Marchex Rolls into the Sales Parade: The 2019 CRM Rising Star Awards

Seattle-based Marchex has provided call analytics and call tracking technology for both marketing and customer service for years. Over the past year, the company, which was founded in 2003, has also made major forays into the sales space.

This started in March 2018 with the company’s addition of an executive overview dashboard to its speech analytics offering, allowing users to view actionable customer insights from calls in a single place. The executive overview dashboard includes a leaderboard that identifies top and bottom sales performers across key performance indicators, including percentage of deals closed, upsell and cross-sell conversions, and lift from sales promotions. Also included are call tables that offer a single view of marketing and sales metrics. The dashboard also provides a trend chart that gives marketers and sales reps actionable insights into customer calls that indicate high buying intent and areas where they’re losing prospects and customers; an interesting calls breakout that leverages sentiment data to surface calls with either delighted or disgruntled customers; and a time-of-day chart that provides a view of customer conversations by day and down to the hour.

The company’s strongest sales addition, though, came in April when it launched Marchex Sales Rescue, which combines artificial intelligence and machine learning with call monitoring and scoring services to alert businesses when potential buyers hang up without making a purchase or a call does not meet the business’s customer service standards. It uses real-time conversational analytics and call scoring to identify these situations and then sends real-time alerts accordingly.

In May the company launched Marchex Stream, a cloud-based conversational data and business intelligence storage and analytics platform that can scale to support Marchex’s more than 1 billion minutes of analyzed consumer-to-business conversations. Marchex Stream can also process events and extract signals from conversations as they occur and make conversation transcripts and multiple AI signals available in seconds. It is purpose-built for consumer conversations across phone, SMS, messaging, and chat and also includes a rich API for developers to access omnichannel conversation data from custom applications and reports or integrate that data with existing business systems.

While the past year has seen Marchex expand its portfolio through organic development, the company also made two key acquisitions that bolster its call tracking and analytics solutions portfolio. This happened in November with separate purchases of Telmetrics, an enterprise call and text tracking and analytics company, and CallCap, a call monitoring and analytics provider. These two deals also give Marchex additional AI capabilities, expanded support for a wider array of communication channels, and an expanded conversational dataset footprint.