As a marketer you know how hard it is to quantify the conversions generated by your campaigns, especially when many of your leads or sales arrive via phone calls. Now imagine you are receiving hundreds or thousands of phone calls a week. How do you know which traffic sources and ad campaigns are generating the highest quality calls?
Recently, Mongoose Metrics and Marchex Call Analytics started offering automated voice transcription of incoming phone calls (here and here). The transcription algorithms can automagically churn through hundreds of hours of recorded calls looking for keywords that signify a transaction occurred, such as “confirmation number” or “coupon code”.
Machines are good, but are humans better?
What if you don’t trust an algorithm to accurately determine the intent of your callers? What if you want an actual human to listen in on your inbound phone calls to pick up on the subtle voice inflection or verbiage that could signify much more than just whether or not a conversion occurred?
Then you should talk to Century Interactive about their new Humanatic Call Categorization service.
From the official press release:
“Unlike other phone lead-optimization services available, Humantic is powered by live human reviewers who have the ability to pick up on the caller’s intent, the key element in qualifying a lead. “
The live humans may be more suited to detecting nuances and subtleties in the call in order to categorize them more accurately. Because the human reviewers work individually and on an “as needed” basis, it more closely resembles the efficiency and scalability of the Amazon Mechanical Turk approach than a dedicated call center.
So, does it work?
It depends on your needs and objectives. Human reviewers likely provide better accuracy but may not scale as quickly as an automated solution. Transcription algorithms will certainly continue to improve over time but may never be able to pick up on the complex vernacular and dialects that makes human speech so uniquely difficult.
I suspect that as these competing services are developed on parallel (and likely eventually interwoven) paths, they will both provide more accurate, higher quality and lower-priced solutions for marketers in years to come.
(CC Photo Credit: moogs on Flickr)