Beyond Call Transcription

Call Analytics, which for Marchex represents a fundamental technical must- have for advertisers dependent on call-based leads, has the potential to go very deep: unlike clicks, which merely beget more clicks, a consumer connecting with an advertiser over the phone is engaged in an active, live, relationship-building conversation. And hearing the richness of these connections, as I now know very intimately, is an education in what really happens when marketing turns to sales and leads become customers....

To maximize the learning potential of call analytics, it's an incredibly valuable (albeit technically very challenging) half step to reach beyond the who-what-where-why-when's of tracking phone calls to start making sense of actual human conversation. This kind of insight can tell you things website and other kinds of marketing analytics can only guess at: how the call center and agents are behaving, the emotional state of the caller, what specific product or service attributes are critical to the customer, what their real pain points are, whether they are price sensitive, whether competitors are a threat, and much, much more.

So in a move that's ripped straight from the pages of the engineering/business disconnect handbook, I've lately heard a ton of noise about the value of transcription, long considered one of the choicest problems in software engineering. So, faced with tens of thousands of hours of otherwise opaque but insanely valuable audio, the marketer, who wants insight, correlation, and proof of ROI, has asked the engineer what the options are; the answer, not surprisingly, is to pick the most relevant engineering challenge, speech-to-text transcription.

But call transcription by itself merely shifts the locus of opacity from audio to text. Tens of thousands of hours of recorded audio are exchanged for millions of pages of text. Handing the marketer transcripts only works at tiny, tiny scale, and only if the marketer has the time and wherewithal to actually read the transcripts. That's why transcription is a necessary, but by itself insufficient, first step in the process of extracting fruit from a consumer/advertiser dialogue. Think of transcription alone as having a Web without a search engine....

Transcription by itself may provide a product, but it doesn't grasp the solution and its opportunity: making sense of live conversation to provide insight and leverage for the marketer.

At Marchex, we've been hard at work on the subsequent steps required to tap
into the opportunity we see in the storm of audio data. We call it Call Mining, and will lay out our vision for it in subsequent posts! Stay tuned....