3 Effective Ways to Utilize IP Telephony for Market Research and Analysis

For a business to survive in today's competitive environment, it needs to grow continuously. If a company fails to do that, it risks losing market share, experiencing declining revenues, and ultimately witnessing smaller profits. When your financial results are affected, it will lower employee morale and, in turn, overall company performance. Address these issues to avoid a cycle of continuous loss in the market, consequently impacting the long-term sustainability of the business.

Consequences of Company Stagnation

1st stage

The company loses its position in the market

2nd stage

Decrease in the company's income

3rd stage

Loss of profit

4th stage

Deterioration of employee morale

5th stage

Reduced efficiency of employees

6th stage

Decreased overall productivity

Research Your Market

This process allows companies to gain invaluable insights into consumer preferences, market trends, and competitor behavior, enabling them to make data-driven decisions that can shape their strategies for success. Businesses can tailor their products or services by thoroughly understanding their target market. This process increases the chances of satisfying customers and helps build a loyal customer base.

Moreover, staying up-to-date with market trends is crucial for companies to adapt and innovate. Monitoring competitor behavior is also an essential aspect of market research. By monitoring the strategies and tactics employed by their peers, businesses can gain valuable insights into industry best practices, potential gaps in the market, and areas where they can differentiate themselves. This knowledge allows them to identify their competitors’ competitive advantages and devise their own strategies to either neutralize these advantages or develop new ones. For example, if a competitor is heavily investing in IP telephony features that customers find appealing, a company can focus on enhancing its own IP telephony services to remain competitive.

Monitoring competitor behavior enables companies to stay updated with the ever-evolving market trends by identifying emerging technologies, new products offered, or changes in customer preferences. In the case of IP telephony, staying abreast of how competitors utilize this technology helps businesses understand the latest trends and ensure their products or services remain relevant in the market.

Monitoring Competitor Usage of IP Telephony

Here's what you can do if you monitor competitors' usage of IP telephony.

• Identify best practices. Examining how competitors utilize IP telephony can help businesses identify best practices in its implementation. By evaluating their competitors' strategies and techniques, companies can gain insights into practical ways to leverage IP telephony for improved customer communication, cost savings, and operational efficiencies. For instance, if a competitor successfully integrates IP telephony into their customer service operations, other companies can replicate this approach to enhance customer experience;
• Benchmark performance. Monitoring competitor usage of IP telephony enables benchmarking performance against industry standards. Companies can assess their market position and identify improvement areas by comparing their service level, first-call resolutions, and other metrics with their competitors. This process helps identify gaps, weaknesses, and opportunities for differentiation, allowing businesses to adjust their strategies accordingly.

Data Collection Through IP Telephony

Businesses can collect data through various methods, such as phone surveys, call recording, and call tracking. These methods allow businesses to directly engage with customers and prospects, gaining valuable insights into their preferences, satisfaction levels, and opinions.

Marketing Research

Telephony

Telephone surveys

Call recording

Call tracking

Phone Surveys

While more and more customers prefer online interactions, phone calls still have a place in the business environment. For marketing research, too. Surveys done by phone call are most practical for the following cases:

• You need to reach a demographic that has limited internet access. It's not only about the age. Not all households have a computer, so reaching them by phone is a better choice sometimes;
• The topic of the study needs an in-depth interview but only requires a small number of respondents. Sometimes, you need to focus not on the number of responses but on the qualitative data the interview can provide. In-depth interviews should be scheduled when your interviewee has time to share their experience or feedback;
• You have a short questionnaire and a large base of interviewees. You can conduct such surveys within your current customer base, for example, for better segmentation, which will allow you to target your marketing efforts more efficiently. You can also use such surveys with your potential market to check how achievable your decision to expand on that market is;
• You need to conduct a B2B survey. Getting responses from your B2B customers online is more challenging than your B2C ones. Phone surveys are necessary in this case. Doing them is difficult: the average response rate may vary between 5% and 10%. Specific circumstances such as the job level of the respondent, survey duration, and timing may influence your results. Take this into consideration.

There are more benefits to using voice surveys than just marketing research. The customer satisfaction team can use it to reduce churn, a product manager can identify areas for product improvement - and much, much more. When used correctly, phone surveys have a better reach than online ones, provide more data with open-ended responses, and are easy to administer.

How to Conduct a Survey?

In any project, the first stage is planning. Start with the goals of your survey. What do you hope to achieve: prepare to launch a product in a new country, win the market share, or discover what impedes your growth? Whatever it is, you can use a SMART system to define your goal.

• Specific. For example, conducting a survey in country A to see if they recognize your brand;
• Measurable. You are checking the indicators that will help you to measure brand awareness. It might be unaided or aided brand awareness;
• Attainable. Conducting a survey of 10,000 people by a team of 3 interviewers is not feasible. So, how many people are on your team? Can you increase the number of people involved or contract a marketing research company? If not, can you receive objective results with a smaller survey pool? For example, you can survey 10-12 people for qualitative studies and 100 people for quantitative studies;
• Relevant. You don't do a survey for the sake of a survey. Data needs to be relevant to be helpful. So, what is the relevance of your goal? For example, surveying 100 participants from country A to check their awareness of your brand to find the best way to launch a marketing campaign;
• Time-bound. If your product launches next Spring, and you need to start a marketing campaign at least a month prior, you must prepare the campaign materials before that. This will take two weeks, by your count. And to do that, you need to decide on the nature of a campaign. This will take, depending on the size of your team, how many decision-makers are involved, and how communication between your works, let's say, a week. So, you must have the results one month and three weeks before the product launch. It will take three team members about a week to get the survey done.

And so, with the SMART goal system, you get the following goal of a survey: 2 months prior to product launch, interview 100 participants based in the country A to measure their brand awareness of your brand to make a decision regarding market positioning of your product.

What you need to do next is to prepare a sample - people you will interview during this survey. With your goal in mind, determine the criteria for choosing the participants for the survey. It might be demographic (often used in consumer products) or their field of business and position (for B2B marketing).

After that, you can start designing your script. It is important to be prepared when you make outbound calls. Even more so when you ask people for help - in this case, to answer your questions, which will help your business. We recommend preparing not only your questionnaire but also everything that will come up in the conversation - starting with a greeting and introduction.

The survey itself is better done in two stages. First, use a randomly chosen small number of participants to test-drive your survey. If any part of your survey script should be changed, this is when you can find out. Use feedback from the responders to improve your survey, and then launch the full-scale one.

After you collect your survey data, it's time to analyze it. That's why the SMART system is so indispensable to plan a survey. You already know by now what your survey should measure and how it will help you achieve your end goal: market growth.

It's important to have call recordings enabled when you conduct a survey. If any data is questionable, you can go back to a recording and check it. And that's only some of what you can do with call recordings to improve your marketing efforts.

Call Recording and Analysis

The call recording feature enables companies to gather valuable data by capturing both inbound and outbound calls. Once collected, this data can be harnessed by market researchers or automated software to conduct in-depth analysis. Through this analysis, businesses gain insights into patterns, customer preferences, and areas for improvement.

Tracking and scrutinizing interactions with customers gives companies a clearer picture of their performance and an opportunity to fine-tune their strategies. Furthermore, call recording and analysis are powerful tools to help companies enhance customer service, increasing client satisfaction and, ultimately, more substantial business growth. IP telephony systems allow market research professionals to record telephone conversations for future analysis. These recorded calls can be transcribed and analyzed for qualitative data, helping researchers identify emerging trends, customer preferences, and areas for improvement.

Call recordings provide qualitative data; you can get quantitative data through call tracking.

Call Tracking

Call tracking systems provide detailed insights into various call metrics, such as call source, call recordings, call outcomes, and geography of the callers. Analyzing these metrics empowers organizations to measure the effectiveness of marketing channels, identify patterns in customer behavior, and optimize marketing efforts accordingly.

There are specific software and tools for call tracking, but it can also be done manually. Everything about this process is simple as long as you have a plan. Here's a checklist to make it easier for you:

• Choose the medium. Where do you publish your ads? Offline and online could be both good channels to drive leads. Your specific circumstances will undoubtedly influence which one works for you. There is nothing to say that you can't use both. Just use different numbers to track the channel the call comes from;
• Choose the type of tracking: static or dynamic. Static call tracking is more effortless than dynamic simply because you do not need to do anything extra. You just put different phone numbers in your ads. They do not change, thus, it is called static call tracking. Dynamic call tracking requires changing the phone number shown to a potential customer depending on some conditions. Rules for change of numbers may depend on the source (a LinkedIn campaign will show a different contact number than a Facebook one) or geography. Changing numbers like that will help you track the lead's source and make it more accessible for potential customers to contact you if you give them a local or a toll-free number;
• Choose variations. You can track the following:
  • The medium that drives the call;
  • The channel that got you the lead;
  • What specific offer encouraged your potential customer to contact you;
  • Which different phrasing or keywords are used for the same offer worked better.

    So, you need to determine how many tracked campaign variations there will be. Use this information to calculate how many numbers you need.

    Other things you will need to track to improve your sales results:

  • When are the peak call periods?
  • How do the calls convert to sales?
  • How many calls per lead will convert to a sale?
  • What variations got you the best-qualified leads? This question is essential for companies with a prolonged sales funnel;
  • ROI.

    Tracking and analyzing the answers to these questions will help you in future planning and marketing efforts.

• Purchase a pool of numbers according to the quantity you determined in the previous step. Bulk purchasing often gets you a better offer.
• Place the numbers in the ads (for static call tracking) or use a Dynamic Number Insertion script on your website, Google Dynamic Ads, or similar tools (for dynamic call tracking).

Then, all that's left is to wait for and assess the results.

Our company understands the importance of staying ahead in this dynamic business environment. We invite you to explore how IP telephony can help implement your market research and analysis strategies. Harness its power to unlock valuable market insights that drive success.