Stoffer's Soapbox

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.

Lead Contact Strategy: Bill Rice Promises an Answer

Bill Rice responded to my post yesterday, "Calling Internet Leads: How Often, How Much", by starting a series on his Better Closer blog devoted to addressing that very problem! Bill promises, in his next few posts, to explain how he (or a PhD in statistics he is lucky enough to have on staff) can use game theory to "construct an effective search strategy or pattern that will maximize your contact rate and reduce your time to contact." Can't wait to hear what he has to say!

Benchmarking Lead Conversion

There is a great site, Lead Marketwatch, that tracks conversions in the mortgage industry - a service I wish were available in the education vertical as well. The site allows mortgage companies to benchmark how they are doing versus other buyers of similar leads. The LeadMarketwatch site is brought to us by Bill Rice and his team at Kaleidico, makers of the icoSales lead management software. They aggregate conversion data from icoSales clients - which includes major mortgage companies nationwide. One thing I would like to see is more lead providers - the biggies are here, but it would be great to see all the small to mid size providers as well!

7 Day Application Rate
Lead Provider	Current	Change	Previous
Lending Tree	7.69 %		5.80 %
Loan Web	5.77 %		5.05 %
Lower My Bills	3.30 %		3.30 %
Low.com	3.19 %		2.41 %
Lead Point	0.73 %		0.37 %
Beta Version 0.3

30 Day Application Rate
Lead Provider	Current	Change	Previous
Juicy Leads	20.51 %		19.23 %
Lending Tree	6.45 %		6.16 %
Loan Web	5.13 %		5.28 %
Lower My Bills	4.58 %		4.63 %
Low.com	3.54 %		3.37 %
NexTag	3.26 %		3.26 %
Prospect Zone	2.56 %		1.69 %
Lead Point	1.53 %		1.50 %
LoanApp	0.00 %	-	0.00 %
Beta Version 0.3

Outbound Call Center Strategies

Want to learn more about optimizing list/lead management and contact strategies? Check out this article, "Does Your Contact Center Measure Up To The Competition" from Elix, a call center consulting firm. Highlights of the article are as follows:

1. How to measure the success of call center activity. Major criteria are (i) the performance of the dialer and its calling lists; (ii) agent productivity; (iii) Profitability of the activity

2. List Penetration. A good penetration rate is 70-75%. The length of a campaign should depend not on length of time but hitting the targeted list penetration.

3. Agent Productivity Statistics. These include things like contacts per hour, AHT, wrap time

4. Dialing Results. Include items such as no signal, busy, no answer, voicemail, abandoned call, call back scheduled, transaction completed

5. Call Termination Codes. Allow you to see what happens to calls; no more than 20 codes are desirable. Target only 2-3% of calls coded as "other"

6. Optimal Time to Call. At the end of a campaign, marketing must analyze the statistics to determine the most opportune time to reach each contact for future campaigns

7. Handling Busy Signals and Voicemail.

• "For voice mailboxes, it is worth using the best calling hours according to geographic zone, with planned strategies for a limited number of callback tries at different times."
• "For busy signals, we recommend planning a tighter callback strategy. For example, following a busy signal, the strategy would be to call back 10 minutes later, then 15 minutes later and, finally, another day."

Lead Allocation Strategies in Inside Sales

A question I grapple with regularly is the best way to allocate leads in an inside sales environment. The Better Closer blog has a good post on the optimal lead buy and allocation strategy. Below are a few golden rules and a few questions I have about lead allocation. Any thoughts from others would be appreciated!

My Lead Allocation Golden Rules

1. You should have a "target daily fresh lead flow" for each salesperson based on their skill set, past performance and your marketing budget
2. Your best salespeople should get a greater percentage of the highest quality leads
3. Your best salespeople have the time management skills to handle a higher quantity of leads than average or low performing salespeople
4. You need to determine which salespeople are best at converting what type of lead (based on lead source, demographics of the lead, geography, etc.) and use skill based routing to get them what they need
5. You need to continuously tweak your recruiting strategies to ensure that you hire the right profile employees to convert different types of leads
6. You need to align incentive compensation and your lead allocation strategy with a well defined plan and strong internal communications. If you don't, employee morale will plummet!

Maximizing conversion with the right lead contact strategy

In the online education, online mortgage and other related industries, leading companies have hundreds of thousands or millions of leads in their database. This begs the question: what is the contact strategy that optimizes conversions in the long-term.

Of course speed to contact is one of the biggest drivers of conversion (the source/quality of the lead is the other biggie). Jeff Soloman posts about speed to contact in the mortgage industry, observing that leads contacted in the first 15 minutes are 70% more likely to convert than leads contacted thereafter.

It is not that difficult to get even a large salesforce to call back customers quickly .

Gen Y and the Changing Contact Center

There is a great new presentation from Nortel called "Multimedia Means Money" which discusses the rapid evolution of call centers into contact centers. This has huge implications on the outbound call center world, especially those companies in my world whose traffic is driven from Internet advertising: e.g. post-secondary for-profit education companies with a large online presence, and online mortgage, brokerage and financial services companies. Typically these companies market in four steps: