In an ideal world, your web presence should generate all of the leads that you need. Organic leads – opted in leads – are from potential customers who are genuinely interested in learning more about your product. However, in operating your call center there are times when you must rely on purchased leads and do some cold calling. Its part of the business, and everyone understands that calling these leads is something of a hit or miss proposition. How you keep your room supplied with fresh leads, and how those leads are called will determine the success of your operation.

Managing Lead Response

Organically generated leads come from customers who opt into your website’s database. They contain contact information, and indicate a definite interest in doing business with your company. Unfortunately, many companies take too long to respond to incoming leads instead of striking while the iron is hot. Let’s think about this as a retail situation, and say that your business has a traffic of 100 people per day of which you completely ignore 71.

Sounds crazy, right?

It sure does. Especially when Forbes indicates that only 27 percent of leads ever get contact. If you combine training and technology, you can contact up to 92 percent of those incoming leads. Part of it is retraining your crew to be more persistent and not give up after one or two calls, the rest is setting up different metrics for different kinds of leads. The key to making attempts into contacts is persistence, having a clearly identifiable number, and more persistence. 

If your call center is using predictive dialing, your agents will be able to reach many more people than they would just punching keys. Simply, the dialer makes calls and then connects each answered line to an agent – the agent is not actually making calls, just answering the ones that are answered. If a system can make an average of 70 calls per hour, that’s terrific – but it doesn’t let you know how many answers you’ll get and how those will be distributed amongst your staff. In fact, looking at this through the lens of ROI might just get you crosseyed.

So, how many leads do you buy? Let’s figure five agents, seventy calls per hour for seven hours.

7 hours x 70 calls = 490 calls per agent x 5 agents = 2,450 leads.

However, that’s just for the first day. Some leads will not answer and roll back over. Others will answer and you’ll have a contact, some numbers will be disconnected, and still others will never be called when the software weeds out the DNC registered numbers. Of the answered calls, some will tell you to never call back again and need to come out of the system. It’s going to be difficult to say how many you’ll need without knowing the quality of your leads and how they were sourced.

 See what upgrading your outbound call room can do? And you can get your upgrade up and running in hours, not days or weeks, just be talking to ChaseData.