It’s easy to see why call analytics platforms have become an essential martech tool. They let marketers collect, analyze and act upon the growing volume of data being captured from inbound calls to businesses.
After you’ve determined if your company needs one, it’s time to select a vendor and schedule demos. It’s important to schedule them as close together as possible to help make relevant comparisons. Also, make sure all potential internal users are on the demo call, and pay attention to the following:
How easy is the platform to use?
Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs?
Are they showing us our “must-have” features?
Here are 37 questions to ask vendors during the software demo to help you gauge whether the tool you are evaluating is the right one for your organization:
Explore platform capabilities from vendors like CallRail, Invoca, CallSource, DialogueTech and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise call analytics platforms.
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Phone numbers
Do you offer both local and toll-free numbers? Do you have any international coverage?
Can you support mobile callers by supplying local numbers or extensions that are dynamically generated based upon the site visitor’s location?
How do you clean your numbers? What is the number quarantine period you use before reissuing them?
Are phone numbers portable? In other words, do we own the numbers and can take them with us if this engagement doesn’t work out?
Onboarding
What makes this platform technically unique from all the others?
How difficult is platform set up and implementation? How long will it take for us to be up and running on the system?
How intuitive is the platform user interface? How easy is it for business users to customize the machine learning-based models or settings?
What is your service reliability guarantee? What telecom carriers do you work with?
Do you manage proprietary telephony infrastructure or are you white-labeled?
How scalable is the platform? How many calls can it handle? How many calls have been successfully processed?
Call tracking
Does the platform record calls? How long are call recordings available to us?
Does the platform track data at both the session and keyword-level for search ads? Does it track data to the ad level for Facebook and display ads?
How does the platform enable multichannel attribution?
How does the platform measure and report call outcomes? Can we customize outcomes to our business needs?
What type of call fraud detection and prevention tools do you have in place? Are they included in pricing? Or is there an additional spam-control fee?
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Speech analytics
How does the platform use AI or machine learning algorithms to analyze the content of phone conversations or chats?
Does the platform utilize natural language processing or some other analytics tools?
How does the platform’s speech analytics help us score calls and feed the call data into our CRM, ESP or other martech systems?
Call data privacy
Which data privacy regulations does the platform comply with? For example, does it meet HIPAA and CCPA requirements?
Is PII automatically redacted from transcripts and recordings?
Are you GDPR compliant for our European Union customers or calls?
Marketing automation and agent training
Does the platform use machine learning-based call scoring and routing to automatically route inbound calls based on caller location, business hours and/or staffing?
Does the platform feature whisper messages to announce caller sources or other valuable information to our agents before accepting the call?
Can call scores be automatically fed into rep performance assessments?
Does the platform enable other marketing automation capabilities, such as automatically generating online display or email nurturing campaigns?
Do you offer native, off-the-shelf integrations with third-party systems such as search, web analytics, CRM or marketing automation platforms? If so, which ones?
Are APIs available? Is access included in pricing?
Pricing and support
What is pricing based on? What features are included? Are there additional fees (consulting, add-on features, APIs, quotas)?
What is the minimum contract length? Is there a short-term contract or an ‘out’ clause if things don’t work out?
Is a free trial or pilot program available?
Can the platform be white-labeled for agencies or multi-location marketers?
Who will be our day-to-day contact?
Who pays if the system/team makes an error?
What kind of customer support is available? Can I pick up the phone to report problems?
Strategy and product roadmap
Do you have other clients in my vertical?
How does the company handle requests for product modifications?
What new features are you considering for the platform? What’s the long-term roadmap and launch dates?
Our latest report Enterprise Call Analytics: A Marketer’s Guide is available for download here
About the author
Pamela Parker is Research Director at Third Door Media’s Content Studio, where she produces MarTech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketers in conjunction with Search Engine Land and MarTech. Prior to taking on this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager, Senior Editor and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its beginning. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ and has also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.