When many people imagine the modern contact center, they imagine numerous computers and other technology alight with information. This is certainly a reality of the industry – and it’s also a perfect metaphor for the many leads that must be handled by the staff of these centers. The information that flashes across these screens can seem unmanageable if that staff doesn’t know how to manage it – and your facility’s call center leads can quickly become unmanageable and useless to you without proper management, too.

Here are a few examples of how to properly manage your call center leads to get the most out of them so that you can take your business to the next level for your center in the coming months:

Wasted Potential

Did you know that less than 30 percent of all leads generated are ever followed-up on successfully? When you think about the time and money that goes into lead generation and the general cost of operations for your company, that is a lot of lost potential profit!

Not following up with your leads is like pouring your potential down the drain. With such obvious importance in contacting your leads, why do so many companies allow these consumers to go uncontacted? You might wonder if it has something to do with a lack of technology, but that isn’t the case; today’s contact center software allows for more than nine out of every ten consumers to be successfully contacted, so this major discrepancy is mostly due to oversights in other areas.

Thankfully, that means there are ways to address this issue. We’ll discuss a few of those next.

Successfully Reaching Call Center Leads

Before you can hope to do anything else to improve your facility’s call center lead management, you must first make contact with those leads. That first contact –whether you are successful in convincing consumers to make a purchasing decision or not – is critical. This is typically your only chance to make an impression on your consumer and will help you make the most of a resource that is already available to you.

One of the first steps for most contact centers is updating your dialers. Unless you have a very small operation, your contact center could likely benefit from an automated dialer. These dialers work in one of two ways, depending on whether your center is primarily inbound or outbound in nature.

For inbound call centers, automated dialers connect incoming calls directly to the agents that are first available to handle them. Today’s best technology includes features that allow for calls to be directed to agents who are best qualified to handle these calls, rather than just to those who are available at that time. This means that calls are not only handled promptly, but correctly, and consumers are left happier as a result.

For outbound call centers, which are the ones that are most likely to be handling leads for sales-based companies, dialers are designed to automatically connect idle agents with their next client. Instead of each agent having to manually dial each number for every call, the dialer does it for them. This makes the process faster and much more accurate, and automatically connects the agent to the next call when their previous call terminates. The process is kept moving and business is kept booming.

So, how do these dialers help you connect with more leads? It’s simple math. The quicker you can make contact with consumers, the larger number of consumers you can make contact within a given window of time. The more people you can connect with, the more leads you can contact. The more leads you contact, the more sales you will close – and the better business will be.

Quality as well as Quantity

While it is incredibly important to make contact with as many of your leads as possible, it also crucial to make the quality of that contact as high as possible. After all, once a consumer has a positive opinion of your company, they are more likely to become a paying – and possibly a repeat – customer.

The first step to a quality contact is speed. When your company receives information on a customer – whether it’s from the consumer directly leaving their information with you through a request for contact or through other means, making contact with that consumer as quickly as possible will leave a positive impression with them right from the start. Quick contact shows that you are interested in their business and prepared to serve, as well as showing that you have agents available to help your consumer on a timetable that works for them.

The second important factor is making your consumer feel like more than just a number. While every time you pick up the phone in your contact center contributes to a set of metrics that you have to keep in mind, you should never leave your customer feeling like they aren’t a whole human being after speaking to your agents.

Avoid this feeling by addressing them as personally as possible and by following up if necessary with a secondary contact. If your call is disconnected on your end for any reason, be sure to reach out to your consumer again right away. Do what you can to make every person you speak to feel like you value them and their business on an individual level – and each of those leads will be more likely to go somewhere positive for your company.

Handling all of this means asking a lot of your individual agents – much like processing a lot of information on each computer screen in your contact center floor. When you’re ready to improve the way your facility handles call center leads, get in touch with the experts here at ChaseData. We have the tools and technology you need to follow up on every lead and make the most of every contact. Every connection is an opportunity for furthering your business, so don’t let them slip through your fingers or let any customer feel overlooked. Your consumers and your bottom line will thank you!