As businesses prepare for their local economies to return to their original vibrancy, how they apply Conversational Intelligence to support sales and retention of customers should be a first-order concern. Marchex’s management made this point very clearly during a call with investors that accompanied its most recent financial statements. Co-CEO and CFO Michael Arends noted  that conversations between companies and their customers are already indicating “patterns of economic activity picking up in critical areas such as Auto Service repair shops and in the dental services industry where appointment volumes rebounded substantially in June.”

Marchex is already deeply engaged in a multi-year effort to transform its core business from “call tracking” and advertising attribution to the broader realm of Conversational Intelligence. Its services apply AI-infused analytics, in near-real time to help its clients recognize identify instances where rapid action by sales or support personnel have direct impact on the top line. Pandemic-driven expediencies play directly into its new strengths. Marchex gives local businesses the ability to respond quickly and react to the needs of new and existing customers as they step up local activities, starting with evaluating options to get out of the house, get a haircut, go to the doctor or hairdresser. If they choose to shelter in place, they benefit from analytics to help them select new streaming services, evaluate insurance options or shop for a new car or, better yet, that RV that promises to be your well-sanitized home-away-from-home.

Grounds for Optimism

In his remarks to analysts, CFO Arends noted that the results of Conversational Intelligence provide early detection of emerging trends. “as we focused on supporting our customers who were re-emerging from shutdowns, we noticed that pent up consumer demand positively affected sales conversations in the latter half of the quarter. Our conversational data showed patterns of economic activity picking up in critical areas such as Auto Service repair shops and in the dental services industry where appointment volumes rebounded substantially in June.” He also noted that hospitality and senior living were seeing additional increases in sales conversions.

This makes perfect sense. When it conducted its annual survey of 500 small business owners at the end of 2019, Capital One found that almost two-thirds were optimistic about the future, while a significant number (43%) were already preparing for a recession. Businesses were hiring or investing in resources to support growth. Yet it was clear that they were already preparing contingency plans for the possible downturn. Nobody foresaw a total shutdown of the economy. Still,.it is clear that local business managers would have their eyes open for business practices and technologies that could cushion the ill-effects of a downturn while prepping them for the recovery that would follow. That’s a near perfect description of Marchex’s service strategy.

Looking at the automotive vertical, for instance, in the midst of the lockdown, Marchex finds that its clients “are reimagining the customer selling experience and the relationships they will have with their dealerships. And they are doing this by increasingly leveraging conversational data to help put new programs in place to grow vehicle sales.” They now recognize that Conversational Intelligence platforms have a direct impact on both sales acceleration and customer retention. Thus, as Arends explained to innvestors, “we are upgrading our capabilities to mine conversational data and moving to real time conversational intelligence. All this while supporting more efficient scaling in our cloud based infrastructure.”

Next Step: A Single Source of Truth Informs Local Businesses

Marchex’s Executive Chairman Russell Horowitz closed his formal remarks by noting that the conversations between companies and their customers – through email, over the phone, using SMS or conversing over chat platforms – serve as the “single source of truth”, indicating their intent, sentiment and activities. Every vertical has different attributes. Yet Marchex reports that, in June, sales calls progressively increased region-by-region. A good number of calls involved common inquiries and nearest location and hours of operation. Yet, closer analysis of conversational content revealed, in the words of Michael Arends, that “it is clear that a two month hiatus in business availability for critical services led to some pent up demand that seems to manifest progressively in the second half of the quarter.”

Local business people will find that the best way to take serve that pent up demand is to use technology that does a better job of capturing the words of customers and prospects and take quick action to help them complete their desired action.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants