Pay per Call, a new but still incomplete advertising channel

To illustrate the interview I gave on the well-known BillautShow in Paris on Tuesday, September 26th 2006, I wanted to shed some light on pay per call and the SKY-click call centre 2.0.

Pay per call is not new, it’s already being offered by companies such as Ingenio or eStara, but in mixed mode, meaning that they mainly use traditional telephony, and very little VOIP. Setting up advertising campaigns in PPcall makes using a call centre indispensable.

To receive mass calls and transform them, light call centres which are cheap to set-up must be implemented by advertisers, main users of this type of solution, but they are little used to setting up such solutions.  

Contrarily to cost per click billed advertising where the web-user surfs onto a website without human assistance, only guided by hypertext links, the call by “click to call” goes directly to agents. From then you can’t imagine making those customers who clicked on the « click to call » button at the same time wait.

Traditional call centres are reserved to large companies, because of their technical and human infrastructure costs, and by their centralisation. It is unthinkable that e-commerce sites or SME’s could equip themselves with them. With SKY-click, it is possible; there are two types of dematerialisation, technical and human, because agents don’t need to be recruited and trained anymore, and calls must be distributed to existing company employees who have the technical and commercial knowledge.

Therefore, for small and medium sized companies, there are no investments, but the possibility to connect employees who are at their desks, at home or geographically distant to a call routing system. The concept is then a "call centre for everybody": communities, social networks, SMEs, schools, universities, administrations, etc…

Here is a comparative table showing the costs of the different click-to-call solutions on the market.

SKY-click’s positioning pushes the current limit towards more functionalities for a low-cost price, giving this application a disruptive effect.

Flash demo of  SKY-click with SalesForce.com

Now more and more applications will benefit from click to call !

What conclusions can we draw ? Simply that whenever we are faced with an application, we will systematically be offered to get in contact via telephone thanks to a simple click passing through the IP protocol. And when we think of how important social spaces like Myspace are to the younger generation, we can say that they will soon find it abnormal to dial a number on a fixed telephone.

Eric Bugnon‘s complete post (in French)

What is interesting is that the majors totally elude the notion of a call centre when they present pay per call; like Google and eBay who have announced partnerships.

eBay & Google hopes to develop simply new services for marketers & advertisers. Click-to-call's live interaction may be one of the biggest business challenges for these actors. The skills for running a call center are very different from mastering a shopping site. And converting customers in a conversation is different than pulling through your site's shopping cart. Skype Journal

 Even more strange is when the CEO of eStara declares :

"The vast majority of consumers want calls to be landline-based,” said John Federman, eStara’s chief executive. PC calling requires computers that are equipped with microphones, and a change in customer behaviour"

Or even

Consumers are more interested in what they are going to say to the mortgage broker than learning how to change behavior,” said Marc Barach, the chief marketing officer of Ingenio, which runs the pay-per-call system used by AOL.

Hehh, he is brave and very retro to declare that consumer habits are not going to change, or very little…in telephony today! Rendezvous in a few months …