Pulse check: Which industries are people calling again?

Infinity tracks millions of phone calls every month, and last week saw our highest volume of calls on record, beating our previous record by 9.5%. This is great news for us as a trusted call tracking provider, but we don’t exist in a bubble.

As a pay-what-you-use business, our clients’ struggles and successes are ours too. We can’t have our heads in the sand when it comes to the industries we serve or we won’t be prepared to meet whatever challenges and opportunities our clients face.

This is an ongoing strategic task for us, but we thought we’d pull the curtain back and share some of what we’re seeing. We have used our new integration with Google Data Studio to take a quick look at some of these wider trends, and what they mean for some of our biggest industries.

Data is collected from over 4,000 active installations. Due to us onboarding several clients with high call volumes in late 2019, these graphs only show Jan - June 2020 for clarity but we have looked at data from January 2018 to the present day. We have also removed the peak number of calls out of respect for the privacy of our clients.

Automotive - 65% Week-on-Week growth

As car dealerships begin to open up once more, call volumes in the automotive industry have leapt back to pre-COVID levels (and beyond) for both our manufacturer and dealership clients in the automotive industry.

Calls to the automotive industry have jumped up by 65% week-on-week, and this represents a 563% increase on the lowest week of the lockdown slump as hundreds of thousands of callers wanted to discuss a new set of wheels.

Learn more about how Infinity works with automotive brands.

Travel - 25% more searches

Without doubt, travel has had to weather a greater storm than many industries in the last few months, and it would be naive to think that total normality would already be back. But that does not mean there are no green shoots to see as we saw call volumes in May increase by a third compared to April and the total amount of minutes on calls almost doubling.

Many of our clients are seeing an unexpected boost in interest in holidays in late 2020, which complements the interest they were already receiving for holidays in 2021.

For example, our client Icelolly.com recently saw a spike in searches for trips in September and October 2020 as governments looked to open borders once more. Speaking to Travel Weekly’s webcast on May 28th, CEO Richard Singer said:

“Last week, despite it being glorious weather and a bank holiday, we saw 25% more searches and double the number of bookings. And they’re not insignificant numbers, there are tens of thousands of holiday searches coming through and generating really good bookings…”¹

After a January peak, we tend to see a dip in calls to travel between March and May, before activity picks up rapidly in June. While it’s unlikely that this June will see usual peaks, the upward trend of travellers picking up the phone is certainly a positive and one we’ll be closely monitoring.

Also, we recently looked at some of the positives that the travel industry can look forward to post-COVID.

Healthcare - Slow but steady 13% rise in calls

The phone call has always been an important communication tool for healthcare brands, as potential patients require reassurance, information, and expert consultation. But at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, many people put off elective or cosmetic surgery plans (if they weren’t cancelled already) or decided to wait until rehabilitation clinics had made the necessary social distancing measures before checking in.

Unlike Automotive, which saw a rapid leap back up, our Healthcare clients have seen a more steady climb back towards normality that is beginning to gather apace. Last week’s 13% rise in the number of calls to our healthcare clients continues this trend, and highlights the importance for marketers in this sector to not take their foot off the pedal.

If you’re finding yourself having to do more with fewer resources than usual, download our free eBook on optimising digital excellence in healthcare marketing.

Property - 5x more calls

Two members of our team have enjoyed the ‘unique’ experience of moving house during the lockdown. But as restrictions ease and new social distancing measures are put in place, tens of thousands of people are set to join them every week.

The number of weekly calls in the property sector recently achieved pre-lockdown levels, with last week’s call volumes just about beating any other week this year by a couple of thousand and the average call length slowly rising too. We have seen call volumes increase fivefold compared to what they were receiving during the early lockdown.

The message for estate agents and housebuilders is clear. If you can make the viewing, renting, and buying experience as safe and useful as possible, there is no shortage of people ready to call again.

Our eBook on tech trends for marketing new homes contains ideas that will be even more useful in a time when social distancing is a must.

And that’s not all

These aren’t the only four industries we serve, and they aren’t the only ones who are seeing growing interest from callers.

• Last week, our insurance clients saw their highest call volumes of the year, and almost triple the amount they received at the lowest point in lockdown.
• Our clients in the retail space saw a healthy 30% week-on-week increase in calls.
• In the US education sector, calls to universities have held steady over the last month, having risen almost back to pre-COVID levels.
• Lockdown saw an approximately 30% spike in calls for the self-storage sector before levels went down, these volumes appear to have come back and been maintained since mid-May
  
  

What do you see?

To quote a badly screen grabbed clip from Cool Runnings…

This anonymised data is collected from all our clients across many industries in many markets. So while we can see very broad, encouraging trends, this view does not account for nuances in location, sub-vertical, or individual company. For example, a lawn care company in the US may have a different experience from an interior decorating company in the UK despite them both being under the bracket of ‘Home Services’.

What we see here is also only a very basic top level view, Infinity’s call tracking data dives far, far deeper. Failure to understand what lies behind your own phone calls means leaving enormous amounts of revenue on the table, as the people most likely to make major purchases will find a competitor first. Start a conversation with us today to discover what’s possible.

References:

1) Icelolly records spike in late 2020 searches and bookings bounce, Travel Weekly, 2020