Discussion Panel – Competitive Call Distribution [Audio Transcription]

in Events by Martin Marinov April 20, 2017May 2, 2017 0 comments

Panelists
Stan Bonnemort – Director of Business Development, Progrexion
Jeff Fisher – Founder, Above the Fold Media
Eric Evans – CEO, HyperTarget Marketing
Adam Sthay – CEO, Pub Club Leads
Joe Charlson – CEO, CallerReady

JOE: I’m the founder of Caller Ready; Caller Ready is a performance marketing platform. I started caller ready about 6 ½ years ago, it really solved the problems that I had in the region space for about a dozen years. Prior to doing this I was the CMO of education management. I was in the education region space when it was hot and heavy and I was trying to solve the problem of how do you turn data leads or phone leads into phone calls and that’s really what I started caller ready to solve and we’ve been building out that platform ever since and I’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing folks over the past couple of years and some of them are here on the panel. The topic today is competitive call distribution, we’re going to talk about it, educate you all about what that is, but we’re also going to talk about paper calling in general and what some of the challenges are and allow you guys some opportunity to ask a bunch of questions too. So, if you have burning questions or questions that come up, feel free to ask them and take advantage of this opportunity. With that I’m going to pass it over to Jeff Fisher to introduce himself.

JEFF: I’m Jeff! I guess my background briefly, I used to own and run a call center, I then transitioned over to the online media side, got into paper call division and built that up and kind of have a real niche coming from both sides within the call center space and the digital front of that online and off-line kind of transition and kind of paper call perfectly with that. So, it’s kind of being running as paper call affiliate and a lot of what I’m doing is turning leads into calls.

ERIC: Good morning Las Vegas! Just making sure everyone was awake and it’s still early in the second day, thanks for being here. My name is Eric Garvin; my company is Hyper-target marketing. We’re a paper call lead generation company; specializing, driving inbound calls to our clients and one of our focuses for 2017 is expanding and innovating new ways that we can drive calls beyond the channels we’ve been doing for the last couple of years successfully and continuing to evolve in the industry and one of the things we are exploring heavily is also lead to call automation with our software like caller ready here.

ADAM: Morning! My name is Adam Sthay; I’m the owner of Pub Club Leads and I’ve been doing paper call for the last 4-5 years. I’ve been using caller ready for the past three and the features that they offer really help a lead company turn into a paper call company.

STAN: I’m Stan; I’m with progression marketing, so we’re the agency of record for two of the leading kind of the repair companies in the industry; Lexington Law and creditrepair.com. We’ve been taking click to call, paper calls traffic for the last couple of years now. We take a few thousand a day, so we have the benefit of working with a lot of publishers, we see a lot of traffic come over, have a pretty good idea of what it needs to look like to convert well and back out leads for us. We see a lot of interesting campaigns and strategies and we consider this definitely an emerging channel for us, it’s one of several and we’re getting a lot of high quality callers and sales in this channel, so it’s definitely working and we see a bright future for call duration campaigns.

JOE: So, to get started, just to gauge where everybody is at, can I get short-hands for some questions. Who in the audience is currently doing paper call in some way either on the call buyer sides, performance marketer? About half and for those that are not doing it, can I see who’s considering doing paper call? So maybe about the other half and who is a call buyer or buyer of calls? 20%. How about an affiliate or publisher or somebody who’s driving calls? Few affiliate and paper calls marketers which generate their own calls, but also purchase from affiliate and manage buyers? We get a couple in the back. So everybody seems interested in paper call, that’s good, we’re going to talk about some of the challenges here, so just dive in, I’ve got a few slides to go through. To officially run a paper call campaign you need to connect a lead with the salesperson that can educate them about the opportunity and qualify them as quickly as possible. Key takeaways for this session are a better understanding of a drop point where you lose money, an understanding if what competitive call distribution is and how that helps you reduce some of the failures points and looking at the financials around paper call. Just quickly, it sounds like everybody has got some sense of it, but how does paper call work? You generate a call, you route the call to call buyers, traditionally that’s done one call buyer at a time, so I like to use the phrase you open up the line and you give the call to an advertiser. I use advertiser to call buyers honestly, but that’s the traditional route and then the buyer pays the marketing company of the call last at seconds. Stan was talking about the duration based metric in this performance channel.

The best situation is that everyone is qualified, the user understands the offer, the buyer quickly acknowledges the customer is qualified and helps them into a solution and continuing on that being everyone gets paid. The marketer pays, the publisher, the affiliate or the whole media buyer, the call buyer pays the marketer and the customer pays the call buyer. What can go wrong, a mismatch in the supply of calls and capacity? So really this is one that we’re harning in here is long old queues, complex IVRs that you drop people into after they’ve been pre-qualified and you get breakage so the callers hang up. It’s basically wasted calls, so the advertiser doesn’t want to pay for calls that they don’t actually handle, that’s in part what’s behind the duration. The duration is; hey we have to handle the call, we have to qualify them. Some advertisers may set their queue to hang up within the duration period, so if they don’t handle the call it’s going to hang up at 55 seconds if its 60 seconds duration based program. But the challenges somebody paid to generate that call and so it’s just waste.

Additionally you know we’re talking about one call here, but in the stream of things, thousands of calls there’s waste of time and researching what’s going wrong;

You have to identify that the breakage is getting out of whack, out of where you’ve projected.

And you have to actually listen to calls and try to figure out what’s going on or you’re just increasing the price to account for breakage which is relatively inefficient for everybody. It might fix it, but it’s not really accruing benefits to the whole ecosystem to waste calls.

Other things that can go wrong in paper calls, so the caller doesn’t understand the offer; it’s a quick mobile optimized offer. They are not sure, they just hit the phone number, pops into the dialer, they are coming through and they don’t really understand it. Or if it’s lead to call automation; one of the areas that was mentioned were out-bounding with IVR, you can get into situations like; hey why did you call me. You called me, so if the caller doesn’t understand the offer or the telesales agent doesn’t understand the campaign that’s a problem. Other ways that we qualify, the ad unit itself can qualify, do you have 10,000 or more in debt. The form itself, do you have more than 10,000 in debt or less. The IVR could be asking it to qualify and transfer reps if there are reps in the middle and be asking it. And then the advertiser can be asking it again before putting them into the whole queue. We’re passing the user through this journey of qualification or not, but the patients in this case if you’ve been through some of those qualifications is low, so you get into caller fatigue. Again, if you’ve been through, this is an example about lead-to-call automation where we’ve got multiple contact attempts going down. We’ve been pursuing to get you on the phone, so whether it’s the first attempt or the sixth attempt, there’s a lot going on and the offer is always to speak with your agent as quickly as possible. So your patients at that point wait in queue is even less.

Here are some economic examples of what’s going on. Some example numbers, just take the first role, we’ve got an inbound phone lead that might cost let’s say $5 to generate. You might put an IVR on it; it may cost $.15, so your cost at that point is $5.15. Assuming a contact percentage in this case of 100% because they are actually phoning in and then a qualification percentage of 40%, you get a net conversion of 40%, so you divide $5.15 by the next conversion rate and you get $12.88 to just deliver the call to the advertiser.

Second roll; fun-filled data just chose a lower cost here to start at $2.50, maybe you’re doing more out-bounding through lead-to-call automation, maybe you add $.50, so it’s $3 to get the lead on the phone, but you’re not contacting everybody because 40% never respond or opted out. Then you might qualify the remainder, another 60% and the way this conversion metrics work, you just kind of multiply them and you get a net to buy it at 36%, dividing the $3 by the 36% you get $8.33. Two different scenarios, two set of calls, but what this assumes is no caller fatigue breakage. With those cost, with 100% giving the human to human connection the advertiser is still doing qualification, so you’re still not qualified. Then maybe, but there’s just not a good chemistry the caller decides they don’t want to really hear more, so it becomes non-billable, so this is also referred to as a squab factor. So you take $12.88 divided by 70% pass through rate to make it to the billable duration and you get $18.39 as your cost for billable call. On a form data doing the same thing just providing the $8.33 by 70%, you get $11.90, but that assumes every caller is getting handled human to human. I just wanted to emphasize this point here that this first role is 100% passing through, so in this case this first call is labeled wrongly, this is cost to deliver the call to the advertiser for the marketer say $15, 100% qualification rate it cost $21.43. If you sell that for $36, that’s a 40% margin and the sale price required is $36.

The second that drops off 100% at the 90% level, so 90% human to human connections happening. The same qualification rate, your margin drops 34% and to maintain a 40% margin you’d have to increase the price by almost $5-$40. That drops to 80%, your margin drops to 26% and to maintain a 40% margin you’ll jack up the price of the call to $45, so almost third more. At 70%, you’re down to a 15% margin and you have to charge your advertisers $51 to maintain a 40% margin. In this example its 60%, you’re basically not making any money and to maintain a 40% margin you need to charge $60, below that you’re losing money. These are the economics that we all experience in the paper call market place and this is just harning in on the fact that human-human connection is really important because drop rates kill the economics of campaigns.

How do we deal with that? You can restrict call volume to your advertisers, to some small percentage of capacity that hopefully make sure that your calls are getting answered quickly. Not a very good strategy, you do want controls, but you’re not necessarily the only one driving calls in anyways. So contingency plans, price the breakaging, offer some kind of intelligent abandonment or you can overflow the other buyers. There is a better way; competitive call distribution is a better way and what this is is offering call to multiple potential buyers at the same time or in a staged speed competition. You run the speed to press one competition against the buyers who are available and you can handicap the rank and the way in which you call the buyers by the effective price per call. You could have your top ranked advertiser, maybe it’s Lexington law, you offer them the call first and then five seconds later you start bringing in other buyers into the seek and what that those is, you’re basically offering the call to multiple parties and then running speed to press one. The advertiser presses one, you hang up on all the other lines and you connect those two parties together. I have a little video that might make it clear.

VIDEO: When a publisher generates a call, their goal is to connect the caller to the advertiser in the fastest way possible. The fastest way to achieve a human to human connection is if the call is offered to several.

JOE: You’re basically offering the call to multiple parties, they have to press one to connect the two lines, you hang up on everybody else, we have a patented method for how to protect the callers’ data because one thing that will go wrong is if you offer the real caller ID out to 10 buyers, you will essentially lost control of that data. What we will do is we typically will mass the last four of the phone number allowing the area code and prefix to use by the advertisers for routing and understanding who to give that call to, but protecting the data until they actually buy the call. By doing that you get a human to human connection as fast as possible, you’re solving this fatigue issue that we’re subscribing by getting a better emotional quotient and it makes everybody more accountable. It takes some of the friction out of what we’re talking about. Less research, less complaints about calls dropping on both parties and an actual side benefit is when companies are getting these calls over to them they can actually hear the scream of business that’s available, so there are benefits there as well.

Some of the challenges, if you have to do this, you have to be able to manage multiple buyers, you might hear complaints like; I don’t want my agents to have to press any key, but once you get over the hub of this is a better way then you’ll start to hear I can’t win enough calls, I’m losing calls, my phone system is not fast enough. With that, I’m going to open it up for some questions, any questions from the audience at this point?

QUESTIONS: Inaudible.

JOE: The question is, is it possible to take data on the call before you start the call routing like the zip code and be able to use that in the call routing.

ADAM: My understanding is, you have two buyers who take a zip code and you want to make sure that you put an IVR in place and as the person who is calling in, they are entering their zip code and as that happens based off of that keystroke there’s logic on the back that we choose which buyers to have that call competed.

MALE SPEAKER: But even like I use in vocal, actually what I do is I use one system where I actually screen first then I send it, but I was wondering if there’s a way to just setup as I use in vocal, I don’t know if it’s an alternate channel that a lot of the performance agencies use or affiliate that works. But basically I’m wondering of there’s a way within vocal or something that could be used where you can actually have the ZIP Code entered first before it reaches the 2 buyers.

JOE: Yes, with caller ready you can definitely do that and you will not only get the ZIP Code straight from the phone number where the phone number is registered, but there is phone number productivity and a lot of us have phone numbers that are not linked to necessarily where we live, so you can definitely put an IVR and collect information like ZIP Codes, like debt amounts, like do you really want to talk or do you want to remove yourself from our automated connection system. We have different qualifiers who use that to dynamically route the call. Other questions right now? Why we’re thinking of them, let me start out with Adam with perspective introducing competitive call distribution, was there any resistance from buyers to the concept?

ADAM: I don’t typically have any resistance, all my agents can do that, but once I explain why we do it and how it benefits them, almost everybody really likes. So the way that I talk to new potential client is, I say listen; your phone is going to the ring, it’s going to say for instance you’re receiving a student loan consolidation call, please press one to accept this call and that will repeat over and over. Most of the time my buyers don’t even hear that anymore because they are so conditioned to answer the phone and press one to try and win the call and how that’s good for them is; since I have multiple buyers and I work in, I’m shocked that the calls and whoever answers the phone and presses one first wins that call. So there phone system is ringing all day long right and whenever their agents are available, they answer the phone, press one and win the call.

If they went to the bathroom they don’t have to worry about missing any call because it won’t hit their voice mail and if it does it’s not pressing one to accept the call, so another buyer will get that call. Whereas some other platforms like vocal, it rings and if it keeps ringing and it hits the voicemail, the call ends there and you have to figure out whether or not you’re in the bill for voicemails or not with your clients and most people will probably don’t want to pay for those.

What it’s done for me is I want from about a 68% conversion to billable rate to about a 98% conversion rate, so it’s really thought powerful program.

JOE: How about on the affiliate side, do they understand that you got this great connection?

ADAM: Yes. They are always looking at the numbers because they experience the same sort of thing. If somebody is driving traffic for me and a vertical occurs from inner vertical and I’m only able to go to one caller and then 30 seconds later another caller, most people are hanging up within 30-45 seconds if they don’t get hold of somebody. With this it’s maybe 6-7 seconds max by the time somebody picks up one of the phone calls and they see if I’m paying out on a roll call with a publisher on a 30 second or 20 second, the majority of their calls are getting answered in billable on my platform rather than on somebody else’s. It helps to attract additional publishers as well who may have been driving traffic elsewhere.

JOE: Thank you. We’re going to ask some more general paper call questions, but again if anybody has got questions as we go, feel free to raise your hand and you can ask te panelists. But let me as, what do you see as the major challenges in paper call today and I guess that’s typical to everybody that want to start.

STAN: I think in the digital world that we live in everybody’s doing this and less of this, so it’s getting somebody from filling out form to changing the consumers habit or preference of hiding behind a computer and sending information they want in email box so that they can give a little bit more information when really everybody who’s buying those forms, they have goals to get that person on the phone, so it’s trying to take that process, that step out of the equation right. With lead to call automation which caller ready does where we post the lead in, it will send them a text message saying thanks for filling out our form you can call us now on this number or we will call you and then in 30 seconds if they haven’t called in you call and so we get what we had. 30% of the forms on the first pass turn into inbound phone calls for our clients and then we continue to follow up with the ones that don’t. We probably end up closely to 40% of our forms turning into calls, so the metrics that Joe showed over there were pretty spot on as far as being able to generate forms and turn them into calls at a lower cost. Your question was, I think the challenges are getting people to the phone.

I guess I’ll jump into also for me like educating both consumers and advertisers on these new experiences as technology continues to advance every day of our lives. Kind of like what Adam was talking about educating his buyers and in all forms a lot of buyers are new to what we do or trying to understand you know how many people they need in their call center to answer calls and how all these works and introducing more advanced concepts like lead to call automation, just training them and getting them on board and understanding some nuances between a pure inbound call that might come from like a Google search versus a call that was dialed on through automation like this. It would be perfectly fine for an advertiser to answer an inbound call and just simply say; hi, how can I help you? The caller called in, they have some intent initially, and they have questions in mind versus if a user is going through an ad through a lead form, they’ve gone through an IVR and they’ve been connected. They’ve gone through quite a bit already to get on the phone, so when the advertiser just jumps in and says how can I help you, it can sometimes create an awkward conversation right off the jump where the person is like you called me and they are expecting to be further along in the process where the agent who answered the phone is now treating it like any other customer service call or inbound call. That’s one of the challenges, that’s not something easy for a lot of buyers do to create dynamic scripting, but as everything continues to evolve, I think that’s going to become more important and as consumers get used to new ads formats and new ways of connecting in, maybe it’s going to be the Alexa or something that everyone is going to be using to now contact different advertisers and things like that. As things evolve, it’s just educating both ends on what this experience is going to be so that everyone’s happy and if everyone’s happy you’re going to make a lot more sales.

ADAM: There’s so much misinformation of what paper call is supposed to be and what it is. If you go online and you’re reading about like paper call and clip to call, you read what the mass medias are talking about, it could have been so much further from the truth in terms of what it actually do and dive everything trying to fight that misconception of here guys here’s actually what we do, here’s actually what our capabilities are especially with brands. I read this article on adage that this is the next thing and they go like that doesn’t exist.

JOE: I’d add one more thing, just exactly on what they are saying, as an advertiser we’re buying a lot of these calls. It’s very important that you take the time to understand what your customer experiences and what the call center experience is that’s being delivered and make sure there’s a good match. One of the biggest challenges that we see time and time again is we’ll launch a new campaign together with a publisher and there isn’t a clear understanding on both sides on what the end to end customer experience is and so there’s a lot of failure points as those calls start to connect and you do get customers, it’s a real problem because people call in and they don’t understand what the purpose of the call is, what’s going to be delivered hence if the IVR for example are round up and we have an IVR and you have an IVR, it makes really poor customer experiences and there will be a lot of failure in that process, so I can’t stress that enough to take the time to understand what customer experience you’re delivering and what experiences that the call centers are delivering. Tweaks are required, so take time and make sure those are in place. On our end we have 2000+ call center agents, so we’re a slow moving ship to make those changes, we can do it as long as we’re working together in collaboration and it’s really important to take that time to ensure the campaign is launched successfully and it keeps going, so we don’t have to cut it off.

QUESTION: We don’t do any paper call yet, but we do generate a lot of inbound calls on our own. When it comes to inbound calls and whether it’s paper call or whether it’s generating on your own, what are the biggest mistakes that you see people making, we talk to our reps all day long and they complain about the quality whether it’s how the script works, whether it’s the IVR, just in general what are the best things we can quickly take a look at to optimize the process for these calls that we’re generating and others are generating for us?

ADAM: So the question is, how to optimize the inbound call experience so that the agents complain less?

QUESTION: Yes, so we get most out of the funnel and where are the biggest pinpoints that drop off points just general best practices for inbound calling that you guys deal with every day?

ADAM: To kind of answer your question, I think one of the best faults that I see especially with guys that do this and try to do improved quality, they keep trying to put more and more qualified into the IVR, almost trying to like make the sale of the IVR before it even hits the land and it’s a downward spiral because what happens is you start putting more and more qualifiers on the IVR, they can get better quality through, but then by the time someone even gets on the phone and they have their defenses up and you just say press 1 if you have a credit card and ready to buy right now, they might get through, but now they are already like when is the pitch coming again and now your rep doesn’t have the chance to close on and it naturally hurts your close rating and so don’t make the mistake of trying to make a sale in the IVR. And I think depending on what your product is, it’s kind of like a bit of law in the science that kind of massage that online to off-line transition of you’re taking too much and having a clean flow through via IVR right into the sales reps pitch and you just want to be clean, fluid and a lot of times just kind of use the IVR to kind of help prep the consumer not aggressively for the sales pitch.

STAN: You have to make sure that if you’re generating your calls, you have to know how that call became a call. Where did it come from, so you need to be able to segment out each different traffic source maybe to a different deed or into a different group or a different queue and then take a look at the analytics which let’s say Google give you an average of 20 minutes talk time, Facebook give you an average of five minutes talk time, Bing an average of 30 minutes talk time. It looks like based on that I’m getting my best results from Bing so let’s spend more money on that side and drive more calls from where those calls are lasting for a longer period of time. So if you’re just putting everything all into one number, it’s really hard to optimize what’s working for you and what’s not.

ADAM: And then you can also use different DIDs to populate the sales rep screens so that they can select just a pitch depending on traffic source. Use different IVRs, like if I’m having a really good search and maybe I don’t even have IVR, maybe I just go direct to connect right to the reps, it’s a really classy user experience and we see increased rates in sales when we direct and connect when we don’t have IVRs. But then you also have talk time so you balance it out with the economics.

JOE: Even in some cases where you have to do some qualification or some IVR screening, you want to eliminate redundancies as much as you can, there’s nothing more frustrating as a consumer if you call in and you have to go through an initial IVR and then maybe like Stan was saying you get transferred and you’re on hold now and you have to go through another IVR, then you’re on hold again and you get on phone with the screener who will ask you the same questions for a third time and then you’re on hold again and you finally get to the person who’s pitching something and like you’re already frustrated and it’s just the chances of that agent closing are going to be low because your consumer like Jeff was saying two hours of defenses and they are bored or they are frustrated. So just making out a seamless process is possible and understanding from start to finish what this person is going through before you get a chance to pitch them.

JOE: Adam said you could do like a screen pop depending on your CRM capabilities to tell them something about the campaign. You can also introduce a whisper, so you’re telling them what this campaign is before you actually connect the lines and depending on your call routing system or caller ready with Adam’s case he’s announcing what the campaign is, but again because they’re so familiar they know what’s going on, so they are not necessary listening to it, but the whisper can be important as well. Whispers, DRGs, the inbound phone number for the call center.

ADAM: I’m not sure how you set up, but let’s say for instance you don’t have the capability of using multiple different numbers to come in, if you use caller ready or something like that you can actually pixel the number into your CRM to see where it’s coming from as well.

JOE: Yeah, like the caller ready is set to compose the lead in as well with the phone call. It can post it in before, it can post it in during, it can post it in on billable and then that’s how you can get that integration going. So let me ask a more basic question; so why do pay per call, why not just sell forms, why are we all working on this?

ADAM: I’d love to answer that question, here’s the honest truth why I got in paper call. I came up with a call center space and started doing lead gen I’d always get quality feedback from advertisers and they will be like these leads aren’t any good. The first question I’d ask is when did you dial the leads? We dialed the leads like two days after and I’m like, did you work the leads properly and so paper; if I’m generating a lead and the lead go for $10, the paper call would go about $18 and so it’s like I’m just going to pay $1 for arbitrage, I’m going to build my own pages better than what the advertiser feels. I’m going to collect less fields and maybe convert that, I’m going to pay less for my media and I’m just going to outbound that call and turn it into inbound call and arbitrage difference and my margins will be the largest margins ever taken for performance marketing and a lot of times we’re happy. So, that’s why I got into it and why I was doing paper call.

QUESTION: Why paper call?

STAN: There’s such a variance sometimes with lead quality, there’s obviously a variance with call quality as well, but you know you get your leads here. You’re not really sure how many you already connect with and if your reps are dialing on those and just nobody’s picking up the phone, it can be pretty frustrating, so having your reps available to just take calls and you’re skipping the step here and just focusing on closing deals as opposed to like contacting people and all the technical things we’re going to how to work this leads properly.

ADAM: It just comes down to efficiency I think you know, why have your reps been six hours a day hitting voicemails when they can spend six hours a day on the phone talking to people and closing deals. The call may cost more than the lead does, but you’ve eliminated all those hours of just out bounding.

STAN: For us, time is of the essence like what’s been suggested here, an absolute difference between an outbound dial on our lead and our contact rate and then the conversion rate conversion to an inbound call. We obviously have somebody on the line that the conversion rate is always going to be better and so how that benefits our publishers so we can pay more for that call and you can make more money, we’re closing more and everybody’s happy, so it makes a lot of sense. And today the consumer mindset like we were saying earlier, everybody is always on their phone. Everybody is looking at their phone; this is a computer, so it’s more likely to get people on the line in the moment when they are ready to have a discussion, so that’s just a better experience for everybody.

JOE: To kind of summarize, ”no one likes making outbound calls”. Nobody likes it, so if you’re performance marketing you are taking advantage of that, you’re providing a greater level of service. It does point to additional breakage points, but it highlights them so that the call fatigue issues that this was ostensibly centered around what can be solved with competitive call distribution, that’s much further along than hey did you even try to call the lead. It’s just a lead passing, it’s easy the leads come in, but nobody really knows exactly what’s going on from the performance marketers’ side, it’s much more difficult to get data back about what’s working, what’s not working, it can lead to major friction between the advertiser and the performance marketers, so it’s in another front here taking out the friction points. Questions from the audience for the panel? Let me ask a question; what makes a call buyer or advertiser a good partner, what makes it a good relationship, what does that look like?

STAN: I guess probably both sides are looking for the same thing as consistency, so for a call buyer we want someone who’s not going to be missing phone calls, not going to have long hold times, not going to have the great variance between their agencies. We’ve seen some cases where they’ve got one call center that closes really well maybe as a rollover or they’ve got another call center that might be offshore or has new trainees and all of a sudden, the call stopping to handle this well, they are not closing as many sales and so, you know that’s the only way we can make money as performance marketing and pay per call if the advertisers handle these calls well. On the flip side it’s the same way an advertiser doesn’t want to spark 100 calls in two minutes and they’ve got five agents answering phone like how the hell are they going to handle that. They want to make sure that we’re matching their capacity and what they’re doing and just consistency on both ends.

ADAM: Speaking of consistency, you know if you’re open and your schedule is 7-7 Monday through Friday, a little bit of heads up if you need to pause the campaign or having a team meeting right, you guys are picking the phone and we’re having a meeting because we can do our best to pause those campaigns or move them over to a different buyer but those are some of the frustrating ones too.

JOE: Competitive call distribution is a methodology that helps you accommodate that because you’re not ending every call at a given buyer, you’re looking for that human to human to solve those sales meeting or my automatic call distribution system went down or weather events, all that stuff happens and because this is real time human to human connection, the communication is key. Are there any other questions right now? I’m going to move towards one with all due respect that I think I took from Jay the founder of this great event which is about predictions. So this is for everybody, where do you see pay per call going in the next 12-24 months? Anybody want to take a step further?

STAN: I don’t know where it’s going to lead, but the things I’m excited about is all the AI that’s coming in all facets of our lives and whatever you think that’s scary or you think it’s cool whatever it’s definitely happening all around us and how many people here have gotten here on Amazon echo or Google whatever that is in the last year? How many of them are still in the box right now? There are just a lot of people that are getting those devices and haven’t quite figured out how to use them yet and much in the way that I seem like many years ago people were getting smart phones and thought they were cool, then the touch screen and now there are so many different uses for them that I just think there’s going to be all kinds opportunities with new technology of course that are coming out and how marketers take advantage of that or deal with that is going to be exciting in the future.

ADAM: I think that will actually be an interesting part of the discussion just in the chat box to so many new things that we’re already been playing around with as marketers that I think called the cutting edge of paper call in terms of how we’re going to be driving calls next is one of the things that AVU looked at is, AVU has been the best Google search as an affiliate right. What can I really do with search is to find that it’s super expensive and I really can’t make any margins there, I don’t provide any values to chain. And so where I make money is by figuring out what’s going to be the next thing, what are the new ways to be able to drive calls, what are media channels that I get to tap into, what’s the angle that nobody else is using and getting on past search and I think that Eric is right like when AI and chat box and all those stuffs coming out is super interesting and I think that over the next few years advertisers will be a lot more accepting as a step to kind of understanding what this technology use and how much better results and volume they can get from leveraging it, I hope a lot of that stuff will come into the niche here.

It’s funny, I thought that the year 2014 was the year of paper call because that’s when it started to really take off for me and I used to do hundreds of thousands of web forms a day and now i do maybe a couple thousand and swing over 10,000 web calls a day and I just see it continue to increase. The demand will continue to grow, you may not even see the opportunity to have anybody fill out a contact request form anymore because there will be technology where as opposed to filling it out, you can set up a time to have the system call you when you want to use more of a schedulers or something like that, so I definitely see it continue to increase and being probably the largest media in advertising will be from calls.

JOE: Absolutely. It’s not going away for sure, it’s only going to become more prominent and so I think as publishers you’ve got to put the pressure on advertisers for them to figure out how to make it work. It is a new frontier and it’s been around for a couple of years now, but not all advertisers are onboard, but we see it a ton of pressure from publishers asking us more and more if we’ll handle these campaigns and our answer is yes and it is putting some pressure on our organization, on our call centers. To figure out how to make it work, we’re going to have to adjust our call center mentality and our approaches and scripting and how we handle these calls, the pressure is on us to adjust as advertisers and if we don’t, the traffic is going to go somewhere else. So your peers are using this aggressively and we all have to figure out how to make it work. And that said we’re going to figure out together how to make it work for the consumer, as we know more and more search is being done on our mobile devices; so desktop searches continues to diminish and go away and so as consumers we’re sitting on our phones throughout the day, it is the best opportunity to generate a call in that moment when the consumer is ready. With that said the consumers is not always ready to get on the phone with somebody, so as a marketer you’ve got to understand and figure out how to position and present the offers so the consumers are ready for that call and then as advertisers will take those all day long, that’s the question we are using this technology checkbox artificial intelligence, text messaging; how can we team up these consumers to be ready to take a call. I don’t know if you’re like me, but I hate calling people to interact and make a sale, I don’t like that as a consumer, but if I’m ready, I’m prepared and down the funnel, I’ll have that call, so that’s going to be the biggest challenge.

ADAM: If you can text somebody and be like I’m available 2:30, call me then. Perfect, they will give you the call 2:30 on the dot, confirm it and then have that trigger the workflow of outbound and hey I’m calling for your 2:30 call, the rep is available to speak to you press 1 right now and speak to the rep, they press 1, such a clean user experience and high-value call too.

JOE: As an advertiser, we will pay a lot of money for that because they are ready to provide a high conversion rate. Is there one last question?

QUESTION: Kind of maybe a provocative thought as far as affiliate, I’ll prefer to actually rather than have the advertiser take the call, I would like to actually have my own call-center take the call because I feel that sometimes some of these buyers do such a bad job with converting the call. Actually I’d like to take the call especially such as nighttime, some say 24/7, but I’ve done some test calls and the calls drop, they go to voicemail, during those hours I would like to have my own call-center take the call, allow the advertiser to hear the actual live recording and I think that will monetize better and be good for the advertisers especially when you guys mentioned that some of the advertisers have downtimes and so forth, you know this might be a solution as long as everybody can share the same technology and see what actually happened during the call because that’s an issue because they want to make sure that the lead is a quality lead, but just outside the box are thoughts.

JOE: So the question really your thought is about generating leads all the time and how do you deal with it, anybody wants to talk about that after hours?

STAN: Caller ready offers a feature where if they are calling and it is after hours they can schedule actually right there on the phone using the keypad schedule a call time for a call back and caller ready will actually announce the next available time for a call back is tomorrow 11:30 AM EST, to choose this press 1.

ADAM: I think call-centers are really expensive, US-based are super-expensive, even off-shore call-centers are expensive and not as good and then it’s like they try and do get rid of the call-center. I think that everything can be done, automate IVRs and AI and it’s a lot more cheaper, they can be a lot more effective, I think that’s the future. I think the middle-man call-center won’t transfer, that’s going to be aging.

JOE: Folks I’m afraid we’re out of time, let’s give the panel a round of applause. Thanks guys, the next session will begin here in about five minutes.