Convirza lands $20M to sift what you say on the phone to brands

Phone calls from customers are time-consuming for brands, but they’re chock-full of useful info.

Convirza specializes in sifting that info by automatically letting the brand know what marketing led to the call and by judging how good a lead it is. Today, the Salt Lake City-based company is announcing it has raised a new round of more than $20 million.

Every call using its technology generates a lead score, CEO Jason Wells told me via email. That score reflects whether the call led to a follow-up appointment or actual revenue, or if it was a missed opportunity. The client is also told which ad, campaign, or keyword drove that call, if it’s known.

Some customers might find voice recognition analysis of your call just another step toward Big Brother.

“Our analytics serve customers by helping businesses provide better sales and service to their customers,” Wells said. “As required by law, our clients choose to announce that the call may be recorded. To be honest, we’ve never had a bit of negative feedback about it.”

One unnamed Fortune 100 client employed Convirza to analyze recorded calls after they had come in. The system determined that nearly a third “were missed opportunities for additional revenue,” he said. The brand called the customers back and scored deals with more than a quarter of the calls, with an average deal size of $1,100.

Another client, he said, used Convirza’s automated phone lead scoring to determine which AdWords generated the highest quality phone calls, in terms of lead scores. Wells said the info led to a revision of strategy that generated a 67 percent improvement on AdWords’ return-on-investment.

Competitors like Invoca and DialogTech offer similar services, but he contends that only Convirza combines call tracking, call analysis, and call automation.

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In March, Invoca updated its mobile search platform to provide more “call intelligence” relating to an incoming call. In February, mobile ad tech company Marchex released a solution for telling which mobile search keywords led to calls.

Ifbyphone, now known as DialogTech, announced a partnership in September 2014 with marketing automation platform Act-On to generate more customer info from a phone call. Other companies, such as Talkdesk, are using phone calls as the centerpiece of a cloud-based customer support center.

Originally founded as LogMyCalls in the spring of 2012, the company rebranded this past May. Wells said the thought behind the company’s origin was: “There’s got to be a way to get more information out of phone calls.”

In total, Convirza has raised just under $25 million. The company claims over 1,200 customers and says it had revenue growth of over 800 percent in the past two years.

This series B round, whose lead investor is a “large East Coast-based investment group” that prefers anonymity, will be used for product development, growth, and acquisitions. In April, Convirza bought the call-tracking division of CallSource. Other investors include Josh James, Todd Pederson, and Rick Alden.