Invoca’s acquisition of DialogTech is a defining moment for the nascent Conversational Intelligence market. But not for the reasons that are being cited by tech reporters in popular outlets. Most have characterized the acquisition as a roll-up of start-ups in a new opportunity area, called ConversationalAI. More accurately, two long-time competitors are joining forces to address how enterprises will leverage “first-party data” in an AI-infused, privacy-preoccupied world.

Bear this in mine: neither company is a “start-up”. Invoca was founded in 2008; one year after DialogTech, then called IfByPhone, debuted as a company helping businesses tackle the tricky problems associated with “call tracking and attribution”. Both offered technologies that discovered which advertising dollars drove calls into sales offices or contact centers. Both have evolved their core technologies and service offerings to bring to  market a set of offerings that define “Conversational Intelligence”. These are resources that apply elements of AI, such as natural language processing, machine learning and analytics, to improve person-to-person and person-to-machine conversations.

Roots in Call Analytics and Attribution

Department store mogul, John Wanamaker is credited with saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In 2008-ish both companies, along with Marchex (founded in 2003 and a public company since 2004) were direct competitors in the “call tracking and attribution” market to solve that problem. The three companies initially brought value by helping companies determine which advertising vehicles led phone calls and which did not. Call-tracking and attribution was a multi-million opportunity all by itself, but it pales in comparison to the potential to apply “AI-infused” analytics not just to the originating number of the phone call, but to the content of conversations between customers and agents.

Today DialogTech has distilled attribution into a product offering called SourceIQ(tm), which offers highly granular attribution data, including the location, browsing history and the search terms used to initiate a query. It augments its attribution service with DialogAnalytics(tm) which surfaces insights for sales and marketing personnel or their managers to recognize the purpose of a call (caller’s intent). The purpose of these organic or evolutionary changes has been to turn the data and metadata associated with phone calls into marketing intelligence.

DialogTech provided its enterprise customers with two tools to incorporate Conversational Intelligence into the processes and conversation flows to promote sales and better customer experience. E​xperienceHub​TM is a self-service call routing interface that makes it easy for marketers to control and personalize caller experiences in real time; and IntegrationStudioTM​ activates deep insights from conversations across the digital ad platforms, marketing tools, and sales solutions that its enterprise customers deployed.

Meanwhile, Invoca pursued a product development path that culminated in the introduction of a proprietary Active Conversation Intelligence Platform. It concentrated on integration with enterprise CRM, marketing automation, digital advertising, web analytics, business intelligence, contact center and other core technologies provided by the likes of Salesforce, Google and Adobe. “Call Tracking and Analytics” and “AI-Powered Speech Analytics” are just two (albeit core) layers of a set of capabilities to support that supports measurable business outcomes across Marketing, eCommerce, Sales and Customer Experience.

Adoption is Use-Case Driven…

…Or maybe a better word is “success driven”. In its press release, Invoca CEO Gregg Johnson notes that DialogTech has a solid customer base in “healthcare, automotive, and financial services — and has organized customer success teams by vertical.” The key word in his comment is “success”. Opus Research expects growth in the Conversational Intelligence opportunity area to be driven by well-understood and measured positive impact on business outcomes. By employing call tracking and attribution, for example, firms were able to reduce unnecessary promotional spending and focus on the media and messages that worked.

As we noted in this post, Invoca competitor Marchex has successfully demonstrated that effective use of “first-party data”, i.e. capturing and quickly analyzing the content of conversations, provides the foundation for conducting purpose-driven analysis that leads to taking actions that accelerate sales or prevent loss of business.

We need no more evidence that businesses have figured out how to turn their investment in Conversational Intelligence into concrete business benefits.

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