Stoffer's Soapbox

Spock: Lauching with Lag

New people search engine Spock has been getting a lot of press - and deservingly so, the product does a great job aggregating information about individuals from across the web. My big question is this: when you have such a huge amount of buzz around your launch, why would you not have the infrastructure in place to handle big spikes in traffic. I had lag of a good 30-60 seconds per page load this morning - unacceptable if you ask me.

Lead Gen: Evolving to Meet the Needs of the Millennial Generation

Direct marketers should heed these facts from recent Deloitte and Disney studies on the millennial generation:

• The average teen/tween uses their cell phone for ~3 hours per day
• 44% of teens use text messaging as their primary means of communication
• 58% of teens use their cell phone in class
• Millennials spend 51% of their online time at user-generated sites while the overall population only spends 24% of their online time at these sites

Clearly, the next generation uses voice and email communication less and is more dependent on text communication and social networks.

A lot of pundits, investors and entrepreneurs have written about the future of lead gen (see Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners's excellent post from January). All these predictions have to be viewed through the lens of the overriding macro trend here - which is that outbound calling will be even less productive in the future as customers move toward other means of communication. So, what will happen? Here are a few thoughts on how lead gen businesses and associated industries will have to adapt:

1. Lead vendor landing pages will give many options - (i) the ability to chat with a sales rep., (ii) use click to call via eStara or another vendor and (iii) fill out the form in a traditional way
2. Each communication channel will need to be trackable and CPL will be determined by ultimate conversion rates (e.g. a chat might have a CPL of $5 while click to call might be $40)
3. Lead forms will contain a space for IM screennames
4. All sales and customer service agents will have IM on their desktop to communicate with clients

I know I am missing many of the implications - please chime in with comments. What else will lead vendors and their clients need to do to adapt as the millennials age?

Intelligent Call Routing - Is LiveOps the Answer?

In most outbound sales-focused call centers, leads are assigned rather haphazardly, often based on some rudimentary skill sets or based on giving a higher volume of leads to the better sales reps. If these call centers learned to be more precise in lead allocation - and ensure that the right lead gets to the right salesperson - they could find a pretty significant lift in conversion rate and profit.

Some call centers have moved up a rung in sophistication by allocating leads based on propensity to convert - i.e. the majority of leads from the highest converting lead sources go to the best sales reps (of course there is a balance here - if you give new or low performing reps only the worst leads, they will never have a chance of improving). This is better but still not optimal - the highest converting lead source for one sales rep is not necessarily the highest converting for another.

Now imagine nirvana - a system that would dynamically determine which reps are best at converting which leads - for example, Susie is best at selling to associate's degree prospects from the South while Jon is best at selling to potential MBA students in the northeast. As the leads come in the door, the system would then allocate them across the call center to optimize whatever KPIs management wants optimized. Well, nirvana exists and it is called Live Ops. David Hornik of August Capital explains how LiveOps works in a recent blog post:

"LiveOps is in essence AdWords for people. The platform is able to measure and manage each individual agent in real time and route calls based upon the performance of each agent. And that routing doesn't simply rely upon data about the agent. It also relies upon information about the call coming in. If a call to the LiveOps' service is to sell a Ginsu Knife, the agent with the best track record of selling and up-selling will get the call. If, on the other hand, it is a call concerning front line product support, a different agent may have the best record of quick and effective resolution of support matters."

Perfect, right? Well, not if you have already invested millions in your call center infrastructure that still sits on the books. The only way to use LiveOps is to either outsource operations to a LiveOps call center or rip out your entire call center infrastructure and install the LiveOps Hosted Contact Center. If LiveOps or someone else would introduce a similar intelligent routing capability that sits on top of Avaya, Genesys, Cisco and other legacy call center platforms, they would have a huge profit opportunity.