Marchex, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Marchex third quarter conference call. My name is Emily, and I'll be your conference call operator today. After the prepared remarks, we will have a question and answer session. And if you'd like to ask a question, please do so by pressing star and then one on your telephone keypads. I will now turn the call over to our host, Trevor Caldwell, Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Trevor.

Thank you, Emily. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Marchex's business update and third quarter 2022 conference call. Joining us today are Michael Renz and Russell Horowitz, our co-CEOs. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, including references to our financial and operational performance, and actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's earnings press release, and in our most recent annual and quarterly report filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements for subsequent events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release is available for the investor relations section of our website. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mike Runtz.

Thank you, Trevor, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. The third quarter was mixed for March X. The ongoing supply chain challenges and rising inflation continue to impact conversation volumes on a year-over-year basis for certain customers and business segments. At the same time, demand for our conversational intelligence software is growing among many of our largest customers as well as other large businesses with distributed retail footprints. We are seeing healthy development in our pipeline, which is a positive indicator for our overall growth as we look into next year. There still are certain macroeconomic factors present, such as inventory shortages, which have impacted prices in certain verticals. That, along with a pullback in consumer spending to a degree, has had a corresponding effect on conversation volumes at the retail level. That story is fluid on a vertical by vertical basis, but it is still a present factor, especially when looking at it on a year-over-year comparison basis. At the other end of the spectrum are customers who, despite the challenging economic outlook, are seeking to increase their utilization of our products and resulting spending with us. We are engaged with some of our largest Fortune 500 customers who want to expand their relationship with us because they want to fundamentally change how they operate their businesses. They see our suite of conversational intelligence software solutions as a means to understand critical insights into the retail operations and customer interactions, like how to deliver a best-in-class customer experience and close the loop to capture more of the opportunities and to sell more effectively. We can solve big problems for these types of businesses, and we believe this will drive our growth. For the auto industry, the time to change has never been more urgent. The global supply chain situation has transformed how US consumers buy vehicles, and hundreds of millions of dollars in sales are being lost every year because dealers and manufacturers have an ingrained, outdated way of operating. Marchex recently released an in-depth data analysis of 60,000 consumer to dealer conversations and found that dealers and manufacturers have significant opportunity to capitalize on these lost sales by bridging a big communication gap between both dealers and consumers and between manufacturers and dealers. We surfaced vital and detailed insights showing that dealerships and manufacturers consistently struggle in their communication over the phone, answering questions about car availability and how the vehicle ordering process works, particularly as the auto industry is in the midst of one of the largest changes in its history. This is being defined by the shift to build to order directly from manufacturer websites and the rise of electronic vehicle sales in our study current gaps in customer communications left the majority of potential customers frustrated and distrustful particularly at a time when inventory is tight and order and financing processes are confusing equally as alarming is that many of these bad experiences convince customers to defect from a particular brand The good news is that dealers and manufacturers are telling us they are motivated to fix these problems so they can evolve their practices now because the moment demands it. And they are turning to us because we have the platform and intelligence to show them exactly how to do it. MarchX is increasingly becoming the conversational intelligence software platform for the auto industry. Our customer success is at the heart of what we do. Our commitment to that mission was recognized last month when we won the APLE SAS Award for Customer Success for Helping Businesses Recover Lost Opportunities. The award came from a case study which highlighted a national computer repair and support services company that saved $50,000 in a single month by using our sales rescue feature of our conversational intelligence platforms. This success was possible through our continued investments in cloud-based solutions and MarchX Anywhere, our integrations and applications hub that makes our suite of industry-leading conversational intelligence services available through third-party communications platforms. The world is changing, and we are changing with it to serve our customers. Whether it's the auto industry, home services, or healthcare, the need for conversational intelligence software is present and growing. The scope of these challenges underlies our move to the cloud to reach more customers and prospects and our ongoing investments and innovations to solve an increasing array of customer experience pain points at the retail level, particularly for large businesses. And with that, I will hand the call over to Russ.