Central Restaurant Products Links Revenue to Its Source with DialogTech

Central Restaurant Products, an Indianapolis-based firm, sells equipment and supplies to hotels, grocery stores, food retailers, and other operators in the food service industry. While the company’s website accounts for some of its sales, more than 80 percent of its business comes through its call center, which employs 55 agents, so it’s important for Central Restaurant Products to understand which of its marketing sources are driving customers to dial their number. Using DialogTech’s call analytics software, the company has been better able to understand which marketing investment is paying off and decide where to invest future advertising dollars.

“The main challenge we faced was attributing phone call revenue to paid advertising,” says Nathan Smith, a marketing database analyst at Central Restaurant Products. “We only had one phone number on our website, and we could track phone call revenue that came from that particular phone number.” But the company didn’t have access to the granular data needed to figure out, for instance, which keyword searches were yielding lucrative phone calls.

After evaluating offerings from competing vendors, Central Restaurant Products chose to invest in DialogTech’s conversation analytics software, largely because of its affordability. “Since this was an entirely new project for us, price was very important,” Smith recalls.

DialogTech’s software captures the search engine, ad, or keyword search that led to each call. If a customer visited the Central Restaurant Products website before picking up the phone, for instance, the technology records that shopper’s digital footprints on the site, including the page they were on just prior to reaching out for more information. Companies can then feed this data into their CRM systems to see which marketing interactions drove not just the calls, but also the resulting revenue.

Central Restaurant Products deployed DialogTech’s software in June 2015. Smith says that the company began to notice improvements shortly thereafter. For a year, the company tracked its results in spreadsheets and managed bids manually before taking things a step further in July 2016 when it began to tie revenue to the Google Click Identifier and import the data into Google AdWords. This has helped the company attract more of the callers who make purchases.

“The thing we’re most pleased with is being able to definitively see the areas of paid advertising that are contributing to bottom-line revenue,” Smith says. “In the past, we would use our gut to determine which keywords to keep spending money on. Now that we have a full picture of online and offline revenue, we’re making more informed decisions.”

In the two years since implementing DialogTech, Central has seen a 23 percent increase in calls and 13 percent growth in new customers, year over year.

“Our next goal is to use the qualitative data to improve website content, increase training for our sales reps, and quickly address the different problems that our customers are facing,” Smith says. The company has taken an interest in the Dialog Analytics feature. “We don’t have the resources to devote full-time employees to listen to phone calls. Therefore, using AI to analyze and categorize phone calls is very appealing.”

Using this functionality, “we can quickly look at the source of a call—say a Google shopping ad—then dive into the actual phone conversation to see if it was a quality lead,” Smith said in a statement. “Or we can analyze calls from a specific product’s web page to see what questions callers are asking, then have our content team update the details on that page to answer them.”

The Payoff

Two years after implementing DialogTech’s conversation analytics software, Central Restaurant Products has seen:

• a 23 percent increase in call conversions;
• a 13 percent increase in new customers; and
• 100 percent of its revenue become trackable to the marketing sources that drove the purchase.