CallTrackingMetrics CEO Welcomes Replacing Humans for the Boring Tasks
Todd Fisher is co-founder and CEO of CallTrackingMetrics, launched in 2009. If your business has a “high-touch” product or service that requires a phone call, it could probably benefit from using CallTrackingMetrics, which started out providing attribution for online ads but now does much more. If your business provides emergency plumbing or law services, or even if it’s an addiction treatment center, CallTrackingMetrics is active 24/7.
Among Fisher’s earliest client prospects were a bail bondsman and a car dealership. They had paid money for ads with Google and wanted to determine how effective those ads were in generating phone calls to those businesses. In the beginning, generated clicks were the only measure of an ad.
“Every business I talked to was grumpy about this,” Fisher explained. “They said, ‘We don’t want any clicks. We just want phone calls. Get me, somebody, on the phone.’ This was back in 2010.”
He has just started experimenting with ChatGPT and GPT-4 to evolve the business and boy, is he excited.
Street Fight: How does CallTrackingMetrics work?
Todd Fisher: It evolved into a sort of Google Analytics for your phone. We didn’t actually allow people to answer the phone using our phone system. We just forwarded the phone calls to the back-end phone system that already existed in a business. We just added a layer of tracking on top of it so we could answer that very simple question: How many people called after clicking on my expensive paid advertising?
Does it work the same way still?
It has evolved greatly. We’re more of a platform for your business to understand the conversations that are occurring, allowing agents to take calls using our software. For example, it can categorize “This was a good call,” with just one push of a button during or after the phone call. As we’ve evolved, people say, “We use Salesforce or we use Zoho, and we need you to integrate your phone system into these platforms.”
We’ve done lots of work to be able to do that because, at the end of the day, people want to know how effective their expensive Google ad click was and how it turned into a sale. Did the sales agent answer the call and ask the right questions and provide insight that would convey to the customer or prospect just how good the product or service is? It gets into the nature of how the agent is handling the call, and what are all the follow-up steps necessary to make sure that that call was nurtured right.
When did you start using ChatGPT and experimenting with it?
I was on the beach [recently] writing some code. Could we put together a C++ version of a web service that we have, and would it perform better? It’s been a while since I’ve written C++. Could ChatGPT help me? Actually, GPT-4 is so much better. And I was able to get a working web service running, written, developed, and compiled and everything worked. While I was on the beach.
It accelerates your ability to do development. I probably could have gotten a C++ server working without ChatGPT by just using Google, and I would have just been burned out and given up. With GPT-4, I’m getting this buzz of excitement that I remember from the late 1990s when Google was released.
What’s another use you’ve tried?
We’re able to answer fundamental questions about a conversation automatically using ChatGPT. Let’s say I’m a law firm and I want to understand whether or not the inbound inquiry was for an accident. Did this person who called the attorney need the attorney? What was the date and time of the scheduled follow-up appointment? And then being able to automatically extract that information, the intent is given to Google ads, and we can tell it to buy more ads like that. And then the CRM knows when to schedule the follow-up call automatically. No human had to read through the conversation to figure these things out. It just automatically happens.
How do you foresee GPT-4 being used in marketing when it gets even more sophisticated?
Imagine digital ads that are interactive. You can just ask the ad a question. Interactive virtual agents and bots and everything like this is going to consume the questions you may have about the product that is presented in front of you. It’s answering those questions, and we can immediately decide if we wanted to buy.
In America, we are constantly talking about a labor shortage and not having enough people to staff the phones. Even for our business, we really need after-hours service. One of the really amazing things we can do with ChatGPT is mine all of our past conversation history and automatically build a FAQ of all the common questions and answers. In the past, we would have built these FAQs by hand.
Do you see this type of AI technology replacing humans on a very large scale?
In time, yeah. What I’m seeing is that very hard labor tasks, like when I was on the beach having it write C++, which for me, is a crazy, hard language. It wasn’t able to create the program completely that was needed to solve the problem I had. But it was able to give me the nuggets to connect them together rapidly to create something more efficiently than before. So will it replace humans? I think it’ll just make us more efficient. Google should be very concerned.
“Born” this year, ChatGPT is in its infancy, but already so very powerful that many worry about a dark future in which AI completely takes over and does everything humans would have done. Some see that future as bright; the ghost in the machine is here to serve. For now.
