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Optimizing phone conversations to increase customer satisfaction and conversions

Laure Fisher and Todd Fisher are the co-founders of CallTrackingMetrics, a marketing software-as-a-service company based in Severna Park, Maryland. Laure is the company’s COO, and Todd serves as CEO. Ranked #226 on the 2016 Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest growing companies, CallTrackingMetrics helps organizations streamline, optimize, and gain a deeper understanding of their phone calls. The company’s platform provides routing, security, and analytics, and integrates with services such as Google AdWords, Salesforce, and Hubspot. CallTrackingMetrics is used by over 30,000 businesses, including Toshiba, Griswold Home Care, and Twilio. Last year, CallTrackingMetrics was named one of SmartCEO’s 2016 Family Business Awards honorees.

Q. How did CallTrackingMetrics get started?

TODD FISHER: In many ways we fell into CallTrackingMetrics. We were consulting, building websites for people and trying to run their AdWords campaigns for them. A handful of them insisted that telephone calls were the only way that we could measure the impact of the AdWords campaigns.

It was very obvious that we needed to come up with some kind of solution. At the same time, there were some interesting APIs that were emerging that would allow us to implement phone systems and do the kind of tracking we need to do. I also think, on the same side, I wasn’t very happy doing consulting. For me it was very difficult to jump from one project to the next and not have that sort of consistency, so building a stable service where we could just iterate on that one service and make it better everyday has really been the driving force ever since.

It’s something that was really hard for us to get to. I feel like there were two years there where it was really, really hard and once we broke through that—and it was still really hard because this platform we’d created wasn’t paying the bills—just barely eking by. I think it took some really big deals that Laure was able to close that brought us to the point where you could say, “I think we can do this full time now.”

LAURE FISHER: What was happening is Todd had a day job, and so we would basically work at night on the business. It was really exhausting. Then, it just got to the point where we had enough customers that it displaced his income so he was able to stop doing that and we both vaguely saw the potential there, that there’s something here and it’s worth the risk to break out of what he was doing and just focus exclusively on us.

TODD FISHER: I spent a lot of time in the basement and I think one of the things that helped me a lot was a, learning from Laure about how to just interact with people from a business standpoint and then b. just taking as many calls as I possibly could, listening to customers’ needs and going from being a developer who just thought I knew what I was doing to listening to other people’s needs and focusing on providing solutions to those needs. Simply put, because it’s a single platform, every little need that we could solve became a multiplier, so one solution for one customer could become a solution for thousands of customers.

Q. Did you use phones to grow the business itself, or is most communication with customers over more modern tools, like email?

LAURE FISHER: It’s interesting, because like I think about that theme around how much Todd and I learned just by being forced to be the only ones interacting with customers for so long, and how the phone played a critical part in that—and thinking about all the different ways our customers come to us and ask us to tell them how they need to be using their phone for their own businesses. You’re right that you would think that the phone is of diminishing importance in terms of how people are interacting and engaging with customers, but what they found is it’s still the best way, and all the things they come to us about are about “How do I engage with people more effectively, faster? How do I know more about them before I even get on the phone, so I can be prepared to answer their questions?” It’s all the kind of stuff that Todd and I had to figure out also as we were starting this business all of a sudden. What I really like about it is I get when people come to us and they say, “I need this for my business,” I understand. Like, “You’re right—we need this for our business.”

TODD FISHER: We need it for our business, yeah!

LAURE FISHER: There are a lot of parallels.

Connect with  Laure and Todd on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

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