TechBytes with David Turner, Vice President of Engineering, ResponseTap

David Turner
Vice President of Engineering at ResponseTap

ResponseTap‘s main areas of focus are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as they are integral to the work they do. We spoke to David Turner, Vice President of Engineering at ResponseTap, to understand his predictions on the role of AI/ML in Call Analytics for Marketing and Sales.

Tell us about your role at ResponseTap and the team/technology you handle.

I’m Vice President of Engineering at ResponseTap, Europe’s leading Call Intelligence provider. I joined the team here, in Manchester, in July 2018. My main responsibility is to lead the Product and Engineering teams. My primary focus is evolving the company’s vision for the future and identifying areas of growth.

Previously, I spent 15 years working with start-up businesses, from angel investor-level through to hedge fund-backed companies. I also served as Chief Technical Officer for Takealot.com, South Africa’s biggest e-commerce website, Wakelet, and CANDDi.

What is ResponseTap’s involvement in making Call Tracking Analytics a more readily adoptable technology for Marketing and Sales teams?

I believe that companies are starting to expect to see Call Tracking as a core part of their conversion rate optimization strategy. What ResponseTap offers is a product that is easy to deploy with seamless migration across their existing systems.

A key selling point for our sales team is that potential customers don’t need to change how their call centres are currently working. We install ResponseTap and can immediately begin tracking calls, as well as adding value. We then work with them to help evolve the process over the course of the relationship.

What are the key features that CMOs and tech vendors should look for while deciding on Call Analytics platforms?

One of the main key features that CMOs should look for is the ability to eliminate the blind spot between marketing spend and return on investment. Our Smart Match technology means we can merge our clients’ CRM data with ResponseTap and attribute conversions to marketing spend.

It allows companies to look at results in a more granular way, tracking the entire user journey from the campaign that first captured their attention through to converting a sale. The benefit of this is the ability to better manage campaign spend and reallocate any extra budget to areas you were previously unaware of being successful.

How do you add intelligence to Call Tracking solutions? Please elaborate on the integrations that marketing teams could use in their existing stack.

We see ourselves as providing intelligence as a service. We have an experienced team with a vast knowledge and understanding of data that allows us to train algorithms for Call Tracking. We use techniques for attribution modelling and extracting features from data that are highly successful for us because of the insights we have. We’re able to gain a unique insight into the online user journey and because of this we’re able to inform our models better and show a stronger correlation to a positive outcome.

Where clients use our service to bridge the data gap between marketing campaign and call outcome, we provide the most value by demonstrating the best ROI for the marketer and predictive insights and optimization for the contact centre.

Our system is fully automated but the more data we can collect from clients the better, as it helps us to learn and evolve. Through tools such as our Smart Match technology we can ingest data from clients’ CRMs, identify the attribution process and add value to campaigns.

What excites you the most about the current Call Tracking technology market?

We’re seeing a rise in demand for Call Tracking technology as well as a greater understanding of the services and products ResponseTap provides. It’s particularly exciting to see the sheer scale of the potential return on investment ResponseTap’s technology provides. On a personal level, being from Manchester, it’s great to see a local company at the forefront of ground-breaking technology.

Which other technologies are you keenly following and why?

I’d say our main areas of focus are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as they are integral to the work we do here at ResponseTap. We have a keen interest in Machine Learning as it can be applied throughout our work.

As we are primarily a data processing provider, we have the opportunity to analyze data on the service we provide every single day, so being aware of the new technologies that can help us improve is vital, it’s almost self-optimizing.

What are your predictions on the role of AI/Machine Learning in Call Analytics for Marketing and Sales? What’s the most exciting aspect of bringing together AI/ML into this marketplace?

The past two years have been particularly exciting because the use of Artificial Intelligence has become more feasible and we’re now starting to see it being implemented more and more. A large amount of research has been done over the past 10 to 20 years that is now being put into practice, so I predict that it will become a key feature for a lot of companies in the near future.

It has also provided engineers with a stack of techniques, knowledge and processes that inspire confidence when it comes to problem solving. The Call Tracking industry is only ten years old and is now starting to gain traction and customer demand, this is largely down to the developments in Artificial Intelligence and how it has advanced the technology we use.

A key element for us is the role it plays in balancing customer demand. For example, we don’t have armies of people listening to calls to provide clients with the perfect example for training purposes, Artificial Intelligence can do that, meaning we can focus our attention on other areas and continue to evolve our product.

Thanks for chatting with us, David.

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