Sycle – CallSource Integration Provides Data-Driven Marketing and Business Improvements for Hearing Care Practices

Interview with Tim Gomoll and Ridge Sampson

Carolyn Smaka: Tim, why don’t you start and tell me a little bit about CallSource and how audiologists would use CallSource?

Tim Gomoll: CallSource tracks the entire customer experience.  The first aspect of customer experience is proper brand communication.  We work with audiologists to help track all of their marketing efforts for new patient acquisition. We not only identify which specific campaigns work the best, but also how they stack up and compare to the industry as a whole, to others in their specific region, and to the 5,500 hearing care clients that we work with today. 

CallSource provides a national toll-free number or a local tracking number to place in each individual marketing effort.  Through that, we essentially become a report card for your advertising and we eliminate the guesswork. We make marketing scientific through metrics and by identifying specifically what works and what does not from the perspective of branding, marketing, and direct response.  We work with all formats - direct mail, newspaper, TV, radio, etc.

More importantly, we also provide support for when that first impression actually happens. After 7 to 10 years of living with hearing loss, when someone finally decides to pick up the phone and talk to your office, we ensure that call is handled exactly the way you want it to be handled.  We teach and train your front office staff and monitor 100% of all the phone calls.   We identify if each call was a real opportunity to set an appointment with a new hearing aid patient. If it was, did they set the appointment?  If they did set it, why did they set it?  If they did not set it, what happened?  We teach and train the front office on how to improve those conversion rates. 

We also help with patient satisfaction by giving offices a second chance to make a first impression.  We identify when the front office staff should have set an appointment but did not. We will send an alert back to the location for a second chance to book that appointment, and then teach and train them how to follow-up with it. We also work with a partner that can re-contact mishandled patients and book the appointment on our clients’ behalf. 

Finally, once we draw the patient to the location, help with brand communication and lead conversion, and help ensure the patient has a great experience, we have a platform that enables staff – all the way down to a specific audiologist or front office team member - to get online reviews.  Word of mouth is still one of the most powerful forms of advertising so we give the patient a public forum to share their experience.  We make it very easy for the patient to write a review.  We teach them how to do it, and we allow them to post on their own social sites such as Facebook, Google+, Yelp, etc.  We also make it easy for the audiologist to pull all those reviews and promote them.  We provide referral programs and promoter score surveys. 

It is a full circle.  To sum up, what we track is the customer experience.  We automate the entire process to help our clients run their businesses, which enables them to focus on providing care to their patients.  That is the value of CallSource.

Carolyn: Ridge, how does partnering with CallSource align with what you are doing at Sycle?

Ridge Sampson: Sycle’s mission is to save audiologists and dispensers time using technology.  This allows professionals to spend more time with patients, and ultimately, to sell more hearing aids.  At end of the day, if you have not sold someone a hearing aid who needs one, you really have not helped them.  We know that there are approximately 37 or 38 million people with hearing loss in the United States, and only about 1 million people are fit with hearing aids each year.  That is a giant gap. 

The CallSource/Sycle Dashboard displays “lead to sale” data, everything in between and much more.  As far as the integration with the two companies, CallSource captures the lead, the lead source, the referral source, whether someone made an appointment, and Sycle takes it from there.  Together we have created a dashboard that combines CallSource lead data with Sycle’s sales data.  We connect the lead data and ultimately the sales data to the same patient.  For example, now we know that patient Mabel is coming in via CallSource. We know that she called, that she had a legitimate need or interest in hearing aids., Sycle picks up now and we know that she showed up and where she went for her appointment, what kind of hearing loss she had, and what kind of hearing aid(s) she purchased.  We can look at the fact that she came in off the Mother’s Day newspaper advertisement and she purchased binaural RIC devices.  This is powerful information especially when used to inform marketing decisions.

For every single referral source, we can look at the ROI.  There is an old quote in advertising, “50% of my marketing dollars are wasted.  I just don’t know which 50%.”  Now you have that information via the CallSource Dashboard in Sycle.

Carolyn:  That was a great example.  Now, how does this help me when I go to plan another advertising campaign?

Ridge: Let’s say you have three different newspaper ads.  You can see which one is pulling the most patients and which one is actually selling the most hearing aids.  It allows you to start qualifying your ads.  You may have an ad that gets lots of people in the door, but you do not end up selling many units.  It could be because it brought in the wrong demographic, for example.  With this kind of data over time, you can refine your advertising. 

Tim:  Between CallSource with roughly 5,000+ locations and Sycle with 5,000+ locations, we have a very large footprint and deep insight into what the industry is doing.  We can look at your business and compare it to those outside your four walls.  If you are running direct mail and you think you are doing great, how does it compare to the national average?  If you are currently paying $900 per patient, is your customer acquisition fee good or bad?  Well, the national average is $881, so that puts it into perspective. 

This Dashboard provides data in context, so that a CEO or owner can make quicker, better, and more informed decisions in real time.  Along with the data, we provide actionable advice based on industry benchmarking and best practices.  That is what makes it dynamic.

We eliminate the guesswork.   By partnering with Sycle, we automate all these processes, but rather than just deliver multiple reports in each system, we narrow it down to combine the information and provide them the necessary data at the fingertips.   It makes very clear what they need to focus on and drive through their organization for this week, this month, and this year. 

Carolyn:  When will the Sycle CallSource Dashboard be available?

Ridge:  We currently have a working beta model that we are running with a subset of clinics and we are planning the larger rollout for this fall.

Carolyn: What has some of the feedback been from the customers using the beta?

Ridge:  The cost of acquisition for a new customer has been eye opening for a lot of clinics.  Many offices either do not know their cost of acquisition, or they think it is much lower than it actually is. As Tim said earlier, the average cost of acquiring a new customer is a staggering $880.  That is a lot of money.  The Dashboard enables you to look at your advertising and know that with certain campaigns your cost may be as low as $400 or $500, and with others as high as $1,000 or more.  You then know where to spend those advertising dollars in the future and you can lower your overall costs of acquisition.  You will start spending money in the right places more often and get a much higher return.   

Tim:  Many times, people neglect their repeat and referral business and they associate those sales toward their new customer totals.  When you back out repeat business you may find your costs are much higher than you think. To Ridge’s point, the biggest epiphany that people have reported is what it truly costs to acquire new business, and finding out where exactly they should spend their money to be more successful.

Carolyn:  Tell me more about how this will become a lead generation system.

Ridge:  A very important next step with this is a risk-free, new patient acquisition program. 

Tim: With our partnership and the Dashboard integration, we now have a delivery system that takes away all the guesswork and creates true ability to track a generated call all the way through the patient sale.  This is very powerful for organizations that want to deliver leads or patients to providers, such as benefit programs and associations that have patients who need services.  They want accountability that these leads are not wasted.  At the end of the day, that is the same goal as hearing care business owners, which is, to help as many people as possible with the gift of hearing.  We can connect these organizations with hearing care practices, provide accountability, and give all parties involved peace of mind. 

Ridge:  Again this is risk-free.  Rather than buying leads, you can buy sales. For example, we could put 10 leads on your schedule.  If you do not sell a hearing aid, you owe us nothing.  When you do sell a hearing aid, because we have the ability to track it all the way from lead through to sale, then you can pay us only when you sell the hearing aid. 

Carolyn: That’s huge.  And you provide support for the whole experience to help them convert the opportunities to sales.  When would this piece be available?

Ridge:  We’re aiming for later this year. 

Carolyn: Thanks Ridge and Tim, for your time in detailing all of the exciting enhancements in Sycle with the new CallSource partnership.  I’ll reach out to you later this year to hear more about how the risk-free new patient acquisition program is going.

For more information, please visit Sycle's website or the Sycle Expo Page on AudiologyOnline.