At our October meet-up we learned a lot about an oft-neglected part of that tiny multi-function computational device we keep on us at all times: the phone. You know, that thing you use when you talk to people? Really, that does still happen… A lot.

Alain Stephan, SVP analytics services at call tracking and analytics company DialogTech, showed us how and why we might want to actually pay attention to what customers say when they call, no matter what size our business is.

162 billion calls driven by digital marketing!

Alain walked us through the basic mechanics of how this kind of system works: forwarding, recording, extracting the contents of a call, and then mining that content for points of interest in a customer journey.

We learned that the building blocks of this kind of system have come as far from the days of dial-up Compuserve (their contributions to text-to-speech technology notwithstanding) as a iPhone from an old rotary phone.

Maybe this doesn’t sound like “web” analytics, but those of us that are driving traffic and running marketing campaigns might want to think about what happens when the click we drove turns into an inbound customer call!

A digital analyst might think of the content of a phone call as an “offline” conversion, but if we can extract the contents and customer funnel interactions in that call — that doesn’t sound like something fundamentally much different a series of website interactions to me. And as we learned from Alain, one call can have a series of different interactions just like a site visit. If we’re listening to the interactions in a site visit shouldn’t we be listening (this time, more literally) to the phone call interactions as well?