WhatConverts Cuts Call Tracking Costs by 94%

Avaya OneCloud CPaaS Helps Connect Calls to Leads, Quotes and Sales

In the age of e-commerce, the phone is surprisingly alive and well in sales and marketing. In fact, 50% - 60% of customer contact, on average, happens over the phone, even for online businesses.

But linking phone calls—as well as other marketing avenues—to leads, quotes and sales has always been an inexact science.

That’s where WhatConverts comes in. Launched in 2015, the company fills a unique spot in the market; its solution specializes in tracking how phone calls, web forms and e-commerce transactions tie back to customer activity. In turn, clients know which marketing investments generate the greatest impact so they can focus their budgets accordingly.

WhatConverts works directly with marketing agencies, which provide the service for their end customers. Today, the company tracks marketing for more than 5,000 end customers, including the Vancouver Canucks, auto dealerships and e-commerce businesses across every industry.

More Features, Less Cost

Michael Cooney co-founded WhatConverts after years of seeing businesses struggle with tracking the source of sales. “I ran a marketing agency and we were trying to track leads for clients, but existing solutions were not sufficient,” Cooney says. “In particular, we didn’t know which phone calls were connected to sales.”

Cooney teamed up with Jeremy Helms to start WhatConverts. As they built the backend to support call tracking, they engaged three companies to provide call routing services in order to link call activity. But every time they needed to make changes to their call tracking, they had to do it for all three ID providers.

WhatConverts considered creating a PBX in house but that route would consume too much manpower. Instead, the company chose to centralize call tracking with a single cloud platform as a service (CPaaS) solution. However, they soon realized that solution was not a fit for the long term.

“We needed better support from our CPaaS because reliability is essential for us in serving our clients,” Helms says. “Plus, pricing was a big concern for us because it’s one of the big factors when customers choose us. We realized pretty quickly that the call tracking solution we had wasn’t sustainable at the current pricing.”

The founders discovered a solution in Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, an offering that allows businesses to communication-enable any application, workflow or business process. With Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, it’s easy for developers and non-developers to use sophisticated application development capabilities.

Avaya brought all the capabilities of the previous solution, and more, in a more affordable package. Unlike the previous CPaaS, Avaya has experience-enhancing features such as playing a ring tone so the caller knows the call is actually going through. Moreover, WhatConverts can do it all with simple XML scripts.

End-to-End Analytics

With Avaya powering call tracking, the WhatConverts solution effectively serves as a digital name tag for end customers that stays with them as they engage with a company.

“Imagine you walk into a shop and someone gives you a tag with a phone number on it,” Cooney says. “As you walk around the store, you use the phone number to interact with the shop staff. When you leave, you hand the tag back and that number is given out again to the next shopper.”

When an end customer calls a unique phone number, it routes to an end point at Avaya, which then posts the call to the WhatConverts system. WhatConverts then dispatches an XML response directing the activities on the call, such as playing a greeting, connecting to the destination phone number and “whispering” a message to the call recipient. The whisper tells the person picking up the call where the call originated from, such as Google AdWords or a website.

After a call, OneCloud posts the caller’s information in the WhatConverts system and the company, in turn, gives clients detailed reports. The business knows extensive details about the call and caller, such as duration, originating marketing source, destination and even keywords the caller used to search.

The Vancouver Canucks hockey team relies on the solution for call tracking for all leads generated online, end-to-end analytics from the first touch point through a sale, and insight into which marketing activities work.

“WhatConverts has bridged the gap of our online marketing and our offline season ticket sales,” says James Liu, Digital & Marketing Analyst, Canucks Sports & Entertainment.

When a diesel parts company began using the solution, it discovered that 75% of sales came through the phone, with the remaining 25% through the website or web forms. “If someone is going to spend hundreds on diesel parts, they want to talk with someone first,” Cooney says.

A Reliable Platform and Provider in Avaya

With more features and lower cost with Avaya OneCloud, WhatConverts now plans to transition exclusively to the platform for call tracking. In doing so, the company reduces its call tracking costs by 94%—savings that benefit both the company and its customers.

“With the move to Avaya OneCloud, we reduce costs for end customers while providing more detail and data for them to make better marketing decisions,” Helms says.

Moving forward, WhatConverts plans to release more advanced call routing features to improve the client and end customer experience. They also plan to roll out features to help clients gain even more granular insight into the value of calls.

With Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, WhatConverts not only has rich functionality to achieve its goals, but a reliable platform and support as well.

“Avaya OneCloud CPaaS gives us a stable, flexible platform on which to build our solution and achieve our mission of helping clients better measure their marketing,” Cooney says. “Avaya has proven to be a partner in helping us bring more benefits to our clients.”