Chris Henger, Chief Product Officer at DialogTech

With millions of vaccine doses administered daily and vaccination accessibility on the rise, we’re at a turning point in the pandemic. Now, businesses are looking for digital innovation to help them handle vaccine demand and questions — they should turn to insights from the voice of the customer.

Over the last year, we’ve come a long way. From the medical triumph of developing a vaccine so quickly to the digital ingenuity that goes into the logistics of vaccine shipments and distribution, so much innovation has gone into the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

Now, businesses across industries are looking for digital solutions to help them understand vaccine demand and the questions that patients and consumers have about the vaccine and to solve for marketing and operational efficiencies so they can provide better experiences. That’s where tapping into the voice of the customer comes in.

With the Vaccine’s Rollout, People Are Looking for Answers — Online and Over the Phone

As the COVID-19 vaccine started rolling out and becoming more widely available, people are looking for answers to their vaccine-related questions. Even just a quick Google Trends search illustrates this spike in queries. Vaccine-related queries increased as vaccine administration began, and these queries have only continued to rise as the rollout expands.

People are turning to online and offline sources for answers. Searches about where to get a vaccine, details on the different types of vaccines, and how long the vaccine lasts tops the chart of most commonly asked questions on Google.

While this information from Google is interesting, it isn’t specific to your business or your customers. That’s why it’s so powerful to unlock these first-party, voice-of-the-customer insights from your inbound calls — and the right call tracking and conversation intelligence partner will help you do that.

These phone conversations are a gold mine of valuable insights since your consumers are telling you their intent, product/service interest, stage in the customer journey, concerns, preferences, and more. And with people turning to the phones to ask questions about the vaccine and COVID-19 and take the next steps in their customer journey safely, it’s so important to leverage this data from the call channel.

Of course, the phone call has always been an important channel connecting businesses and consumers — and it only became even more vital over the last year with stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures in place. According to DialogTech’s own data, inbound call volumes to businesses increased at the beginning of the pandemic and have remained high.

At DialogTech, we knew that businesses would need visibility into how COVID-19 was affecting their customers, their calls, and their operations. That’s why in March 2020, just days after Illinois’ first lockdown order, we released a COVID-19 KPI to help our customers detect when callers mention the virus or COVID-19-related terms, visualize that data in a variety of reports and dashboards, and leverage this data to make updates to messaging, marketing strategies, operations, and more. For example, one of our customers, a leading physical therapy provider with hundreds of locations nationwide, leveraged the COVID-19 KPI along with other features to train their clinics, share safety precautions, and help callers reschedule appointments.

A year later in March 2021, with vaccination distribution well underway and businesses fielding more and more calls with vaccine-related questions and conversations, DialogTech launched a new vaccine KPI. This innovative KPI makes it easy to identify calls mentioning vaccine-related terms by marketing source, day/time, location, and more and drill into the call recording and transcription of each call for deeper insights.

What Do These Vaccine Insights Mean for Marketers?

Businesses and marketers across industries are thinking about the impact the vaccine has on your organization and you want to know things like: how many people calling your business are talking about the vaccine, how are those calls trending over time, if you’re getting more calls in certain cities and states than others, and more.

Here’s just a sampling of how organizations can activate insights from the vaccine KPI to provide better patient and consumer experiences, drive more leads, and improve operational efficiencies. 

Healthcare marketers can:

• Get credit for all the vaccination appointments driven from marketing:  The vaccine KPI helps you get attribution for the marketing channels and campaigns that are driving vaccination appointment calls.
• Identify the new patients making vaccine calls and plan to capture more lifetime value: You can get attribution for the vaccination calls you’re driving from new patients, and then make a plan to capture more lifetime value from these new patients. For example, you can retarget this audience with email campaigns, ads, or outbound calls for more services.
• Update patients with vaccine availability amidst high demand: Many providers are facing a dramatic influx of callers asking about vaccine availability and trying to book appointments, and are struggling to meet this demand. Instead of losing these patients if you don’t have availability for them, you can use the KPI to build an audience of callers who asked about a vaccine appointment but were unable to get one due to a lack of doses. Once more vaccine doses become available, you can retarget this audience with an email, SMS, or voice broadcast campaign letting them know.

Multi-location businesses can:

• Pinpoint vaccination trends by location: With many locations or franchises and vaccine distribution regulations varied by city and state, your customers in one area likely have different questions and concerns than customers somewhere else. With the KPI, you can dig into data on vaccine calls by where the call originated and the location that received the call, so you can understand how the vaccine is affecting different locations. You can also use call recordings and transcriptions to understand common questions by area and update your local marketing to answer those questions.

Travel companies can:

• Understand callers’ policy questions and concerns: If your organization is creating new policies like requiring proof of vaccination to book a trip or experience, your customers will likely have questions about your vaccination policies. The KPI can help you pinpoint these questions so you can improve agent training and call handling, as well as use these insights to update your messaging and FAQs so your customers feel comfortable making a booking.

And no matter your industry, you can learn common questions that callers have about the vaccine how it affects your business, and your customers’ experience with you. With this information, you can update your website and other content to address these questions, set up an IVR (interactive voice response) to answer these queries on the call itself, and more.

To learn more about how DialogTech helps businesses across industries leverage valuable voice-of-the-customer insights to drive smarter optimizations, visit our website.

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About the author: Prior to joining DialogTech as Chief Product Officer, Chris served as the Chief Product Officer at Ansira, a brand-to-local marketing agency. He has been a member of leadership teams over the last 22 years of his digital career with a focus on martech and adtech. Chris has worked in various product leadership roles and has expertise in launching and leading business lines, strategic planning, and commercialization.

His digital domain experience spans across search advertising, display advertising, mobile advertising, CRM management, co-op and channel marketing, affiliate marketing, behavioral targeting, data matching, analytics, and lead generation. He earned a B.S. in Finance from Indiana University and received an MBA from DePaul.