Marchex has been busy. Way back in the pre-pandemic days of December, 2019, Opus Research highlighted Marchex in our Vendors That Matter series. It was a transformational time when we started liberally using the term “conversational intelligence” to better express how Marchex and others combine analytics and AI to inform sales, marketing, and customer support experiences.

In that same time period, Marchex announced their acquisition of Sonar Technologies, thereby significantly expanding their capabilities as a leading conversational analytics and solutions company. Exciting times! That is, until the pandemic hit in early 2020 and all bets were off. In their Q1 2020 financials report, they shared the cost of that initial shutdown: “These events have had a severe impact on the company’s call analytics and solutions volumes, which started declining meaningfully in March and by the end of March were down materially as compared to early February.”

Fast-Forwarding

That was then, this is now and there’s a much rosier picture to paint for Marchex. They have thoughtfully integrated Sonar into their portfolio and greatly simplified their integration offers with the recently announced Marchex Anywhere launch. This is a big step for Marchex and puts them on solid ground with other competitors in the sales recovery and conversational intelligence space.

Marchex Anywhere was also the main focus of investor questions during the company’s Q3 2021 (MCHX) earnings call on November 12. The launch promises to simplify Marchex integrations for platforms widely used by customer verticals wherein Marchex has been most successful (e.g. automotive, home services), but it also means they’re now widely available to customers and verticals that may have been historically out of Marchex’s comfort zone.

“We think it can broaden from there, right, and given the applicability, extends beyond those as well. And this’ll be the most cost efficient and scalable way to do it,” explains Russell Horowitz, Marchex Executive Chairman and Co-CEO.

The Marchex Anywhere launch promotes the company’s latest integrations and applications hub making their conversational intelligence services available in two flavors:

Communication Platform Integrations: Marchex specifically called out new integrations for RingCentral, Twilio, Telnyx, Five9, whereby conversations are pushed from those platforms to Marchex, then ingested and analyzed for the following attributes; call handling performance by staff, quantify leads, and appointment or sale outcome analysis. The value of the Marchex hub is its ability to leverage efforts by leading CPaaS providers by providing a compelling complement of Conversational Intelligence solutions for their existing customers.

Zero Code Integrations: Marchex Zero Code Integrations provide easy-to-configure integrations for popular customer engagement and marketing platforms, like Salesforce Sales Cloud, Google Marketing Platform, and Adobe Experience Platform. The latest zero code highlight includes support for VinSolutions Connect CRM, a leading automotive dealer CRM platform.

Marching Right Along

Marchex is still best known for their widespread adoption in the automotive industry, but the promise of Marchex Anywhere means their foot is now in the door of every company established on the supported CpaaS and CRM platforms. Horowitz explained, “I think for the folks who are invested in Marchex, they know that we’ve got pretty much — most, if not all of the major auto OEMs and that’s extended into a significant dealer footprint. And so, by integrating directly into the CRMs and easing — again, integration, adoption, and benefit, that’s a real accelerant for us.”

Marchex has officially entered the low-code/no-code connector arena and they are poised to serve as a force multiplier for the companies already invested in CPaaS solutions. What a difference two-years makes!

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Articles

Tags: Conversational Intelligence, marchex, conversational commerce