Scorpion powers lead conversion with Call Tracking built using Twilio

For any business, the holy grail to understanding the true impact of any marketing campaign is knowing exactly where the leads come from. Scorpion built a custom solution for their clients that precisely tracks incoming sales leads from different sources and channels. With this level of detail, Scorpion helps clients optimize their marketing campaigns.

Boosting Lead Generation with Call Tracking

Scorpion is a full-service internet marketing agency that helps healthcare, legal, home services, and franchise clients grow their businesses. They provide a full set of marketing services from website design to online marketing and digital campaigns tailored to each customer’s needs. Scorpion stands out for their ability to pinpoint marketing ROI and lead attribution to any campaign they oversee.

“Call tracking for clients is a big part of what we do,” said Grace Miller, VP of Product at Scorpion. “Our customers need to know where the ROI is and where conversions are coming from so they can make better spending decisions.” Part of the secret to Scorpion’s success is their ability to effectively track customer leads in real time – and in granular detail – using a call tracking solution they built with Twilio.

The first call tracking provider Scorpion used wasn’t able to scale lead attribution by channel, source, and ad copy. This alone would have increasingly limited Scorpion’s ability over time to provide world-class services to their clients. The previous provider also began to experience severe outage problems that impacted Scorpion’s call tracking and routing.

These outages not only resulted in loss of attribution, but also caused calls to be dropped, which severely impacted their business. “If you have a seven-hour outage in the middle of a workday when there’s a lot of traffic coming in and prospects are trying to reach your client’s business and can’t, that’s a big deal,” said Jenkins. “It’s something that we had to take very seriously and act very quickly to maintain the integrity of our clients’ campaigns.”

The Decision to Build Rather Than Buy

Scorpion started evaluating their options for a new call tracking and routing solution and ran into the following questions: Did they want to explore buying another out-of-the-box call tracking solution? What would the overhead be if they tried to build and maintain a complete solution on their own? Which option would most benefit their clients? Right as they were in the middle of this build-versus-buy analysis, Jenkins, the lead developer on the project, learned about Twilio APIs and how he could use them to build a custom call tracking solution.

Now that Scorpion had decided to build their own call tracking solution, only one question remained: how long would it take to build?

In a single afternoon, Scorpion had the answer. Here’s the C# code of the prototype they built. That was all it took for Scorpion to get their own call tracking solution up and running.

“We differentiate ourselves by always building—building is part of our DNA,” noted Miller, “but we want to make decisions that are the best move for our clients, and be flexible for our developers. With Twilio, we found a platform that we can use to build our own solution. And infrastructure that is stable—giving us the confidence that we’re not going to be missing any leads.”

Building a Custom Call Tracking Solution

One of the things that appealed to the Scorpion development team the most was that they could build directly with Twilio APIs on top of their existing systems. The call tracking data from Twilio simply flowed into the reporting that Scorpion and their clients use to drive dynamic number insertion.

Scorpion built a routing system using Twilio Taskrouter that could be customized to an individual client’s needs. For example, if Scorpion’s customer is a legal client, the person responding to inquiries could be a legal intake specialist who is able to provide more relevant information to customers. Additionally, Scorpion’s routing solution can apply different call rules if the client only needs someone to respond to their phone calls while they are in court, during specific hours, or even after hours. Scorpion is able to completely customize the experience for their clients.

Scorpion is continuously looking for ways to innovate and drive success for their clients. Twilio enables them to do so quickly and at scale, like integrating Twilio SMS into their workflow to notify clients about real-time campaign performance and incoming leads.

As a company focused on driving results for customers, Scorpion consistently finds improvements to enhance and extend the suite of services they can offer customers to help them drive revenue. With Twilio, they can react quickly, iterate on ideas rapidly, and roll out new features to their customers in hours, not days.

During the 2016 election season, Scorpion noticed a sudden uptick in the number of spam calls their customers were receiving. They decided to implement a custom Twilio IVR solution for each of their clients that easily outsmarted mass robocalls and reduced spam. As a robocall isn’t able to make an IVR selection, spam calls were easily detected and terminated. “We saw a 20% drop in overall call volume, without any noticeable drop in actual lead volume,” said Jenkins, a clear sign the IVR was effectively filtering out spam calls.

Implementing a Twilio-powered IVR was fast. “We had a Tuesday evening call and rolled out a new IVR system for a large portion of our customer base with personalized messages in under 24 hours. We wouldn’t have been able to do that with any other platform,” said Jenkins.

Built for Always on Tracking

Working with Twilio, Scorpion has dramatically increased their customer base by scaling faster and handling whatever call volume comes through. “When everything’s going right, it just works. It’s like flipping the light switch and you expect the lights to come on,” says Miller. “That’s the level of confidence that we can have in this integration and in the call tracking that we’re doing with Twilio.” Their clients are delighted with the continued improvements and Scorpion has reported an increased level of satisfaction and retention rate as they continue to double their business year after year.