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Optimizing phone conversations to increase customer satisfaction and conversions

Laure Fisher and Todd Fisher are the co-founders of CallTrackingMetrics, a marketing software-as-a-service company based in Severna Park, Maryland. Laure is the company’s COO, and Todd serves as CEO. Ranked #226 on the 2016 Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest growing companies, CallTrackingMetrics helps organizations streamline, optimize, and gain a deeper understanding of their phone calls. The company’s platform provides routing, security, and analytics, and integrates with services such as Google AdWords, Salesforce, and Hubspot. CallTrackingMetrics is used by over 30,000 businesses, including Toshiba, Griswold Home Care, and Twilio. Last year, CallTrackingMetrics was named one of SmartCEO’s 2016 Family Business Awards honorees.

Q. Let’s talk about the tremendous CallTrackingMetrics has experienced.

LAURE FISHER: In our industry, the technology industry, there are certain kind of stereotypes that people have about technology companies. I haven’t worked at a high technology company before, but I have worked at venture capital based companies, fast growth companies—you know, companies that have had a lot of funding and have grown very rapidly—and you see founders who are all of a sudden in charge of managing thousands of people, and it’s happening overnight, and there are all of these people involved in the business. For us, we had to think: How do we want to grow this? We want to grow it in a way that we can handle, so Todd and I don’t have to ever feel like the business is out of our hands and that we no longer can manage it or understand it.

Coming from a family that always had family-owned businesses, I like to try to bring some of that into the technology world—some of the aspects of a family business, the culture. And we think of our employees as that. I would love for this company to be around a long time from now. You go out and talk to a lot of founders of tech companies—that’s not their plan; they’re all about the exit strategy.

TODD FISHER: Exactly, which is kind of scary.

LAURE FISHER: Yes, but I get it. It’s just a different way of thinking. But we’d like to see our company be around a hundred years from now.

TODD FISHER: It’s incredible. It’s good growth. I look at it though, and I always say: “We’re slow and steady.” We may be perceived to be growing fast but I look at similar tech companies and comparing us to something like Uber or something that’s explosive—that, to me is the explosive growth. That’s just so fast, so out of the ballpark. We’re not even over fifty people. We’re still a very small company where maybe our customer base has grown, commitments have grown, but I think it’s all about controlling the growth in such a way that it’s manageable, so that we never really lose control over our daily operation, and are never overwhelmed and can’t provide good quality service to the end user. That’s been our focus, and have we put the brakes in certain places? I think we have. It’s probably not perceived that way, but we have definitely held back in some areas simply because we feel that we’re not ready for that next move.

Q. How much of that growth is due to the people you hire?

LAURE FISHER: I think about every person that we hire. I think: Is this person a good fit right now for what we need? But, more importantly, is this person a good fit for 5–10 years down the road? I want every single person we hire to be bringing something to the table that we don’t have right now, because even though I might not have this really cool management executive job for them right now, I will. I want to figure out ways in our culture to engage those type of people to get them excited about it and to make them see their path here, because I really want to be a place where people can work for a long time.

TODD FISHER: I mean, I try to make sure everyone feels they’re empowered to make decisions. We’re such a small team that every single one of us is critical to just keeping the day-to-day operations alive: making that immediate decision around how to handle a customer, how to handle a sale, how to implement into the future—making good judgment calls. And I feel that that’s part of what Laure’s saying: hiring folks who can make these good decisions in a moment.

LAURE FISHER: I have a finance background, so a lot of what I do is probably unusual for a company of our size. I get very focused on the numbers and I try to also bring that to everyone in the company as well, so that at any given time anyone here can know exactly what our revenue is, they can know exactly what our growth rate is over the last year or the prior quarter. I want everybody to feel ownership and have a lot of visibility around that. We look very closely at those numbers and we map our goals every quarter, every year, to figure out: What do we think we can accomplish next year, way ahead of time? We grew at a very fast growth rate this year, and we expect to do it next year.

Q. What role does phone technology play in your growth?

LAURE FISHER: I think it’s just a combination of the work that I can see we’re doing, where we’re just keeping the product ahead of the curve. This space is growing so quickly. There’s so much opportunity here, as the way that people think about interacting with phone systems is changing. You no longer need a legacy from a provider in your office. People come into our office and they’re like, “Where are your phones? You don’t have any phones on your desk.”

You don’t need that and big companies are realizing that. They don’t need these impossibly expensive and complicated phone systems. It’s just a just a matter of “How do we position ourselves in that space?”

The interesting thing is there are a lot of companies getting much more open-minded about handing their phone system over to a company like us. It used to be you only go with the big guy—you talk to AT&T or Cisco or something like that—but there’s much more innovation. People want the innovative solutions, which may be these different cloud based companies like us. There are a lot of opportunities, a lot of features we need to develop, and a lot of hiring we need to do.

You know, one of the things that I get stressed out about is hiring people, especially where we’re based. We don’t sit in the tech capital of the world, but we kind of like that. We like that we can potentially bring technology talent to this area. There’s a lot going on in Baltimore, there’s always stuff going on in DC that’s interesting, and just being able to draw talent that we need, particularly on the engineering side, there’s always so much to think about. We run a profitable company. It’s always been a very big priority for us and we try to compensate our employees very well, and give them a share of those profits every year.

TODDY FISHER: It’s not like an IOU that’s pending on all of this hope, and maybe, maybe, maybe. It’s real and every year that we hit our targets, there’s growth, there’s money to be had.

Connect with  Laure and Todd on LinkedIn

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