Personalizing It with Phone Conversations

The Internet provides several convenient ways to communicate, but the most personal and meaningful conversations still take place offline. While you can learn a lot about your customers by tracking their online habits, the only way to truly get to know their interests, opinions, and challenges is to talk to them. Speaking to a customer or a prospect on the phone reduces the chances of misinterpreting what they are really saying. Far from being old-fashioned, phone calls remain an integral part of the customer service experience.

Phone Calls Can Teach You if You’re Willing to Learn

In addition to being more personal, phone calls to businesses are still the most common way that people interact. According to a State of the Mobile Experience report from Invoca, three times as many people reported that they prefer to speak to someone at a business directly rather than complete an online form. Another report, this one from BIA/Kelsey, states that calls initiated from a mobile phone to a business will reach 162 billion annually by 2019. This makes sense when you consider just how many people use a mobile phone every day.

As a digital marketer, it’s easy enough to retrieve mobile data regarding mobile engagement. However, you’re often left with little to no insight about what’s happening with telephone conversations taking place at your company. The result is a lack of personalization that people crave. When you don’t know what takes place during these offline conversations, you will attempt to personalize your company website with the wrong message or send customers a follow-up email that doesn’t relate at all to their most recent conversation. Call intelligence is the solution.

With call intelligence, you gain insight into the conversations that prospects and customers have with representatives of your company. Not only does this allow you to understand them better, it allows for greater personalization based on the customer’s multi-channel journey.

Call Sumo has identified the following four ways that call intelligence can aid you in taking a more holistic approach to personalization based on online and offline interactions.

Improve Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing enables you to educate prospects and ensure they remain engaged with your company. Imagine a prospect calling to learn more about your business and how it differs from a competitor. When your sales representative can answer perfectly and the competitor cannot, it makes you look much better to the prospect.

Unfortunately, nurturing without personalization can come across as spam-like to the prospect. That means your sales representatives offers the same generic response to everyone that is more common at the top of the sales funnel. The lead receives an email discussing things that he or she has no interest in and writes off your organization as irrelevant. It would have been better to send a new buyer guide than something so generic.

When you have the right tools, it’s simple to sync marketing automation with call data. This ensures that each prospect travels to the appropriate track for nurturing and receives relevant follow-up.

Re-targeting Done Right

The process of re-targeting turns the prospect’s attention to a highly personalized ad. As an example, imagine that a prospect spoke to one of your sales representatives extensively at a tradeshow. When he or she does an online search to learn more about your company, a targeted ad appears. It takes the prospect directly to your landing page after he or she clicks on it. This person doesn’t want to complete a form. He or she is ready to initiate a phone call to learn more and make a purchase right now.

Re-targeting with an incomplete picture sends prospects the wrong message. This happens when your company’s re-targeting platform is not up to speed enough to know about any offline conversations. The result is that the prospect receives re-targeting directed at an unconverted visitor offering a discount. The potential customer realizes that he or she would have paid full price and feels misled and angry. Although a poor and impersonal customer experience, it happens all too often.

Nail Your Website Personalization

Static websites just won’t cut it anymore. With web personalization, your company marketers can create a unique digital experience for each visitor by creating content for them. This is based on the preferences they have demonstrated in previous interactions.

Personalization can only be effective when it considers the multi-channel journey of the customer. Disregarding this step means your personalization comes out all wrong. A good example of personalization is listing a telephone number and providing mobile customers an easy way to reach you by including a click-to-call button. Another good example is making sure that sales representatives know about a customer’s last interactions with your business the next time that person calls.

Combining personalization with call intelligence gives your company the ability to show website visitors content that relates to the product they just discussed over the phone. This spurs them to take the next step in the buying journey.

Include Your Sales Reps in the Process

Personalized marketing is great, but it shouldn’t stop after a customer has made his or her digital journey. You could quickly and easily lose a customer if he or she hears generic questions and a general pitch after getting this far in the buying process. That means your sales reps must have real-time data available about each caller and their history of engagement.

Call intelligence combined with a strong marketing automation platform provides important demographic data. This allows you to share information about the campaigns each customer has interacted with in the past. Having this data available in real-time gives sales reps a deeper level of insight to make the conversation more personal for the customer.

We live in an electronic era, which makes it easy to believe that online interactions are all that matters. However, it’s essential to draw on the information discussed during phone calls to understand and personalize the entire journey for the customer. People want to feel like they matter to the companies they choose to do business with, and a personalized experience is the best way to ensure that they feel heard.