Fast Call Back - The easiest way mobile local directories will ever have to automate merchant acquisition

I just posted a demo of Fast Call Back - The easiest way mobile local directories will ever have to automate their sales process:

Call: 323-405-7948 (as a consumer) and listen to the message...

1. Receive an automated call back (as a merchant)
2. Press 0 for sales (connects to my office); 1 to rcv info by email; 2 to rcv info by SMS
3. Close the sale!

As soon as the consumers call is over, our automated FAST CALL BACK, places a call to that same merchant. This is the easiest way mobile local directories will ever have to automate their sales process.

The directory has just shown the merchant how effective the directory is with the consumer call. Now they can conveniently get information by live sales, email or SMS.

It's simple. It's fast. It's effective.

Want to test Fast Call Back using a PBX or blocked caller ID? Go to Fast Call Back and use the click to call demo. In a live application FastCall411 is always able to call the merchant using the merchant's phone number. This 323-405-7948 demo relies on your caller ID.

New FastCall411 Feature: Transcription

FastCall41 uses speech to text transcription to transcribe voice mails and other spoken conversations. Transcriptions can be sent via SMS, email, available via API, or integrated into Salesforce.com.

FastCall411 utilizes transcription in our outbound automated calls to identify if an IVR is present on a merchant’s phone. This is important because when calls are branded (i.e: “this a call from …”) a live person must answer to hear the branding. Further, FastCall411 research indicates that consumer’s prefer merchants who are available and who answer their phone.

FastCall411 also leverages transcription on our Fast Call Back application. In the Fast Call Back application, we automatically call back non-advertising merchants after a consumer’s inbound call. When combined with branding, the idea is that the merchant:

1) received the call;
2) heard the branding and
3) can respond for more information

Fast Call Back enables merchants to leave their email address to receive information about our clients' advertising programs.

To try out transcription, send yourself a call and chose option #2 to receive information by email. We will email you the transcription and additional information of FastCall411.

http://fastcall411.com/fastcallback

"Success Breeds Success" - Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker famously said: "Success breeds success".

In the sample above, the top 46% of merchants who received 90% of the phone calls from searching consumers answer their phones, engage and serve the consumer. FastCall411 call analytics helps partners identify merchants that are open for business and generally providing quality service to their consumers.

With FastCall411, your mobile local directory will find the merchants who are a success serving their consumers and your local media sales efforts will find success selling these merchants. These are the Hot Leads that we deliver to our clients to laser-focus their sales efforts.

Voice: Caring and Nurturing or Low and Dominant?

Very Interesting Article on Male Vs Female Voice in Voice Applications from Speech Tech Magazine:

Are Consumers More Responsive to Male or Female Voices?

This is What a Bad Call Looks Like

I read a press release yesterday that claimed 10-20% of (measured) calls to local search ads are telemarketers. Spam calls, of course, are a bad experience for merchants. One flag is short call length - as merchants hang up on telemarketers.

But what about the 2 minute, 40 second call? Usually a great experience for the caller and merchant, right?

Not when it looks like this:




That's 2 minutes and 30 seconds of on-hold time, then a hang up by the caller.

FastCall411 insures the success of our client's PPCall campaigns by optimizing the quality of leads delivered to merchants. We identify spam calls with a patent-pending spam call filter. Beyond spam filtering, we also optimize the quality of the merchants delivered to the caller.

Rightfully so, merchants should not pay for spam calls. But many merchants also don't want to pay for the call above - even though it was the merchant's poor experience that prevented this call from becoming a sale. In thier minds they did not convert the quality leads into sales. To them, these calls are no different than spam calls. So it's no wonder that merchants delivering this poor experience to their callers churn out of the adverting campaign.

FastCall411 solves this problems for our clients by identifying their best performing merchants: Merchants who deliver a better quality of service to the caller, and are better PPCall / paid search clients.

Merchants give credit for calls received, not just calls delivered.

Andrew Shotland is No Leaking Bucket

Its always good to connect with Andrew Shotland at Loc@l SEO Guide. He wrote a great review of ReachLocal, Yext, Yodle, ect. and the difficulty in keeping merchants signed up after they've been acquired. I agree - within reason - you can't please everyone in a volume business. Acquired merchants may not always have their lead generation expectations met.

The churn problem can't be explained away as overly aggressive sales by the local search industry. There is a supply and demand problem within local search: Consumer demand doesn't always equal merchant supply. The local search marketing cos (Reach, Yodle, Yext, etc) do a fine job at acquisition, but without prior insight into consumer demand for that particular business, lead delivery to the merchant is going to be spotty. Thus local marketers deal with merchant churn. I previously called this problem a leaking bucket and it is.

With the VC activity in this space - there are still many that are bullish on this business model. WebVisible has another $20M to put toward solving this problem.

FastCall411 also has a solution with HotLeads! We solve the demand and churn problems for our clients by first identifying consumer demand, teasing the merchant with a few free trial consumer leads, then offering a targeted, precise value prop to the merchant: "we've proven we can deliver demand - just say yes and we will sign you up."

BTW, Andrew also wrote an interesting post on MerchantCircle.

Fix the Leaking Bucket and Increase Local Search Sales

The other day my friend and industry luminary, Dick Larkin posted on Facebook that his business is picking up. Calls to HomePage Directories’ 300 metered lines were double the volume from this time last year.

The term “metered lines” is a yellow pages throw back. We also use call tracking or call measurement, though I don’t really like any of these terms. The assumption is that the local search industry, including yellow pages is metering ROI to the advertiser.

Virtual Numbers (the term I use) can do so much more. Followers of FastCall411 know that I believe there is a significant opportunity for innovation in the “calls to local merchants” space.

For example: our IVR application, TryAnother, offers a call redirection to a 2nd seller if the first vendor is not available, or if the caller wants to keep shopping after the first call (we launched this at DEMO).

If the phone rings and the merchant does not answer, the lead was delivered but not received. And merchants only give credit for leads received. The bigger picture here is not just metering ROI to the advertiser, but metering and improving the experience to the consumer.

When a merchant doesn’t answer a consumer’s call they are falling short on their “quality of service”. I don’t need a Yelp review for that – if I can’t speak to the merchant, he can’t answer my questions. This customer service issue is a leaking bucket for online local services. FastCall411’s metered lines / call tracking / measurement / virtual numbers – whichever term we use - not only prove ROI, but improve the consumer experience by matching ready buyers dynamically with available sellers.

Further, FastCall411 identifies merchants who don’t answer their phones – your cold sales leads. We use Virtual Numbers to find and eliminate your cold leads so that we can focus your sales efforts on the warm pipeline.

FastCall411 is seizing this opportunity for innovation with Voice 2.0 applications that take phone calls initiated from mobile local search and classifieds to the next level with consumer reviews, merchant acquisition and much more.

Find the Good Eggs and Find Your Best Advertiser Prospects

FastCall411's customer service studies reveal that often 50% or more calls to local merchants fail to result in a meaningful interaction with the called merchant. Better service drives performance marketing. The Good Eggs who serve their customers win as interactive mkting takes over from traditional media.

Focus your sales efforts on the 50% of your prospects that are Good Eggs and find your best advertiser prospects. This doubles your sales effectiveness.

Jack n Jill Went Up the Hill and Came Down w ~4700 Groupons!

2000 3500 4674 new customers! What if they eat an average of 2 times a year? And each tell 2 friends? These Groupon subscribers are plugged-in, early adopters. Jack 'n Jill would be two smart kiddos if they capture the email addresses, became Facebook fans, Twitter followers, etc. of all the Grouponers and encourage all to write reviews. What an amazing customer acquisition play for Jack 'n Jill when they think of the lifetime value of these clients. Well done!

MerchantCircleAnswers: Active and Engaged

The other day I received an email announcing MerchantCircleAnswers. To give the new service a try, I posted a tax question that I had recently asked my own accountant. As of today, I have received 15 well informed, thorough answers from CPAs around the country and a few near me in Los Angeles.

The result: MerchantCircle’s wisdom of the crowd outperformed the advice from my own accountant.

MerchantCircle, who just announced that they've signed their one-millionth merchant to their social networking platform for small businesses, clearly has a very active and engaged audience of small business owners.

So many companies have tried to crack local search as the ~$150 billion local media market continues to aggressively move to online / interactive media. And so many have failed.

Hat’s off to CEO Ben Smith and the MerchantCircle team on this accomplishment. While the one million merchant mark is impressive, 15 great answers to a very specific small business question in so short a time is even more impressive. It proves merchants are active and engaged.

Beverly Hills-based TeleSign Innovates with SMS / Phone Verification

The two-factor SMS / phone verification is an efficient way for cloud-based applications to offer an additional level of security beyond a CAPTCHA. Here's the story...

Become a Selling Machine and Not an Inefficient Dialer Leaving Long Incoherent Voice Mails

I just received a call from a local search sales rep. Can't tell you the name of the company because it was inaudible. You have to listen to this message:

MP3 of the message

Goog Voice Transcription:

Hi, My name is Keith, In Name info to win 91886, extension 245 small business. I think that's by more than 658 billion dollars on Internet Marketing Services last year. This band is expected to go buy a more than 2 billion dollars in next 5 years maximize the ship sure David skip and that there'd and that allows you to view the mafia business. My name is Megan Klein keeping all but I think or so. Explain this 12 076 or website management long too many pages. Email Marketing Bay, Public Management. All, in, one. Unbigoted to. I would like to show you a demo food and then have a center for the free drive. Google have business. Please call me Cape, IN 91402 IN 91886, extension 24 flight to see more info please. Is. It's good to know if those dot com. Thank you. Have a nice day.

What Keith did wrong:

1) The company should record a professional answering machine message and let Keith leave this when he hits a machine.

** The FastCall411 dialer - standalone web app, or integrated into Salesforce.com - automates this for Keith

2) Keith should always leave his email on the message. Let the called party respond in their preferred method of communication.

** FastCall411 offers an option for the called party to redial and leave their email address on a voicemail. We then transcribe the email address and subscribe the party to receive addtl info. The process is automated and efficient.

With FastCall411 Keith would become a selling machine and not an inefficient dialer leaving long incoherent voice mails.

This is Customer Relationship Management?

Yesterday an ad for a Salesforce integrator grabbed my attention in my Google apps-powered FastCall411 email.* I called the number on the landing page and hit an answering machine. So I used the web to lead form to submit an inquiry (a standard Salesforce feature) and received a page error on submit. The company did, however, send me an email confirmation saying thanks for the inquiry, please feel free to call. But they didn't provide a phone number in the email.

Hello? Isn't that the reason I completed the inquiry form? I wanted you to call me? Otherwise, I would have just called you. (Oh I did that.)

The company never called back either as a result of my voice mail or web lead.

Wow. All this from a company who advertised they were experts in customer relationship management. Why spend money in lead generation if your company has no resources to manage those leads?

*I've been heads down on an integration with Salesforce.com (we will be provisioning virtual numbers to local merchant and reporting the call details within Salesforce).

Call tracking: Slick as snot, or just good service?

This continuing call tracking discussion on Greg Sterling's blog frames a fundamental challenge within mobile local search: data quality. A quick search for plumbers on HelpHive returns 687 results (Los Angeles also returns 687 results so this is perhaps programmed by HelpHive). Search for Seattle Plumber with Google Maps and there are 2,368 results. Directories such as HelpHive aim to help consumers sort through these very unmanageable lists.

In my recent article on iMediaCONNECTION: "Left in the dark: How search fails at mobile local", I provide examples of base mobile local search data that is out-of-date, unverified by the business owner, inaccurate, poorly categorized, etc.

Our testing at FastCall411 has revealed that if /when the consumer calls the 2,368 results on Google, they will – on average - receive a disconnected number, busy signal or no answer about 700 times. About 700 times they will be connected to an answering machine or IVR (which may in turn connect to a live person or voice mail). The remaining consumers would be lucky to find a plumber who answers their phone. Of these, we can assume some will be available to serve the consumer's need and some will not.

Call tracking enables publishers to apply a level of analysis to a mostly unfiltered database of local merchants well beyond spidering the web. The call disposition (disconnect, busy, etc) provides insight into the status of the merchant that we could never uncover from a base listing or meta data alone. Further, examining average call length reveals even more about the interaction between the caller and merchant. While there are exceptions, I believe average call length – taken over a series of calls – is a great proxy for customer service. Unlike consumer reviews, the call detail records present empirical data.

The net result: plumbers who better serve their clients can be rewarded by tracking calls.

Huge Call Tracking Discussion over on Screenwerk

Greg Sterling's Screenwerk has a hot conversation going on a dispute between Seattle-based HelpHive and a local merchant. The original post and comments are here.

I jumped into the fray and (of course) agreed that if a Merchant fails to meet a publisher's quality of service standard or worse, doesn't pay their bills; the publisher should redirect their calls. [Note: I would council my publisher clients to cover call redirection in their terms of service so that advertisers would have to agree to these terms when they sign the insertion order.]

FastCall411's TryAnother application was designed for this type of call redirection.

Mobile local search has many challenges, and for better or worse, call tracking offers many solutions. In June I wrote in response to Greg's post on pay-per-call: “Will Local Market Ultimately Reject PFP/PPC”

I have argued many times that customer service is the key to success in mobile local search. Consumers expect immediate availability when hiring a local merchant.

FastCall411 research confirms what most of us have experienced: merchants don’t always answer their phones or are otherwise not available.

From the publisher's POV is it a better consumer experience to connect the calling consumer to the merchant's voicemail, or is it a better consumer experience to offer to connect the consumer to other available merchants and redirect the call?

Yes, in this scenario some merchants will lose leads, but others will win. More importantly, the consumer is served.

By tracking calls we are able to identify merchants who are more likely to be available and responsive. This rewards merchants who deliver better customer service. So while merchants should be hyper diligent about who is controlling their identity and reputation, they can find solace in the potential to be rewarded for their good service.