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.
This seems to be a far more complicated technology :) But I believe that the purpose here is very noble. Surely, you can't avoid to risk the possibility of losing a lead, simply because the sales agent isn't trained to handle such type of lead, such as debt leads, or is not a good performer at all.
Posted by: Perry | November 27, 2008 at 05:40 PM
This seems to be a far more complicated technology :) But I believe that the purpose here is very noble. Surely, you can't avoid to risk the possibility of losing a lead, simply because the sales agent isn't trained to handle such type of lead, such as debt leads, or is not a good performer at all.
Posted by: Perry | November 27, 2008 at 05:40 PM
This seems to be a far more complicated technology :) But I believe that the purpose here is very noble. Surely, you can't avoid to risk the possibility of losing a lead, simply because the sales agent isn't trained to handle such type of lead, such as debt leads, or is not a good performer at all.
Posted by: Perry | November 27, 2008 at 05:40 PM