MarTech Interview with Matt Whiteway, Chief Commercial Officer at Infinity

Matt Whiteway, Chief Commercial Officer at Infinity shares more on the company’s recent acquisition of ResponseTap while taking us through a few customer analytics best practices in this quick-chat:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Matt, tell us more about your role at Infinity?

At Infinity, I’m primarily accountable for all of the commercial teams across the business. This spans from sales development, through to enterprise sales, marketing and our international growth objectives. 

Infinity recently announced its acquisition of ResponseTap, we’d love to hear more about this and how it benefits end-users?

The opportunity to bring two of the best call intelligence technologies together was too good an opportunity to miss. The two businesses have been competing for many years, but now we have brought together the resources and roadmaps to fast-track planned developments and enhancements to an already world-leading call tracking and speech analytics platform. 

Benefits for existing and new customers will include future developments around other elements of the customer conversation, further enhancements of our conversation analytics solution along with more world-class partnerships and integrations. These developments will help our customers grow, particularly by supporting the development of omnichannel customer engagement strategies capable of boosting revenue though improved retention. I am also excited about our international expansion plans – in fact we have just announced our first office opening in Spain.

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How are you seeing conversation analytics systems become more crucial to marketing and sales operations and processes in today’s marketplace?

The ability to understand not only what channels are making the phone ring, but what is being said on those calls is now essential. The amount of untapped information in those calls is vast – what common terms and key phrases are callers using that are leading to sales? Being able to understand that and learn from it is an exciting prospect for our customers. By really understanding the sentiment of a call, and how it changes when specific topics are discussed, our customers have the ability to refine their approach to phone calls and not only deliver the smooth experience callers crave, but massively increase their chances of closing more deals. The intel Conversation Analytics provides will help businesses understand which tactics result in their biggest wins, so they can double-down on the initiatives that will help them hit sales targets faster and grow average order values. It also allows businesses to learn what challenges are constantly being mentioned on calls so marketing materials can be made much more hard-hitting. Not only that, but this intel can be used to make sure webpages and other materials satisfy common queries leading to more focussed customer interactions in the contact centre – minimising wait times by reducing pressure on the teams. By understanding what happens on calls, at scale, contact centres can develop a clear understanding of what agents need to when it comes to dealing with specific situations that can either make or break a call and feed this knowledge into training programmes for staff. Using this information, businesses can improve the overall quality of conversations they have with customers and better cater for their needs. 

In what ways can marketers/sales people work on personalizing the customer call experience with better technologies/capabilities today? A few examples of how you’ve seen leading brands do this? 

We are the Netflix-Amazon-Uber generation. As a result we have come to expect our digital experiences to be personalized both to our tastes and our desires. Yet our offline experiences have lagged behind in delivering this level of personalization. 

Our focus on improving the experience of the customer runs through our development of our Conversation Analytics suite of products. This gives customers the ability to analyse the content of phone conversations to glean best practices and empowers them to discover what is generating certain types of enquiries so they can take relevant actions. Callers get a much better experience, and our customers get to reap the rewards when it comes to having better, more fruitful conversations and building loyalty. For example, since using the tech to unlock the insights held within their phone calls, Flight Centre has been able to identify customer pain points to inform decisions on switching off landing pages that weren’t previously performing, or improving ones that justify additional investment. As a result, their quality of calls has greatly improved and they’ve seen their year-on-year bookings from phone enquiries shoot up by 79%.

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A few thoughts on the future of conversation intelligence and it can drive marketing and sales outcomes?

For us, our aim is to deliver solutions that go above transaction metrics and help our clients and partners tackle transformative strategic challenges they face. Phone calls are a window into the minds of callers and are a goldmine of information. Being able to delve into this allows businesses not only to improve marketing efficiencies and call centre experiences, but also to refine things like their brand positioning and improve their strategic agility, responding to what their customers are telling them. 

Research by Cisco has found that 93% of contact centres believe that “the ability to precisely route customers to the right resource with the right skills, the first time, plays a key role in the customer and agent experience.” And in fact it’s the number one capability they look for when selecting a contact centre solution. Businesses should be working to make the entire customer journey, from initial research to call, as slick and frictionless as possible – that experience can make or break a sale. So for us at Infinity, this is a big part of our future and our product roadmap. Now we’re a combined team, we’ll be developing call personalization technology to help more customers route callers to the most relevant agent for the job and deliver the most personalized experience possible. This tech has already helped a major travel brand boost on-call bookings by 48% and I’m very excited about what it will be able to do for sales teams in the future.

Some last thoughts and marketing / martech (or cold call!) takeaways before we wrap up?

The wealth of digital data out there is growing exponentially. It’s so important for modern marketers, who will by nature be digital natives, not to ignore offline channels like phone calls. Once marketers can view call data alongside online data, they are filling a gap in their data set for the complete picture. And as the sophistication of products that can extract valuable insights from offline channels grows, so too should the importance of including these in your tech stack. We all know customer experience is the new battleground, and improving both how phone calls are handled and the quality of the conversations customers have with businesses will ultimately be beneficial far beyond the sales and marketing teams.

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Since 2011 Infinity has been developing call tracking technology to optimise marketing campaigns for clients in the automotive, travel, finance, healthcare, property, telecommunications, retail, and technology sectors. With offices in London, Madrid, San Francisco, Baltimore, Manchester, and Reigate, the business now offers an innovative suite of products across the Call Intelligence spectrum.

Matt Whiteway is the Chief Commercial Officer at Infinity