain one of the last untapped sources of first-party data and insights,” said Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca. “These conversations represent a goldmine of customer data. It’s in these conversations that consumers are explicitly telling a brand their preferences, their fears, their requests — in their own words. Without this level of insight into sales conversations, marketers are losing out on opportunities to drive 15-20% more conversions from their digital and offline campaigns.”

Today, Invoca also released new research, “The State of First-Party Data,” which includes fresh data from over 500 business to consumer (B2C) marketers about how they’re looking to build one-to-one customer relationships in the post third-party data era. Sample insights include:

More than one in four respondents (27%) put phone call data in their top three sources of first-party data. Yet only half of marketers (56%) have access to this data, and only 8% say this is the top source of data they use to inform campaign personalization.
These numbers represent missed opportunities, given nearly three-fourths of marketers (73%) are very confident or confident in their customer data from phone calls.
21st-century strategies should be unified. While marketers are attempting to connect online and offline customer data, only 28% say they have a unified strategy.

Introducing Signal Discovery

With Signal Discovery, marketers can quickly gain new insights from tens of thousands of conversations and take action on them in real time. This new level of insight not only serves to validate their current assumptions about caller behavior, but it also uncovers conversation patterns and behaviors that they didn’t know existed. Marketers can take these deep insights to drive more revenue-generating calls, boost conversion rates, and optimize the buying experience.

Signal Discovery is the latest addition to Invoca’s Signal AI conversational analytics suite, which has received recognition from Forrester Research and CB Insights for its innovative approach to extracting conversational insights with proprietary AI models.

Key benefits include:

Proactive insights. Using unsupervised machine learning, Signal Discovery automatically groups customer conversations into topics based on similarities in speech patterns — without any guidance or training data needed. This means marketers can quickly understand customer behavior, without the need to set up search terms or know exactly what to look for.
Customer journey focused. While existing speech analytics solutions provide feedback and coaching to sales reps and contact center agents, Signal Discovery is focused on understanding the customer. So marketers can detect conversational events in the customer journey, like callers asking about price matching or competitive promotions.
Digitally actionable. Since each conversation is tied to a digital customer ID, marketers can easily activate new customer journeys based on these events and personalize interactions on Google, Facebook and on their website. For example, when a customer asks about competitive promotions, a marketer can retarget them with a special offer and personalize the web experience to accentuate competitive differentiation.
Centered on the buying experience. The conversational insights gleaned from Signal Discovery improve the experience for consumers who are high-intent and close to the point of purchase. Making this process as seamless as possible, across channels, is an area where marketers and customer experience (CX) professionals are increasingly collaborating. With Invoca’s extensible platform, marketers can send conversational data to CX platforms like Medallia and Qualtrics to provide actionable feedback on the buying experience.

Comments on the News

“In telecommunications, consumers want to speak to an expert before committing the resources to sign up for services. As a result, conversations are not only a highly influential step in the buying process, but a critical source of customer data for the marketing team,” said Bryan Flores, Group Vice President of Marketing and Strategy, Frontier Communications. “With Signal Discovery, we’re excited about uncovering even more insights that we hadn’t known to look for, and applying these learnings to new inbound calls to further optimize our customer acquisition campaigns and improve the buying experience.”

“Signal Discovery shines a whole new light on conversations happening in our contact center, giving us the data we need to enact changes across the organization,” said Noah Brooks, Manager of Digital Engagement and Analytics, University Hospitals. “As a marketer, I’m excited to apply this data in real-time to improve the patient experience.”

“Conversations are overflowing with insights that don’t always see the light of day outside the contact center. As a result, many companies are missing out on opportunities to create a more consistent and positive customer experience across human and digital touch points,” said Dan Miller, Lead Analyst and Founder, Opus Research. “Invoca’s AI is democratizing conversational data by making it available and actionable beyond the confines of the contact center. By applying this data in real time, marketers can not only streamline the buying experience but also use it to inform product strategy and improve customer service.”