The Hottest Mobile App: Phone Calls

by Joe Mandese, Oct 25, 2011, 4:49 PM

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Yep, the good old fashion voice-based phone conversation turns out to be one of the most significant of all mobile apps. Go figure, people still like talking to each other. At least that’s what Tom Leung, Senior Vice President of Product, at OMMA Mobile luncheon sponsor Marchex is saying during today’s conference sponsored luncheon session.

Leung said that consumers may still do a lot of their research online overnight, but in they frequently call the companies they are researching in the morning.

“People are more call read,” Leung said, adding that marketers nonetheless, “have to do a better job of connecting those dots if we want to be successful.”

“The good news about voice is there are some new technologies that are coming out from all different vendors that are making voice a lot more appealing to consumers,” Leung noted, making me wonder why the voices people were born with weren’t sufficient for their user experiences.

But that was before things like Apple’s new Siri voice-to-text interface got people thinking there might be a better way.

Marchex’s Leung called Siri “a huge example,” of the innovative technologies that are transforming the experience humans have with their voices.

He said Marchex currently is tracking about 20 million consumer-to-business calls a month, and that there is a remarkable amount of data and metrics to be gleaned from all those conversations.

For example, he said you can determine if the voice calls were initiated to a retailer from a mobile app. And because most in-bound customer calls are also recorded, he said it’s now possible to do “really cool things” with all that voice data.

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