Lead to Call Automation and Competitive Call Distribution – Presentation from Contact IO 2017
JOE: Don’t worry if you don’t know exactly what we’re talking about because we’re going to explain it all. My name is Joe Charlson, I’m the CEO and founder of ‘’Caller Ready’’ and go I’m joined by Jeffrey Fisher who’s founder of Above the Fold Media and Adam Sthay who’s the CEO of Pub club leads’. I’m going to give you a little bit about my background and I’ll let these guys introduce themselves. You’re going to get access to a ton of experiences; these guys have deep expertise in both topics we’re talking about and performance marketing in general. My background is I’ve been in performance marketing for the last 12 years. I started out not knowing much about it, when I joined education management court as their chief marketing officer back in 2005 and we were responsible for generating about a million leads a year through direct advertising as well as through bid aggregators and other programs.
The whole goal of generating those day leads fun-filled was to get a potential student in conversation with an admissions officer at the right school. Sound so bone of, but it was very difficult to do, so difficult that when I left EDMC after 5 years and wanted to do something entrepreneurial I started calling to solve that problem. We started with advanced form, so taking a lead form and trying to keep the perspective student or customer or other verticals engaged from that moment of truth and clicking submit all the way through into the phone conversation. From there we built out schedule a call because the call centers are only open part of the time and kept following our customers around and have a very robust, I think the most robust platform available to do automation of taking that lead and turning it into a sales conversation.
JEFF: I’m Jeff Fisher; I founded ‘’Above the fold media’’ which is an email ad network, but my background is where I’ve been for years has always been in a place people call space. I use my own call center and now I just run as a paper call affiliate, honestly just an easy way to make money, so that’s kind of my background.
ADAM: I’m Adam Sthay and I’m the owner of Pub club leads and we own our own offers, drive a majority of all of our own traffic and tap a large bio-network in all the verticals that we drive forms and mainly call in.
JOE: This is an intimate environment, if you’ve got questions, don’t hesitate; we will pause at certain points to give you guys opportunities to talk. One of the things I wanted to say was; why are we all doing this, why are you guys interested in calls and performance marketing? It’s a very competitive situation, so if you like competition and you like trying to be the best and get the most yields. You’re interested in performance marketing, that’s a common analogy that I know we all share. This is a picture of me I guess 20 years ago, getting knocked on my ass playing ice hockey. But you know when you’re doing performance marketing, not everything works, you have to tune it. What works today doesn’t necessary work tomorrow; Facebook could down your ad campaign, it’s been performing beautifully, because it’s performing beautifully. The world keeps changing, these guys also have interesting athletics. This is Jeff, he told me he never trained, but he and his fiancée ran a half marathon. Adam was a big time soccer player, division 1 college and also you’ll see him in his snowboarding gear. I think you don’t have to be an athlete to like performance marketing, but it’s actually very similar in all of ways.
Before we get into it, let me just ask a couple of questions to gauge where you guys are. How many people use a human base outbound content process like the outbound call center? Couple of people. What are some of the problems we pinpoint with an outbound call center?
ADAM: getting people to show up. Keeping it motivated.
JEFF: Hiring people.
JOE: Managing for productivity. The outbound content process is extremely important, but it’s not really a human value ad I don’t think. At certain cases, if the intent is extremely low and you’re having a conversation and it needs to be a long interview, certainly that’s good for humans, but the actual just quick qualifying transfer, I think it’s really done better with technology today. So, you have all the costs and you’re trying to take the calls out. You have a service in the US, you go overseas, and you got accents to deal, so there are a lot of reasons not where technology can help.
Lead to call automation is a call I think we came up at Caller Ready to describe what we were up to and it’s using technology to connect leads, qualify them and put them into a phone conversation with the right salesperson. Does anybody in the audience use a fully automated system for doing this today? Has anybody considered doing it before? Few folks, why haven’t you tried it? The right partner won’t be able to handle it. It does take the right tool set and the right set up to really do a round, we’re going to get into that. Some other objections I’ve heard over the years like if I get an automated message I just hang up on it. Well, usually I’m talking to somebody who is pretty intelligent telling me that, but it’s not really an intelligence thing, it’s really about intent. And let’s say, if you call your doctor’s office and you say I want Dr. Smith to call me and then the person say I’ll have him call you back, you get called back in a couple of minutes and it says; I’ve got Dr. Smith on the line, press one to speak to Dr. Smith. Your intent to speak with your doctor’s high, you’re going to press one and you’re going to get connected. Somebody just called you out of the blue and says sit on the couch and earn $10,000, this is the most important message you’ve ever heard in your life, state tuned.
There’s a difference between robot-calling and calling in response to request for information to help people get through to the right person. Don’t wait on hold we’re ready for you now, your sales agent is on the line. So, we’re also going to talk about competitive call distribution, it’s another way of using automation in the call process and it’s basically offering the call to more than one agent or competing buyer of a call at the same time and what you get from doing that is you collapse the lead time of getting a human to human and you stop dropping calls into long queues into broken call center technology. We all deal with technology, we all deal with the issues and benefits of course, but competitive call distribution is a way around about that ensuring you get the most connects possible and if you’re going to pay for call at the highest price, if you’re doing agent distribution the most connects to the highest-ranked agent in your own queue.
Is anybody in the audience doing competitive call distribution today? Anybody considering competitive call distribution? No. Hopefully the end of this, you will want to consider it, but it is something that I guess new in the marketplace. Something we’ve always wanted to do from day one when we started Caller Ready 6 ½ years ago, and we do it today very well, but it’s still new in the market. So, with that, automation revolutionizing the world today we hear all the time about robotics, Smart homes, underwater autonomous vehicles, Amazon echo, Google homes, self-driving cars, Drones, artificial intelligence, App driven commerce, it’s happening all over the place. So, it’s not a new trend, it’s been going on for a long time; 104 years ago Henry Ford revolutionized the process of making a car, he took the cycle time from 12 hours down to two and half hours. Interestingly he said; if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. If I asked advertisers, if anybody ask what do they want, they want more calls. I don’t know this is pressuring or not, but I think calls are here to stay, I don’t necessarily know that it’s going to be the same tech connecting people with voice. But people need to talk about highly considered purchases that they’re not prepared to make a decision about.
Today the automation trend is driven by software and artificial intelligence and they are increasingly dominating the innovative advancements. So why are we talking about this? We can automate tedious processes that nobody wants to do. Nobody wants to dial for dollars, so sorry if you run an outbound contact center, people don’t want to do it and you know they don’t because they are not that productive and because if you drive productivity, you’re not getting a really good human experience. So, automating outbound ensures you get a rapid response all the time is less expensive and allows humans to focus on selling rather than contacting. And connecting the call with the best available sales agent and it’s never been any easier. So, what’s the opportunity? I’m going to let these guys talk a little bit about how they use it and then we’ll go into it more but performance marketers can stop delivery just daily leads and arguing with sales about the lead quality. You can deliver calls from your data, it’s completely repeatable, the system doesn’t take smoke breaks, it doesn’t get sick, it doesn’t avoid making calls, you just need to maybe slowdown from time to time because if you want to make calls and it costs significantly less than human based process.
On the cost, couple of quick slides. This is a lot of data up here, but I’m basically showing the cost of a human in the US – $30, all in 240 a day, maybe in general take longer than approval message to qualify, so two minutes, the first one minute. They might do 168 per day qualifying transfer sessions, so you get down to say because they are doing two minutes and the technology is doing one, the Telco costs are about half if you’re just doing automated and you get 97% savings, basically all the human cost come out. But then you say well, what if you drive productivity sure qualifying transfers, one minute versus one minute. The Telco line is the same, go from 97% down to 95% savings. So, then you say well, I’m not going to do this in Atlanta, I’m going to do this in the Philippines for $8 hour loaded with the manager. Doing one minute at 90% utilization, so 90% is more than most people that run call center expect to get. People do have to go to the bathroom, they do the time to want to pull down the calls, so that’s really driving high productivity, 79% savings, and you’re introducing non-US accents.
One other point about the automation, you can have a consistent voice of the brand every time and you can test different options. Take it down even further, you’ll say I’m going to go to Pakistan and maybe use sound board technology. Sound board would address the non-accents, but you still have huge savings, because why the telephony is the telephony. The telephony with intelligence doesn’t cost really any more than the dialer and the telephone lines. So, that’s why there’s so much cost savings to be had here. You can work your agents to non-human efficiencies, you can take out the cost when moving outbound overseas where you can automate and control, take out the cost and have on-demand scalability and focus your resources on the sales process. So, Adam, let me start with you. Can you describe for the audience how you use lead-to-call automation?
ADAM: Up until maybe about three years ago or so, most of the lead generation that I did was to a form. Sold out forms to clients and it was their job to get them on the phone. They were lucky if they got maybe 40% to 50% of the clients no matter what the quality of the lead was on the phone and pitch able. With lead-to-call automation I was able to bring in all sorts of different data sets that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to have done maybe 5% or 10% conversion ratio at the call center with human interaction, put it into Caller Ready and increase the number of conversions that I got, because it was predictably doing what it needed to do and increasing the amount of contact attempts per lead because it is scalable and turning those into calls. And what that meant to me was, I was able to approach my clients and say hey instead of giving you somebody you’ll try and get on the phone, I’m going to give you somebody on the phone, but I’m going to charge you more for it and that allowed us to increase our revenue quite substantially actually from selling forms to turning them into calls with Caller Ready and selling the calls.
JOE: That’s Adam, let me go to Jeff. You also used it in many different situations, can you talk about your experience with lead-to-call, and how you got into it?
JEFF: My situation is similar to Adams, so I think I tend to over get advertisers too much credit in terms of what they are doing and the capabilities and attracting. And in leads generating they get things that I also saw coming up is every now and then you have an advertiser come back and say all these things are bad and I almost got them all back, this is terrible quality right. When did you call these leads? How long did it take you to dial them and sometimes they didn’t dial them at all, but sometimes it was 2, 3, 4 days later. And anybody that comes out of the call center space knows that as soon as leads flows out of form the clock starts ticking. You have to call them, the best chances are in terms of quality and connect with them is down with them right away.
Few hours go by and your chance of connecting with them will decrease. Next day is half the chances the day before, the day after that is half the chance before that, so it’s really important that you connect with your lead quickly and so that’s sort of when the light bulb went up in my head and I said wait a minute; so, I just generated my own leads, outbound to outbound right way is what you guys should be doing and they get paid more for doing it. That sounds like an easy arbitrage opportunity to me and that’s how I got into it and from there we just kind of took it and really just ran with it. I used my own call center and the benefits of automating it. Essentially, you’re just able to make just much money with much greater margins. You’re able to win it with the whole process with just one person, you don’t need to have man a year and deal with all the call center reps or worry about onshore/offshore. Just tremendous amounts of benefits of automating the entire process, not just connecting with them in optimization because it’s always stable, consistent variable, you don’t have to worry about people going on and off script.
JOE: So, Jeff, one of the things I’ve heard you say over this is a great way to test whether a program is going to work, because the technology, once its set up is just repeatable.
JEFF: You’re able to kind of split test or optimize much more easily, because it’s a concept. It’s not let me write a script and give it to my best sales guys on the floor and route these calls and see if that performs better than this. And anyone who works at the call center knows that your agents are going to perform better no matter what they are selling or what they are trying to work transfer on. You’re going to have your best agents; you’re going to have your bad agents with the eminent process like it’s same, like it’s always going to be the same IVR. So it makes it much easier to split test and get consistent results and then really they are going to figure out is it my media, is it my script, is the call center, where do we want to adjust and make the changes.
JOE: I’m going to go into actually showing you how this is laid out in the new Caller Ready and lead-to-call automation interface, but before I do that, let me pause. Does anybody have questions for me or these guys?
QUESTIONS: Inaudible.
ADAM: I think you have to understand what you put in is what you’re going to get out. So if you are using the same type of data where somebody’s actually solid about the intent. So if somebody is filling out the form to speak with that company, it doesn’t matter whether a human is calling or the automation is calling, just like Joe said with your doctor. If you asked for the doctor to call you back it says the doctor is on the phone, press 1 to talk to your doctor. I’m looking for refinance, I filled out a form for refinancing on a phone call and thanks for filling out the form on refinance, would you like to speak with a loan officer now? Press 1. It’s the same kind of thing, if you’re going to put in a bunch of data that has nothing to do with what you’re trying to do, that’s where it’s going to get a little bit hearing, your advertiser maybe a little bit upset about that.
JEFF: I mean if you want to a voice recording that you and I can share and work on, you know that’s those that will be going out. Or do you want some guy from India with an accent reaching out or controlling your headset. It’s definitely a difficult conversation to have with the risk.
JOE: In that example, if you have low quality leads or older age leads, you might want to use this plug-in queuing qualify transfer agency behind an IVR qualifying transfer in those case. Adam does that in some cases, certain leads. And another thing as Jeff was saying for brand, that’s to get complete control. So if you’re actually running media for a brand, it can be the voice of the brand. It can sample different voice talents, they can authorize the exact messaging and then from compliance, it’s actually a benefit, because nobody’s going off script, it’s always what they say, it is just if they decide they want to change the tone of the messaging, the more friendly, the more professional or different things or actually make it very responsive to the actual campaign that’s there by doing some dynamic swapping of the IVR’s or just setting up different campaigns for different media programs. Any other questions on lead-to-call before we get into some of the details here?
Caller Ready is presenting its new interface for it to call. This is a dashboard for an advertiser, I don’t know how readable it is from there, but customers, customer acquisition costs, revenue, marketing ROI, return on your marketing dollars. The short in the middle is connection by contact attempts, so in this case we’ve got seven contact attempts and it is showing two periods month over month differentiation and then down below we’ve got usage statistics and productivity metrics. The usage is how many leads have been pumped through this program, what are the cost of those leads, the calls, the SMSes, the emails, the average talk time and the total span. On the productivity side, you’ve got connection rate, Caller ready expense per connection, expense per lead. So basically everything you need to effectively monitor what’s going on. And this is really a new day for the Caller ready platform because, we’ve always had all the data and we built the power of the platform, but it’s really bringing it to light so that you can engage with your programs very easily and see how they are doing.
This is just a drilling showing you in that second contact attempt there’s two components to it, it is not just a call. This case we have a pre-call warning SMS which we generally like to do at certain points to the contact to say; hey thanks for inquiring, this is us the brand, we’re going to call you from this number, so please pick up and 30 seconds later you get the call. And in this case it’s showing you what portion of the conversion came in that 30 seconds from the SMS and what portion can once we call 273. Another piece of the software is template, so you can start with some pretend templates, you can design your own and then you can compare them and this is one of the pin points we’ve had over the years because these can get very complex and sophisticated putting them together can take a lot of work. We’re now making it very easy with drag-and-drop interface for your call flow.
On this screen we’re showing 8 contact attempts down the vertical axis. The times which are difficult probably lead or the cadence between the contact attempts. So you see 0 seconds from a lead coming in at .1 to the pre-call SMS. If you look to the right of the second entry here, we have the pre-call SMS 30 seconds to call and then if we don’t engage with you so we left a voice message instead. You didn’t respond five minutes later, we’re calling you and then 10 minutes we’re calling you again. If we don’t get you five minutes after that, we’re sending an SMS, an email. We can keep going down and basically this is your automated outbound contact center, so it is very easy to see the cadence and also to modify them. Some people just want do an SMS, some people want to do three calls and done, other certain campaigns want to go out 15 call attempts. So that’s the way you can design with this tool.
Another thing that we’ve had, but we’re making very easy to use is script testing. So if you want run two different voice talents on the same script, you can do a champion challenger via 80% of the weight to one script, 20% to the other. If you want to bury the scripts, you can test those out and see what performs better. So really bringing the things that marketers want to do around optimizing your campaigns and yield to the forefront making it visual and giving you those tools. It used to be that we would do this, but then we have to just get the data and drag to Excel and pivot it, but right here you can actually just see how everything is performing. Another on-screen component of this is how the leads are coming through and what the responses for by IVR option. So 65% connection rate there, 11% asked to be called later, 10% picked the specific time for the call, 5% opted out, 9% no response, so you can really see how it’s working.
This shows you contact attempt components, you can drive over and reconfigure your campaign, save it and then at a point in time you can compare to other things. Couple of other points about Lead-to-call, you can’t just do this and then go home for the night. You really want to have after-hours handling unless you’re a 24/7 call center that never closes, chances are you’re going to need to be there when the customer wants you and you may not be. So this shows after-hours handling with that lets say a greeting and either going to a schedule the call flow or just an after-hours they call you back as soon as you’re next available. You’ll also see the schedule call flow, courtesy call backflow. Courtesy callbacks are really when somebody is on hold and you tell them it’s also referred to as intelligent abandonment. It used to be unique to spend a quarter million dollars to get a phone system that would even offer you that kind of feature, but you can basically….I’m sure some of you have experienced this when you tried calling to Verizon or I’ve seen Delta Airlines coming out here. I engage with intelligent abandonment and couple of times it works really nicely. It says rather to wait on hold; we’re going to call you back as soon as an agent becomes available. It looks like you’re calling from this number, press 1 if you want us to call you back on this number and then get off the phone. A couple of minutes later rings and it’s another pre-recorded message to connect you through to your agent.
These are the ways that you configure the campaign to get the maximum yield, because it’s not really magic, it’s just putting together a solution that’s there for the connection process. Let me pause there, does anybody have questions about the deep dive on the product?
QUESTION: Inaudible.
JOE: Yes, there’s not definitive answer, but let me give it to Jeff to explain something recently that he did.
JEFF: I think it depends on your vertical, what you are dialing, and what kind of call flow is. I’ve done a test before where local numbers do make an agreement. I read a test a test about a month ago where local numbers didn’t have an improvement over some numbers, so I think it kind of depends to be honest. It’s an easy test to do to test it, but I definitely think it’s overrated for people to say that it makes such a huge impact, because that’s not the case.
ADAM: To elaborate, when Jeff was talking about it, it’s like the younger crowd a local number, the older crowd, one of the toll-free numbers. In that instance that’s what happens and that depends on what exactly you’re marketing for.
JEFF: What we did find out and what’s interesting is that, we did get more when it was a local number. You do get more people who missed the call and call back, but the problem with that is that, they think it’s the neighbor or something that are relevant. You have to have a good flow that feed into it. I kind of look at it as a way of almost like burying my data like rather than almost have them pick up and answer it and be in a position to get on the phone as supposed to call me back and not be something that’s expected and almost kind of waste that lead.
QUESTION: Inaudible.
JEFF: This is an issue that I was running through especially speaking to brands because when I say hey I’m up and dialing, they go you’re doing voice broadcasting which is legal. Now we’re not doing voice broadcasting, I think what’s awesome about Caller Ready and those have a picture of the CRM management tool, but now when they are capturing first name and last name, I got an IP address. I had URL create date, I had so much information about that lead and it’s undeniable that we have like a legal upgrade. On the page you will have your TCPA compliance on the page. I mean it’s without a doubt, I just want advertiser say here’s the page and try to have them understand that like we’re just taking our leads, we get that often and we’re just taking on the outbound dialing for you.
ADAMS: You can take it a step further and do something like trusted lead; I think they just changed their name. And then the trusting forms or lead ID or something like that.
JOE: The system won’t allow you call outside of 8 AM to 9 PM in the caller’s time zone, so there are a couple of constraints. There’s back constraint, there’s also the constraint of do you have open hours where you’re going to send the call. There’s nowhere to take the call, it won’t do an outbound call, and so those are two sorts of safeguards if you will. Caller Ready does require that when you post a lead in which you have express written consent, that you verify it to us. So you need to have that to use this type of process and then we have those tools to protect you from that. Inbound, you can always take an inbound call, so there are lots of little nuances around, we have widgets you can use to schedule a call, but you can basically after-hours. This is come up I guess on addiction recovery campaigns where it tends to be people hit the bottom. When they hit the bottom outside of allowable calling hours, so one thing that we recommended to clients and that is to come on-screen and say; hey we’re not allowed to call you right now, but you can call us we’re here for you and promote the number and try and drive the inbound at that point.
JEFF: The other good thing if i can try them in too which I think is important is. a lot of people do control when they dial based on area code which with mobile like it’s horribly flawed because 50% of the people. I have an East Coast number, I’m at the West Coast, so with Caller Ready I actually use the days off IP address. I’m looking up the IP address that’s where they filled it out. I can always use area code as backup if I’m not sure it will get super sensitive, but I should find that like really good hacker results with the IP address they thought I work and I’m going to use that as a way to determine region and determine where I dive in.
JOE: If we don’t have a ZIP Code or some other time zone metric we drive off the phone number, but it is less precise these days for sure. Any other questions at this point, we still have a few more minutes. I’m going to explain the competitive call distribution again.
NARRATOR: When a publisher generates a call, their goal is to connect the caller to the advertiser in the fastest way possible. The fastest way to achieve a human to human connection is if the call is offered to several buyers simultaneously. Most paper call platforms offer to call to only one potential call buyer without requiring that a person is actually available to take the call, if there’s no available agent. The caller will be left waiting on the phone. Long hold times lead to an increase in dropped calls and higher frustration with the consumers who do wait in queue for assistance. Also this leads to fewer sales conversion as people are less likely to engage in a productive sales conversation.
Fortunately, Caller ready has new technology that ensures the fastest human to human connection possible by putting several call buyers in competition to win each call. This technology reduces the way time which results in happier callers and higher sales conversion rates. Caller Ready is called auction model, helps to ensure the call is sold to the buyer who is willing to pay the highest price. Thanks to Caller Ready’s competitive call option system, publishers generate more qualified calls at a better price. And advertisers get more callers who are happy and more inclined to make a purchase. For more information about competitive call distribution and call options; visit CallerReady.com or call us today 877-800-4844.
JOE: So I think that kind of explains it may be better than I did, but let me pass it to Adam and ask him to explain a little bit about how you use it and how your publishers feel about it and how your call buyers feel about it.
ADAM: The whole reason I switched to caller Ready three years ago was because I had a need, that need was to connect more calls to my buyers. There was a platform that I was on before but it only allowed me to go to one infinite answer after 30 seconds but with an overflow, by that time somebody’s is pissed off and hangs up. Like maybe a 62% call connection ratio which was killing me and also killing anybody running traffic to me. I found Joe at a conference; he had exactly what I was looking for. And the way that I use it is I have in my student loan consolidate that had about 35 active clients on it at any point in time and I’d actually ring to say 15 or 20 of those, whoever has the highest price, the highest answer rate increasing my profit margin per call. And what that does on the backend of somebody else’s driving a call to me, it allows them to get more connected calls where they went to send that call to a different company that’s using a platform that only goes to one person and then rolls over, they were getting disconnected calls and not making as much money either. So it really helps basically like an automation of calls. If you take it back to two forms, you always try and optimize to make sure that the most people who land on your page fill out the form increasing your ROI and your metrics. And with this competitive call distribution you’re doing the same thing but for calls. It’s really slick; it’s a cool piece of the program.
When you tell a client, so the way that I do it is not only that I ring out to a bunch of buyers at the same time, but they have to answer press 1 to accept that call. So it’s not just going to somebody’s phone where the person will stand hold. I go to my clients obviously, I do a lot of site visits and they are literally there with their hand on a 1. They are trained to be as quick as they can be to grab as many phone calls which decreases amount of time that people spend on the phone and increases the amount of conversions that I have. If a buyer has a slow phone system, then there’s an issue, but Caller ready has an option for that as well. We can do agent seats and Caller Ready will actually log in on the cell phone, but it really means the buyers get so competitive which is great for me as a marketer. They get hungrier and hungrier for the calls that are coming in.
JOE: They want to win the calls and I think there’s also a psychology that business is happening. They don’t win them all and they get upset they can’t win, they are not fast, and they are too slow to press one. They have like the matrix, calls are coming down and I think it has like a stock market animal spirit affect that the phone is ringing a lot.
ADAM: The only thing with that as well as you know is, I’m ringing out to 30 different buyers at the same time and I’m doing 5000 calls a day and they may only have 3 or 4 agents, but their phone is ringing off the hook. When they bring in that new sales rep, he’ll be like hey you know does anybody want to leave one company and go to another because the marketing is not good at one company. When new agents walk into that call center and they hear the phones ringing off the hook like I have to be at this place.
JOE: Does anybody have questions about competitive call distribution at this point?
ADAM: Is anybody out there doing paper call? Here to learn how to do it or you skipped about 15 bad mistakes by coming here and starting with Caller Ready.
JOE: The frustrations of single delivery, long hold times, something goes wrong. I think Jeff you have an experience you can share about call center going down.
JEFF: One of my biggest frustration moments with paper call was when call center got struck by lightning or a 59 goes down or a million different reasons, then you stop selling calls to data and it’s like you owe me a few thousand dollars. You got the call and you kind of go back-and-forth with competitive call distribution and make the call center goes down and of course it’s going to the next guy. It definitely helps from a lead distributor point of view or lead seller or call seller. It definitely significantly helps with the bottom line. I think what most people out here all need like the sell side or the buy side and if you get so many questions in terms of specifically about campaigns we’re running and how we set this up, I’ll be more than happy to answer, I’m an open book.
JOE: You have entrée to the brains. Any questions about running media, to drive calls, competitive call distribution or lead-to-call automation at this point?
QUESTION: Inaudible.
JEFF: I think I use mine in a fairly unique way. If you speak to other people everyone is going to have a different strategy. I probably only get 5% to 7% of my paid calls, come of equivalent with SMS, but I’m using my SMS strategically. I’ll send out my SMS like 30 seconds before I actually dial them and the whole idea is I want to bring people’s attention to their phone, so that their phone is in their hand and when I dial them, they are more likely to pick up. So that’s why I don’t think I’m seeing as much from SMS because I’m connecting with them. I’m using it as a way to prime the consumers so that I could get them on the phone.
QUESTION: Inaudible.
JEFF: In connect rate? Definitely, I also use email as well as another follow-up mechanism which gives about the same result. I will see about again like 5% of people who are calling directly off the email. But again just remind the person that here’s the number that I’m calling from and to you to pick up. I also use SMS, if some of those are after-hours or over the weekend and don’t have call center hours, I’ll send them text messages letting them know hey by the way, if it is after-hours we’re not open, here’s our call center hours and when we’re opened up in the morning, again hey SMS; I just opened up, the next available rep will be contacting, get your attention to the phone and hear them when they dial.
JOE: It makes a lot of sense, you’re moving between devices a lot of time or moving from a form, they start browsing, then you get a text notification, they start reading it saying thank you. It’s like the landing page online, but it’s in the text and then as they are sort of finishing reading it, it rings and it’s that number and so you are just building the engagement to try and get over the inertia. One of the most interesting things is; people want to fill out forms more than they want to call. I think there’s a psychology of inertia particularly around verticals that do well in paper call is to try to get out of trouble, too much tax debt, the IRS is coming after you or you’ve got too much student loans or you need a re-file, but you don’t really want to spend the time to do it. So there’s a lot of inertia in the sharing of information and Jeff has some interesting stats on this from tests he’s run about when you have a phone number and a form, it increases the response rate on both, but who’s filling out the form and such. But you fill out the form, but then you’ve to get further, you’ve got to get them on the phone to get the help that they need. So everything that you orchestrated around this is the same kind of logic you would take if were using a human process, you just like make it completely repeatable and consistent.
ADAM: People like to hide behind the computer and this brings them out from behind the computer.
JOE: From behind the curtain, any other questions for us. I’m colorblind and I think we’re over. Are we over? Okay. Thank you very much for attending our session, we really appreciate it. If you have more questions about Caller Ready platform we’re going to be at the networking session with our table there. These guys are here for the rest of the day if you want to ask them questions. I’m sure they will be available as well.