Traaqr, a St. Louis-based company, has just announced the launch of their interesting and clever new service. Essentially the system connects online interactions with real world customer service representatives, ensuring accurate attribution when someone goes from your website to your phone bank.
Created by entrepreneurs Brian Handrigan, Jeff Linihan, and RJ Jones, the company has raised $250,000 to build the product. They’ve connected over 90,000 calls already. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
The system works by connecting the data a website knows about you with the person answering calls made to a call center. For example, you could submit your name and request on a website and then the website can ask if you want to talk to a representative. Instead of flying blind the rep can know who you are and what you want.
“Currently, call tracking considers a call (as conversion) to be sufficient for attribution – sometimes as a lead alone, other times as an Average Conversion Value per call. Traaqr provides a level of granularity to offline conversion attribution that rivals the precision of e-commerce,” said Handrigan.
The founders created the project because they knew how hard it was to manage website-to-phone conversions. They originally had a company that generated leads online but made its money with follow-up phone calls. When the buyers got a phone call the caller wouldn’t know anything about them.
“After conducting customer development interviews with digital agency owners, we confirmed there was a huge market of advertisers that had accepted the inferior options available to them. We then decided to build out a commercially saleable product and take it to market,” he said.
While getting a phone call from a salesperson is no one’s idea of a good time, it’s clear that there could be plenty to be fixed in the adtech space. A tool like Traaqr makes the process of checking out a website and asking for more information far simpler and far more useful and, hopefully, it leads to less cold sales calls at dinner time.
