Invoca Announces New Capabilities to Help Brands Drive Customer Acquisition and Retention in a Challenging Economy

SANTA BARBARA, CA, Oct. 4, 2022 — Invoca, the cloud leader in AI-powered conversation intelligence for revenue teams that recently raised $83 million in Series F equity financing at a valuation of $1.1 billion, announced new capabilities to help brands drive more efficient marketing, faster revenue growth and better customer experiences amidst a challenging economy. These announcements came during the company’s 8th annual Invoca Summit, the premier conversation intelligence conference for marketing, contact center and customer experience professionals.

“With inflation at a 40-year high and uncertainty about a recession, revenue executives are becoming more disciplined about their paid media expenditures and technology investments,” said Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca. “They’re cutting back on underperforming and unmeasurable spending and doubling down on tactics that deliver proven returns. Brands that invest in the data and analytics that reveal what’s working and what’s not — at every step of the buyer’s journey — are much better positioned to stand out and gain market share now and when the economy recovers.”

The marketing imperative: Focus on media efficiency and measurable ROI

Marketers charged with driving customer acquisition across online and offline channels often face challenges when measuring which of their customer acquisition efforts actually led to sales. Invoca helps marketers connect their media investments to campaign-driven conversions that happen in their contact center, revealing exactly which campaigns are performing and delivering high return on investment.

  • Today, Invoca announced its enhanced no-code Salesforce CRM integration, part of the Invoca Exchange, giving brands complete visibility into which marketing efforts drive high-value sales opportunities and conversions through closed-loop conversion and revenue reporting. This integration automatically matches closed-won revenue captured in Salesforce with the digital campaigns, ad placements, and paid search keywords that are driving the initial customer interest, even if the sale happens weeks later. This helps brands shift budgets into campaigns that are driving high returns and away from campaigns that are less efficient, increasing overall return on advertising spend.
Expectations for the voice channel are high, and the customer experience has never been more critical

In today’s high-inflation environment, consumers expect a much higher level of personalization over the phone versus online, digital channels. According to a recent survey, two-thirds of consumers said they’d happily pay a price premium to get good customer service over the phone, and it’s that “make-or-break” moment when brands either earn a lifetime customer or risk losing them forever.

  • In August, Invoca and Five9 announced a new integration that shares data captured during a consumer’s digital journey with contact center agents in real time. Agents gain access to pre-call data like the products in the consumer’s online shopping cart or the webpage the consumer called from, so they can better anticipate caller needs and more efficiently handle calls. This helps sales agents increase conversion rates and support agents more quickly resolve more customer issues.

“Being able to get an omnichannel view of the customer experience is invaluable,” said Mark Loovis, Senior Director of Marketing Technology at DIRECTV during the Invoca Summit. “With Invoca, we can quickly identify issues in the buyer journey and correct them. It’s had a huge impact on our conversion rate. Now, when a rep picks up the phone, they know what pages the customer is interested in and what features they want. Our reps’ conversion rates have gone up 100%.”

With the vast majority of contact centers reviewing less than 1% of their agents’ calls, quality assurance (QA) teams will never analyze most customer conversations to ensure proper agent performance. This leads to missed sales opportunities and lost revenue. Using Invoca’s natural language processing (NLP) and speech analytics, brands can quickly uncover those missed opportunities, converting more callers to customers.

  • Today, Invoca announced new out-of-the-box automated QA scorecards to help contact center leaders ensure that agents deliver efficient and empathetic conversational experiences. By automatically scoring 100% of calls, Invoca’s AI drastically improves visibility into agent call handling, helping managers and supervisors identify best practices and improve agent coaching and training. The new scorecards provide this visibility on day one, eliminating much of the need to custom build scorecards and train AI models.

  • Invoca has also announced 11 new out-of-the-box industry-based insight packages that automatically derive insight from conversations. These include pre-built insights for healthcare, automotive, senior care, home services, insurance, and more. These packages include 200 unique insights across industries, including “appointment discussed” for automotive service businesses, “new policy inquiry” for insurance providers, and “misrouted/transferred” for hospital and healthcare providers.
Conversation data and insights can go beyond organizational boundaries, identifying ways to impact the bottom line. Rates of unanswered calls to businesses are through the roof, resulting in lost sales when calls go to voicemail or when buyers hang up before speaking with an agent. Research shared during Invoca Summit found that 49% of calls to banks and lenders went unanswered, followed by 45% for telecommunications and 39% for insurance.
New features make it easy for brands to reduce unanswered sales calls and follow up with non-converting consumers via digital or human re-engagement.
  • Today, Invoca announced significant enhancements to its cloud Conversational IVR technology. Brands can reduce call abandonment rates by enabling callers to interact with the IVR’s speech recognition capabilities. The enhanced Conversational IVR now understands both voice and keypress responses, so callers can navigate the IVR hands-free, making it much easier for consumers who call on the go. This can improve the overall caller experience and reduce caller hang-ups. 

  • Invoca has also released Ring Group Call Routing to help brands answer more sales calls by having Invoca automatically route callers to a list of phone numbers sequentially or simultaneously until an agent answers. This is particularly impactful for brands that route calls to many locations, like automotive service centers or healthcare clinics, where data on unanswered calls is low, and reps are often busy supporting customers in-person.
Keep the Conversations Going Through Invoca Summit and Beyond

Invoca Summit welcomed hundreds of customers, partners, prospects, and dozens of industry-leading speakers. The two-day event featured informative sessions from Auto Genius, Banner Health, Christian Brothers Automotive, DIRECTV, Five9, Google, MoneySolver, Mutual of Omaha, Ochsner Health, Yext and more, in addition to a keynote from an internationally recognized expert on conversation and communication, Celeste Headlee. Those interested in learning more about Invoca’s industry-leading conversation intelligence can watch Invoca Summit on-demand or attend an upcoming in-person roadshow event.