From Telephone Strategy News, February 2006

Editor’s Notes

The call meets the click

Bill Meisel, Publisher & Editor

On January 17, Google announced the acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting Inc., a company that automates the sale of radio ads. The purchase was widely reported in the business press as Google moving more into mainstream mass advertising, adding technology to make it easier for advertisers to place an ad. Unlike the highly targeted Google ads on Web pages, dMarc-placed ads reach mass broadcasting markets, perhaps differentiated to some degree by locality and specialization of some radio broadcasts. Google also has a small effort where it places print ads in major magazines, in essence buying one large print ad and allocated portions of it to a number of advertisers.

One key to Google’s success on the Web is that advertisers only pay for a click, and are thus assured that they are paying for an interested prospect. The mere broadcast or display of an ad doesn’t have this feature, other than the usual approach of estimating the radio audience or magazine distribution. A closer analogy to the Web-site ad click is a visit to a Web site or a call to a toll-free number included in the broadcast or print ad and specific to that ad. Providing a measurable result with a call is similar to Google’s current Web approach, and may be a model the company will eventually address.

On February 1, the San Jose Mercury News reported a further step of Google toward generating telephone calls that may suggest they are examining this pay-per-call model. The Mercury News reported that Google confirmed that it is working with a Florida-based telephone network, VoIP Inc., to allow people to make Internet phone calls directly to the companies highlighted in its search results. (The newspaper inquired after a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by VoIP Inc. made a brief reference to a Google telecommunications service.)

As this newsletter has previously noted, this trend toward more targeted marketing can significantly increase call center volume and change call center objectives (“Reaching a mass market one customer at a time,” Editor’s Notes, TSN, May 2005, p. 4). The fraction of calls that are potential new customers and revenue-generating—as opposed to existing customers trying to resolve problems or obtain status information—will increase.

Call centers will want to make the most of such calls, rather than try to make the call as short as possible. To do this economically will require at least partial automation. Being greeted by a touch-tone system may turn away a caller at the onset of the call, so speech recognition should be a preferred means of automation.

A caller prompted by an ad will often have a different mindset than a caller trying to solve a customer service problem. The call may be more exploratory, and the caller more willing to spend time on the call. The design of a Voice User Interface for marketing applications may require an adjustment in the usual assumptions about a caller to a contact center.

The Google acquisition is simply another data point suggesting movement away from mass-market advertising toward asking a potential customer to signal their interest more directly. When that signal is delivered through a call, it is critical that it be handled effectively and economically, or the cost of handling could outweigh the average revenue generated per call.