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Answers Served: Century’s Call-Tracking Has Human Touch

Written on
Oct 20, 2010 
Author
Gavin Dunaway  |
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Answers Served: Century’s Call-Tracking Has Human Touch

payphone.jpgADOTAS – In the world of online advertising, it seems like machines and algorithms can best us bags of flesh at every stop. But pay-per-call service Century Interactive argues there’s at least one area where humans are superior — qualifying a lead through understanding intent, hence why Century’s new Humanatic phone-call analytics platform is powered by live human reviewers.

Head of Marketing Stephen Cravens, who has contributed some great articles to Adotas, served me some answers about why machine-based speech analytics are lacking and all the buzz surrounding pay-per-call.

ADOTAS: So humans can still best machines? Does that mean we’ve pushed back their imminent domination of this planet and their enslavement of the human race?

CRAVENS: We’re attempting to accurately answer the question, “Does this call represent an opportunity for new business?” Only a human being is capable of reasoning out whether to qualify the lead or not. It’s not easy, and no other service even claims to make this evaluation. They’ll try to identify the word “appointment” or determine the caller’s mood, but that’s just not actionable enough in our opinion. Rather than adding more metrics, we’re eliminating them and clarifying an actionable path toward growing sales.

Century found that U.S.-based, native-English speaking reviewers were the best way to scale a call categorization service — how do you find people like that? I mean, most people in the U.S. speak “Amurican,” ya know what I’m sayin’, bro?

Taking our cue from the Amazon Mechanical Turk program, we’re employing an army of stay-at-home-mom types to login, evaluate recordings and give a thumbs up or thumbs down. We’re essentially asking our human evaluators to do only one thing and do it well.

We then rely on our end-users to enhance the output. If a customer reviews a call and changes the categorization that we’ve applied, our system will note the mistake and learn. As a result of this feedback system, Humanatic will continuously improve. In exchange for their input, our customers will have access to a categorization feature for a fraction of the cost of a typical human review service.

Pay-per-call is still in its experimental phase, and practitioners (both advertisers and publishers) are using high-priced internal resources to listen to every call. We can do it cheaper without a systematic drop in accuracy.

Pay-per-call scales only if disputes between publishers and advertisers are kept at a minimum. Advertisers will pay more for phone leads if less junk makes it through the filter. And publishers can more profitably administer pay-per-call if minimal resources are applied to verifying leads. Humanatic expands the Venn diagram union between what’s a profitable pay-per-call platform for both advertisers and publishers.

On a more serious note, why that demographic? How did they test better than other groups in perceiving intent?

There are overseas solutions in the marketplace that fall short because they don’t understand the underlying business and the vernacular. No one else has invested to build a cost-efficient domestic solution. Our thesis in launching Humanatic is that the presence of a reliable third-party lead verification system will increase what advertisers are willing to pay for leads.

Do you believe auto-transcription services will ever catch up? What’s lacking with machine-based speech analytics solutions now?

Accurately transcribing a two way conversation (versus say a voicemail) is really, really hard, and there’s no service that makes any claims that any of its data is reliably actionable. As opposed to the auto-transcription services out there today, we’ve created a way to categorize calls that speeds the business up rather than slows it down. Meaning we’re delivering hand-raisers rather than just analytics.

What other features make Humanatic and other Century services stand out from the competition?

Humanatic is also unique because we offer it on a no contracts, no minimums, no setup fees basis to our customers. Eliminating fixed costs is essential for pay-per-call because publishers, listings sites, lead-gen companies etc. are only compensated when they deliver leads to advertisers. We facilitate pay-per-call better than anyone, not just because of our technology, but also because we help publishers match revenues with expenses so closely.

Another service that makes Century Interactive unique is the way we use dynamic number insertion to relate phone leads back to web sessions. Think of it as Google Analytics with an extra column showing how many phone calls each keyword and referring source delivered. This is unique because most call tracking providers display a tracking phone number just for PPC visits.

We track every phone call and tie it to its referral source, so you can evaluate your banner ads, email, PPC and SEO all in one platform. Because we display the session-specific phone number within JavaScript, the search crawlers don’t see the tracking phone number and therefore the site maintains its SEO standing.

Why does call-tracking and pay-per-call marketing have such buzz at the moment?

Advertisers are demanding more transparency from publishers. Performance marketing (pay-per-call) is the way of the future, and it only works if staff (on either side) don’t have to get bogged down listening to call recordings. Therefore, it’s incumbent upon a neutral third party to be the arbiter of what’s a lead. We feel Humanatic will be a catalyst toward pay-per-call becoming a mainstream advertising model.





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