MarTech360 Interview With Warren Newbert, CEO, Infinity

“In 2023, all businesses will aim to achieve greater degrees of agility, resilience, and flexibility – and for call centres these elements continue to be essential to long-term business success.”

Tell us about your background. How has your professional journey been so far?

Throughout my career, I’ve dedicated myself to helping businesses thrive. My mission as CEO of Infinity, a leading call intelligence provider, is no different; and my experience of managing growing finance teams helps me support the growth of Infinity’s enterprise clients.

I am a seasoned financial expert and dedicated call intelligence leader, with over thirty years of extensive experience bringing products to markets in emerging categories. I’ve led teams at some of the world’s most established organisations, such as BBC Studioworks and Grant Thornton. Striving to help staff, clients and partners realise their potential, I’ve built a reputation for creating innovative solutions across a variety of industries.

Tell us about your role at Infinity.

I oversee the direction of my staff to meet the needs of our investors and customers. At my core, I am metrics-focused and pragmatic. This helps me live and breathe one of our core values; we measure what matters—and ensure we can respond when needs shift. It’s my job to make sure that Infinity delivers.

Like others that have come before me have said, transitioning from CFO to CEO means you face the toughest odds of outperforming as a CEO. Often there’s a focus on profitability at the expense of revenue growth, which includes understanding all organisational metrics—including meeting consumer expectations.

As a CEO, I have to wear different hats depending on the meeting, participants, nature, and the intended outcome. But regardless of the hat, I try to look through the lens of a customer. In every department, every role, and each case, I ask every Infinity employee to think about the customer and ensure that is front and centre in their thinking, response, and actions. We are only as good as the customers we keep, both today and in the future, so I ensure they are a key focus. The voice of customers is paramount to business success, and I always seek feedback from them, good or less good, supportive or suggestive. All insight is valuable.

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What sets Infinity as the leading call intelligence provider and sets it apart from the competition?

As marketplaces become saturated, making a company stand out is becoming more challenging. At Infinity, we have a customer-centric approach to enable us to better understand our customer’s objectives and ensure they succeed. We have received recognition for our efforts, winning “Most Innovative Customer Success Initiative” at the Customer Success Excellence Awards.

It’s simple. We stick to the foundational elements of success: measurement, results, and customer satisfaction. Our teams go above and beyond to achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction and happiness—and this only comes from hard evidence and results.

For example, our work with Specsavers led to them transforming their marketing campaigns. The insights we uncovered helped them drive down CPA by 32% and boost bookings for their home visit service by 25%.

With the help of Infinity’s Insights & Intelligence team, Specsavers were able to set up Conversation Analytics in a swift fashion. In just three weeks, it was possible to automatically identify when a booking goal had taken place on a call. Using one of Infinity’s 45 out-of-the-box integrations, the Specsavers team could push conversion data directly into Search Ads 360 and use it to create efficiencies and improvements across their paid media campaigns.

After configuring keyword groups to help identify call drivers and appointment bookings, we helped Specsavers strengthen their understanding of what happens during phone calls and make their decision-making much more data-driven.

Can you explain to us what call centre technology is and how it has evolved beyond the use of phone systems?

When we think of a call centre, people usually picture a sales floor lined with call agents who pick up the phone all day. However, those days are gone. Call centres are much more than a machine to churn out sales and services. The output has moved from being a simple sales function to enable better and personalised customer experience, more accessible and in-depth reporting and a catalogue of integrations—and this is largely because of the evolution of call centre technology.

Call centre technology refers to the systems call centres use to support business processes, enhance operational efficiencies, and deliver the customer experience consumers expect. Like other businesses, call centres have been forced to rapidly adapt to the growing technology landscape. It’s now gone beyond phone call systems. Call centres have moved on from just data-driven to analytic-driven processes, delivering an unparalleled service through a more personalised customer experience.

Do you think call centre technology is driving innovation and improving customer experience?

Call centre technology has changed call centres in two fundamental ways. The first is that it simply makes customer calls as seamless and data-rich as possible. Not only is this better for customers, but it also reduces costs by ensuring that call agents focus on talking to the right people in the most appropriate way. Automation has also enabled call centres to improve their workflows by managing call volumes, assigning the next incoming calls, tracking call performance, and signalling where pre-defined weaknesses are appearing for follow-up attention.

What are the latest trends in call centre technology? And can we expect it in the future?

In 2023, all businesses will aim to achieve greater degrees of agility, resilience, and flexibility – and for call centres these elements continue to be essential to long-term business success. Leaders realise that they need tools in place to help them anticipate and adapt to change, and incorporate industry trends into their development.

In call centres, the pendulum of trends is swinging from automation to increasingly important touchpoints powered by call agents as customers seek out a human touch during the economic crisis. The customer data that call agents can gather from these calls will prove to be vital for business survival in 2023, as customer tighten their purse strings. Unfortunately, this customer data is often locked within company silos, which makes it difficult to deliver future meaningful, personalised and positive customer call experiences.

In 2023, call centres will seek to combine data, call agent training and AI to deliver anticipatory and highly personalised customer call experiences that will help them better satisfy customers and look after their margins.

What is customer intelligence, and why is it essential for customer success?

At its core, customer intelligence is the collection and analysis of large amounts of data that businesses can use to determine the best, most effective ways to interface and interact with their customers. At Infinity, we have further developed this concept and enhanced it to create our Conversation Analytics suite. The Conversation Analytics suite shines a light on the many truths contained within each phone conversation call agents have with customers during a call. This can then be used by call centres for smarter attribution, strategic agility, and training of call agents faster. While our Call Tracking technology tells you what led to a call, Conversation Analytics tells you what happened on the call, at scale.

Are call intelligence and call tracking different? What is the difference between the two?

Call tracking allows organisations to easily identify the digital marketing source of each customer call. There are a few different kinds of dynamic call tracking, user-level and campaign and channel-based tracking.

After the information is collected through the call tracking technology, intelligent processes make sense of these groups, clarifying consumer behaviours for both sales and marketing teams so that they can optimise future campaigns. This is what we refer to as call intelligence.

Using an automated, intelligent system means plugging call data can be used to enhance the call experience significantly.

Call intelligence is also linked to the concept of omnichannel. When a customer calls a brand, the journey created online can fall to the wayside, due to lack of training or shoddy online to-offline handover – usually, because the data isn’t being utilised the way it should be. With additional channels offered by contact centres, call intelligence tools can help sales and marketers understand and improve interactions across all touch points – allowing for the end-to-end customer journey to be improved.

Where does Call Intelligence fit into the MarTech landscape?

We are currently living in a time of great uncertainty. We all know customer experience is the new battleground and improving both how phone calls are handled and the quality of the conversations customers have with businesses will ultimately be beneficial far beyond sales and marketing teams.

For brands, this means anticipating and understanding customers’ needs has never been more crucial for business development. The ability to not only understand which channels are most appealing to customers, but what is being said on customer calls is now essential for business survival.

Call intelligence fits into the Martech landscape by unlocking the door to a vast amount of customer call data. By really understanding the key aspects of a call, and how feelings change when specific topics are discussed, marketers and sales teams can refine their approach to customer interactions. Organisations are then not only able to deliver smooth customer experiences but massively increase their chances of closing more deals.

This intel helps organisations to understand which tactics result in their biggest wins, so they can double down on the initiatives to hit sales targets faster and grow average order values.

The wealth of digital data out there is growing exponentially. It’s so important for modern marketers, who are naturally digital natives, not to ignore offline channels like phone calls. Once marketers can view call data alongside online data, they’re filling a gap in their data set for the complete picture.

How is Artificial Intelligence contributing to improving customer conversations in a contact centre?

We’re facing the harsh reality of a recession, an energy crisis, and war in Europe. For customers, this means rising inflation rates and financial turmoil – and this is something that will impact all sectors.

I think this is where AI can improve customer conversations – by managing the call flow. AI has been successfully applied in large call centres to be the gatekeeper. It can manage the call volume, assign the next incoming calls, track call performance, and signal where pre-defined weaknesses are appearing for follow-up attention. Instead of spending long hours monitoring and taking metrics, the management simply has to respond to the flagged issues.

On top of that, tools like Conversation Analytics can be utilised to ensure contact centre teams are demonstrating empathy and providing the support and reassurance that customers are craving. Failing to meet these needs will have disastrous consequences – not just for now, but for long-term growth too.

Thanks, Warren!