Why Call Accounting is Good for Marketers
October 30, 2014
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
When you consider your marketing strategy, do you include data in the mix? It’s hard to believe it, but marketing today without data is really going into the jungle blind. There is truly too much saturation among the target markets to throw messaging at it and hope something sticks. Tactics today have to be solid and based on proven data before executed. After all, return on investment when it comes to your marketing is more important today than ever before.
To that end, what kind of data is critical to collect? You know that you need to focus on customer data, demographics, segmentation of the market and other common knowledge marketing elements. But did you also know you have the opportunity to capture information in-house that could also help in the process? Call accounting can actually make a significant impact, providing one more reason why it’s important to track your call activity and use that information beyond billing purposes.
In fact, Accenture (News - Alert) suggests that 85 percent of survey respondents believe big data will drastically change the way companies do business in the future. The company also found that 37 percent recognize that big data will have the largest impact on customer relationships in the next five years. In other words, if your company is getting a large volume of calls from the same number, this is something to investigate to ensure you protect the relationship.
A priority for 62 percent, according to Forbes, is the creation of a single, central customer marketing data that contains customer experience information. So important is this information and its use that Accenture suggests companies who do not embrace the opportunity will find no place in the market to operate. In fact, 79 percent of those surveyed agree that a failure to embrace and integrate big data is a death wish for any company hoping to continue to compete in the market.
The challenge for a number of these organizations, according to Business2Community is that they aren’t sure how to integrate or even report on the data that they capture. This is where call accounting can lend considerable value. For a number of companies, call recording is already in place for regulatory purposes. Why not use that captured data to learn more about the customer base, why they are calling, the most common times they call and other trends identified and associated with known facts about the client base?
This kind of information opens up a world of opportunity for markets as they can gain first-hand information from live customer interactions, learning customers desires, frustrations, excitement and more. With that kind of business intelligence, there’s no reason companies shouldn’t dominate their respective industries.