Invoca Introduces Signal AI to Unlock New Insights from Offline Voice Conversations

By Sudipto Ghosh On Aug 7, 2017

Invoca, the call intelligence company, today unveiled Invoca Signal AI, adding the power and scale of machine learning to the Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud. With Signal AI, marketers can uncover previously inaccessible insights from billions of phone conversations with customers. Signal AI analyzes the entire context of the conversation for language patterns, in real time, and identifies customer intent and behavior, as well as the outcome of the call. This gives marketers the ability to analyze offline phone conversations and optimize digital marketing campaigns just as they’ve done for online conversions.

“Invoca Signal AI is powered by enterprise cloud architecture and is PCI certified to ensure the security of sensitive customer information exchanged in conversations.”

Lauren Ishimaru Invoca — Lauren Ishimaru

Invoca’s Director of Product Marketing, Lauren Ishimaru spoke to Martech Series about this development.

MTS: What are the out-of-the-box predictive models offered by Signal AI?

Lauren Ishimaru: We have been working on Signal AI since 2016.

Our first set of predictive models is industry-based, which means we’ve trained our models using conversational data across key industries including, insurance, automotive, lending/financial services, telecommunications, home services and healthcare. We understand that not all companies want to identify the same insights from their conversations with customers, so we created over 25 distinct pre-trained Signals that we offer out-of-the-box for marketers to choose from. Our methodology for creating these industry pre-trained Signals is all performed with the strictest level of data governance, ensuring we are anonymizing data at each step of the model training process.

MTS: How does Signal measure marketing effectiveness for offline and online conversations?

Lauren Ishimaru: Signal AI uses the power of machine learning to analyze voice conversations in real-time. Marketers can use Signal AI to understand various outcomes of the conversation (a quote requested, a sale made, a positive customer experience, a cancellation). With this level of detail, marketers can accurately measure whether a sale was made over the phone and attribute the sale back to the paid search keyword, email campaign, paid social ad or display ad that drove the call.

MTS: How would Signal AI integrate with other AI/ML platforms, including Adobe Sensei, Salesforce Einstein, and IBM Watson?

Lauren Ishimaru: With more than 85 billion calls to business each year, it’s becoming even more important for marketers to integrate call intelligence with their marketing automation solutions to connect digital and offline consumer interactions. Signal AI delivers insights from calls that are analyzed as they happen to the leading digital marketing clouds we integrate with, like Adobe, Facebook, Google, and Salesforce. Valuable offline data provided by Signal AI can be used to improve the algorithms those platforms use to power their artificial intelligence to improve marketing spend and the customer experience.

MTS: Would Signal AI democratize on-call conversation data and help CMOs increase the ROI of their marketing budgets?

Lauren Ishimaru: For expensive or complex purchases, like a kitchen remodel or buying life insurance, consumers often research online and then call to purchase. According to a study by Google, 61% of mobile users call a business when they’re in the purchase phase of the buying cycle. These voice conversations are a goldmine of information for marketers, but marketers haven’t been able to or limited in their ability to gain access to all of the insights available in these voice conversations.

Either they don’t have the people or resources to manually listen to calls to uncover what’s happening, or they rely on keyword spotting technology that’s limited in the scope of solutions it can solve for. This means all of the rich insights from the voice conversation are lost.

Our new offering uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the entire context of voice conversations. Marketers can use Invoca AI to understand various outcomes of the conversation (a quote requested, a sale made, a positive customer experience, a cancellation) and use that information to better inform marketing spend and the next best engagement with that customer — like thanking them for a purchase or moving them to a nurturing cycle. Marketers can optimize their marketing performance by allocating more spend to the keywords or marketing campaigns driving calls that result in a purchase.

Signal AI Optimizes Digital Experience with Improved Offline Insights on Conversations

The Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud with Signal AI uses machine learning to give brands access to actionable data from the billions of phone conversations that happen with customers each year. Before Signal AI, marketers seeking these insights had to listen to individual calls or use basic keyword-spotting products that identify only pre-determined words or phrases.

Invoca’s new offering analyzes conversations in real time and identifies language patterns associated with specific intents and outcomes, such as “requesting a quote” in insurance, “booking an appointment” in home services or “placing an order” in telecommunications.

Marketers can use these insights to optimize their digital marketing investments, improve offline conversions, increase ad spend efficiency and drive revenue.

Enterprise customers including Allstate, Frontier Communications and 3 Day Blinds are already using Invoca Signal AI in private beta.

Signal AI Could Be Customized For Wider Variety of Customer Data

Signal AI offers pre-trained, out-of-the-box predictive models for marketers who are getting started with machine learning. These models are based on millions of calls from industries including insurance, automotive, lending, telecommunications, home services and healthcare.

Signal AI delivers insights from calls that are analyzed as they happen and automatically triggers the next action in a marketer’s technology stack. The Invoca Voice Marketing Cloud has over 30 integrations, including bid management solutions and CRM software, so marketers can use actionable data from live conversations to improve marketing spend and the customer experience.

More sophisticated marketers can customize Signal AI to understand a wider variety of customer behaviors and outcomes. These marketers, with access to internal data science teams, can use their company’s data sets to build and continuously tune custom Signal AI classifiers.

Marketers Could Use AI/ML Capabilities to Create Better Experiences using Unstructured Voice Conversations

According to BIA/Kelsey, calls to businesses are expected to exceed 169 billion by 2020. For expensive or complex purchases, such as a mortgage, life insurance plan, or home renovation project, consumers often conduct initial research online, and then call for advice before buying. Marketers have lacked insight into these revenue-driving phone conversations by narrowly focusing their efforts on optimizing for digital engagements. However, Innovative marketers are now recognizing the need to use artificial intelligence to gain insights from large volumes of data, such as unstructured voice conversations, to better serve their customers.

Dan Williams, Chief Revenue Officer at 3 Day Blinds, said, “We rely on digital marketing to find and build relationships with our customers, who then book appointments with us over the phone. A majority of our customers come through phone calls, so the importance of call intelligence cannot be overstated. With the new Invoca Signal AI we can more quickly identify the outcome of the call — whether a customer booked an in-home visit or inquired about pricing. We can use this information to measure our marketing effectiveness while also building a stronger relationship with each customer with personalized interactions.”

Customer Conversations Data Remains an Underutilized yet Valuable Data Source for Marketers

Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca, said, “People are using voice to interact with the world around them more than ever, and they’re using mobile phones, home devices and even landlines to call businesses at staggering rates. Customer conversations have been an underutilized yet valuable data source for marketers as they seek to understand, meet and even predict the subtlest of consumer needs and intents. Brands will differentiate themselves from the competition by leveraging rich insights from conversations to optimize digital marketing investments and improve the customer experience.”

Currently, Invoca helps the modern marketer optimize for the most important step in the customer journey: the phone call. With Invoca’s Voice Marketing Cloud, marketers can get granular campaign attribution to understand why customers are calling, gain real-time intelligence about who is calling and analyze what’s being said in conversations.

Marketers can put this data to work directly in the Voice Marketing Cloud by automating the ideal customer experience before, during and after each call. With an ecosystem of over 30 technology partners, marketers can inject call intelligence into their existing technology stack, giving them the ability to orchestrate a true omnichannel customer journey.

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