Improved Customer Service will Drive Mobile Local Search

Over at Screenwerk Greg Sterling just asked “Will Local Market Ultimately Reject PFP/PPC”

Calls are a difficult deliverable for many SMBs. As Greg previously wrote when FastCall411 launched, consumers expect immediate availability when hiring a local merchant.

Problem is merchants don’t always answer their phones or are not available and don’t want to be billed for leads they can not fulfill. In this case not only is the call not billable when the plumber “is under the sink” and not available when the consumer needs them, but the consumer has not been able to make a decision in hiring a plumber.

Until we can better match consumer demand with merchant supply – PPCall pricing will be discounted and margins for calls will be lower than clicks.

We must look beyond call tracking as merely a means to prove ROI. Voice applications can help improve the consumer experience by matching ready to buy consumers dynamically with ready to sell merchants. For PPCall to work, the focus must be on merchants who best serve their consumers, rather than the highest bid for calls.

For example, knowing a consumer is looking for a 2001 Honda Civic (based on the call), TryAnother - our call routing application - offers a redirection to a 2nd seller if the first car is sold, or if the caller wants to keep shopping after the first call. The consumer can also review the interaction with the seller right from within the call. These types of voice applications will help fix PPCall leakage, SMB churn and, in my opinion, will drive mobile local search.

So I respectfully I disagree with Greg’s statement regarding PPCall:

But there’s another (radical) performance scenario in the mix too: YP publishers simply selling calls derived from whatever source (print, online, mobile). This product is being tested right now in certain markets. That makes the traffic sources more of a black box and the publisher manages the delivery of leads or calls from any/all of them. It also means that under certain circumstances “organic” calls can potentially be counted as well (ethical caveats here). This has the advantage of no required education and no analytics to understand, pay attention to or optimize against.

I believe there is significant opportunity for innovation in analyzing the interaction between calling consumers and merchants. As I written here before, I also suspect that Google with the relaunch of Google Voice, and Skype are headed in this direction.