“Can you hear me now?”
Mongoose Metrics just announced their newest call tracking feature: voice recognition for conversion tracking. Dubbed Conversation Conversion Dynamics (CCD), it allows marketers to automatically track conversions within a phone call back to the source of the call, whether it’s a website, search campaign, direct mail piece, billboard, business card, or any other place you can think of to drop your digits.
What does that mean?
Each call is recorded and automagically transcribed to text using speech recognition software. This text can be searched for keywords which can indicate whether or not a conversion occurred.
Here’s how I envision it working. Say you are an e-commerce or catalog company that takes phone orders in addition to online sales. If you were using this tool to track inbound phone calls, you could search every call for keywords like “order confirmation number” to indicate a sale had taken place and tie the conversion back to the originating traffic source.
Or, if you run a customer service operation and want to track caller sentiment by call source or representative, you can search for keywords such as “satisfied” or “close my account”…or even “sucks” or any other colloquial sentiment.
Questions Abound
The upside is that machine transcription is free. The downside is that it is inconsistent at best and useless at worst. It has typically misrecognized most names, slang, or fast-paced speech. –CNET
The service sounds great and will probably be very helpful to the marketers that can incorporate it into their analytics processes (I know my clients would be salivating). However, anybody that’s used other online voice transcription services such as Google Voice knows that even with a clear message and no dialect, the machine transcription is not perfect.
How will this affect CCD’s accuracy, reliability and therefore its value?
I’m very interested to read the white paper scheduled to drop on July 7th. If this works as well as they propose, it could easily become a vital part of marketing analytics for companies that previously couldn’t afford to implement any of the other speech recognition software packages for call centers.