What is Lead to Call Automation?

Joe Charlson hosts a panel of speakers on what Lead to Call Automation is and how it can help increase sales.

 

Video Transcription

Joe  : Three unique case studies here and I would like to get your participation with any questions you have. So, I will pass it to May to introduce herself.

May : Sure. Hello, my name is May Chan I’m AVP of Marketing at NationStar Mortgage. NationStar Mortgage is one of the largest and fastest growing mortgage servicer in the U.S. We have a portfolio of about $400 billion and we have more than 2.4 million customers. In NationStar Mortgage we have in our origination segment, we have both green light loans and NationStar mortgage rents. I have been with the company a little bit more than two years and in the mortgage industry about nine years. With my background and passions in (can’t decipher 00:57) and continuous processing improvement, my team and I are always looking for different ways to do things faster, cheaper, and more efficient. It’s my pleasure to be here today, talking to you, presenting and kind of share our experiences with you on our experiences with CallerReady and with lead-to call other automation service.

Clelland : Good morning everyone. I’m Clelland Green, I’m president of Benepath. We’re an insurance lead provider for both inbound calls and Internet leads based outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We also provide a distinct service called Search Plus, we’re launching that product…actually in the next quarter we’ve got several clients in beta for it, where we set up your own website and we do the Adwords campaigns, Bing campaigns, social campaigns on your behalf in a completely transparent manner, because all your campaigns.

Jeff : Good morning I’m Jeff Fisher. Right now I’m just an independent Marketing Strategist, but my experiences has been everything from click all the way to call center. I started my own call center when I was 24 out of my apartment with a cell phone. I grew that company and then got it to the online lead gen, went to work at Matomia as the youngest executive there, built out their pay-per-call business, a lot of it using CallerReady technology. Now I’m just building out marketing flows on my own. Been getting in control of everything from getting clicked into the call center

Joe : All right, can I just get a show of hands how many people are familiar with lead to call automation in general? Nobody, one person, okay good. So what is it? It’s a form fill lead or an inbound call that has turned into a phone call between two people using an automated, programmatic, non-human connection system. It’s taking a lead using a system to turn it into a call or taking a call and using different IVR’s and techniques to to connect it to the right person. The three case studies we’re going to talk about, outbound contact center automation. A lot of companies might use their own internal call center to make outbound calls on a lead. You know a lead comes in, gets into a dialer, a person gets connected to try and reach a center or use a third party call center for those services. So we’re going to talk about, May is going to give an example that NationStar has done, trying to compare the performance of using a human-based outbound call center to using an automatic process. She is also going to talk about email to call generation. So if you are generating leads off of email, what you can expect when you try and turn those into phone calls with phone numbers on the landing pages as well as forms. Clelland is going to talk about using a dynamic call distribution API where his system has the network of agents and in real time each inbound call reaches out to his system, figures out the group to call and then brokers that call. So without further ado, I will pass it to May to talk about the outbound call center automation.

May : Sure, so as I mentioned NationStar Mortgage has about 2.4 million customers and we also have another business marketing sector, which is new customer acquisition. With new customer acquisition, speed to dial is always critical especially in the mortgage industry. The rates change throughout the day and we want to make sure we get the people on the phone as quick as possible and lock in the rate and get them funded. That is back in, I believe in August, that is when we started partnering with CallerReady, truly utilized their text SMS and phone calls with pre-recorded a message and just started doing some testing on our web forms. So what we did is, you know, for example we have prospects and they fill out a form either through the website or through their mobile devices, the lead is created in our lead management system. In real time the lead gets passed to the CallerReady system and in real time the prospect receives a text message. Just to kind of give you a little favor of what the message will say is, this is a pre-call warning. So before we actually give them a real phone call we actually give them a text. So here is an example, ‘Hi May, guess what? It’s NationStar Mortgage, we will be calling you momentarily from 888-422-7658, please pick up to discuss money saving mortgage options. If you don’t, we’ll be sad.’ So of course we’re sad, but we put a happy face after that. of course we give them the option to turn off communication via text, so reply ‘stop.’ So we also give the prospects that option too, if they want to stop receiving texts, they have that option to do that as well. We went through a couple years of testing and we have seen significant improvement in August when we launched, we had the transfer rate or the connection rate at about 32%. In August, that is when we changed the talent, the voice, you will hear a little later.

Joe : Do you want to play that right now?

May : Sure you can play it. So you can see the first original voice.

Joe : Can we get the volume up on this?

(Automated system 07:07-07:38)

May : Can you guys hear that okay?

Joe : Okay, that was the first voice.

May : The first voice yes and then in October we were doing some different testing and we said, well how about lets do something with a little bit more energy. So you can hear the higher energy voice.

(automated system 08:02- 08:29)

Joe : Okay, so that was voice #2. I apologize if you couldn’t hear that. Specifically it had higher energy to it. Keep going.

May : Okay, so once we actually did a test with the higher energy voice, we were actually able to bump up the connection rate another 2% or I guess 4%, but a total of about 36% connection rate. In early January we will revisit our call attempts and the frequency of reaching out to the customers we decided to add another call attempt to the process. So currently we’re doing as I mentioned, so first you get the first pre-warning text, then 45 seconds after that the prospect will receive a first phone call. If they don’t respond, ten minutes later they will receive a second call attempt and after that it’s one attempt per day after that, up to six contact attempts.

Jeff : Can I chime in, just on the pre-warning texts?

May : Sure

Jeff : You bring up a really good point, I just want to elaborate on it. is that the cool thing with lead to call automation, right and really utilize SMS and the reason why you are sending that SMS before you make the call, is not necessarily because you think anyone is going to call in on the SMS, but it’s the prime people. Most people are contacting call again through a call center or through their cell phone, right? So 90% of the people who call in and whether on their phone or their desk top, going to use a mobile device to actually call in. So a lot of the text messages that you send are going to get through to somebody. So what we’re doing is, we’re using text messages to prime the consumer so that they hear their phone vibrate or ring, they look at their phone and then we dial it up, right? So just so their phone is in their hand when their phone is ringing, it increases the likelihood that they will then pick up the phone and connect to the call center.

May : Thank you Jeff. It also gives kind of a confirmation that yes, you know we received your inquiry on our website and we will be contacting you as soon as possible. It’s a great way to notify the prospect that we will be calling them soon. So with our experience, the couple things that we learned from this experience working with CallerReady and lead to call automation is that it not only streamlined our process, but it also unified our business communication. How many times do you have call centers, but depending on the people on the phone, they might not read a script the way you want it, but with this way you can easily do AB testing as many times as you want and get immediate results. Everything is data driven. You also increase the productivity, the MP’s can spend more time on the hot leads, working on the hot leads versus either doing outbound themselves or waiting for a call to come in. It’s also more cost effective. Based off of our initial study, we see that it’s definitely more cost effective and it also increased our productivity. One thing we want to use for the future is to really use it more as a (drip campaign and nurture 11:41). If you have any customers in the nurture status, it’s a great way to implement the lead to call automation service.

Joe : Thank you May. I will just add that the goal to the pre-warning SMS is to warm them up right? But you do get people that will call right in off the SMS and that is always an option as well. Let me pass it to Clelland next or I’m sorry, it’s going to Jeff to talk about email to call generation.

Jeff : So one of the biggest, most immediate challenges that I was really generating a lot of calls off voice emails, right? What we found out early on, at least when you are trying to get an inbound call off of, is that when you take somebody to a landing page that just says ‘call this number,’ no one is calling. It’s too simple, it’s almost too aggressive in a way. So what we found is when we put a phone number with a lead form, we actually get more people to call in than if we just have a phone number, but 80% of people are still filling out the lead form, right? So when I was working on pay-per-call, it was like, how do we monetize these leads? Well, let’s just outbound dial them, say reps are now available to speak to you, press one and bring them into the call center. It’s a super effective way for it to work and then just automating it, the dialing pattern. So one of the big things is, if you are ever on the call center side, if you have ever been the guy picking up the phone to make a sale, five minutes after these people fill out the form they forgot they filled it out, they don’t know who you are. So the best, as soon as someone fills out the form, the clock starts ticking about your chances of you actually getting into contact with somebody. So the faster you dial them, get in contact with them, the more likely to pick up the phone, but also the more likely to buy. So literally that is what you are doing, somebody fills out the form, we send a text message right away, again to probe them to looking at the phone, make sure that they have the phone number, we dial them out within under a minute, if they don’t pick up we dial again within 3-5 minutes, right? Dial them a third time within 15 minutes. Within that 15 minutes we would usually get in touch with 50-60% of the leads we would touch overall. Over the next 2-3 days, every few hours, maybe two or three times a day we outbound dial them and try to get in touch with them. it’s just a super effective way of one, I think they mentioned it, being able to look at your analytics and being able to measure and split test against it. Which is a really super effective way to get in touch with people and bring them into the call center. I think it goes to show that if you typically look at leads versus the rates off pay per call, pay per call will typically go for one and a half times the rate of a lead. So if at any given vertical you are paying $10 for a lead, the paper call will probably be $15-17 once you get a call to come in on a connecting duration. Obviously it’s a lot harder to generate that call, but with lead to call automation, we’re actually able to make the numbers work and a little bit of optimizing the creative, we were really able to make those numbers work and generate a call for overall much more cost effectively than generating a lead and having the call center try to outbound dial it on their own with their reps. So anyways, I guess this is kind of a brief over view kind of my experience into kind of my methodology of how we’re doing email traffic, turning them into leads and sending them into pay per calls. If you guys have any questions specifically about our methods or techniques or dialing patters, I would be happy to answer any of those.

Joe : All right, thanks Jeff and pass it to Clelland to talk about inbound calling with dynamic call distribution API.

Clelland : All right. So just a little bit of background, prior to working with CallerReady, we worked with an answering service like a doctor would use and we built a web app for them to enter data and as our calls come in. So we generate inbound phone calls similar to what he does so that people hit our web forms and they were calling us. The answering service had a couple key problems: A – their call to answer rates weren’t consistent, so they were losing calls on the very front end and then, B – they had so many people in their call center that they weren’t able to train people. Even though we made that form so that you didn’t have to be trained to use it, regardless you had inconsistencies in the approach from all the different people that were out there. I mean the script was right there, it was brain dead to be able to use it. What was happening was, the calls that they were connecting were not transferring to our end insurance agent. So we were looking for a solution. I actually talked to a large competitor of CallerReady and CallerReady and found that the large competitor couldn’t do what we needed to do which was dynamically assign the calls to our agents and we built that part of the technology. So it was a joint project between the two of us and essentially what happens is, a caller now hits our website and we dynamically generate a different phone number for each user. That phone number is then connected back to all the data net users, the IP address, what network he is using, whether he came from Google, what keyword he typed into Google, any other source information that we have about that particular individual and we also have the IP address and his actual location which is key because we work with everything from national telemarketing insurance agencies to an individual working out of his basement and he only wants leads in his ten mile radius sort of speak. So we went through that process of doing the integration where now somebody calls our system and literally within 20 seconds they get qualified. We prescreen out the ones who are just looking for an ID card or just looking for their insurance company’s phone number, so that the agents aren’t getting that and we make sure that they answer affirmatively that looking to get a quote. If they answer firmly to that we ask some age demographics to see whether there might be a Medicare Supplement lead or a health lead for instance. Then they ping us and in real time we send back a result based on that persons location, the agents who can take that call and we tier it. So there are tier one agents who are paying a premium price and then we have overflow buyers. Within those tiers we have rankings because within those tiers we have a millisecond or something or a thousandth of a second.

Joe : it’s configurable.

Clelland : A very minor amount, but they go out in that type of an order. Some of the agents can have press one and an individual agent usually has a press one to take that call because they might be on another call, whereas the call centers, their systems aren’t built for a press one. So we don’t have a press one for them and it’s an option because some smaller telemarketing centers say ‘yes, we want that press one.’ After they have done that press one, they respond back to us telling us which agent took that lead and then we assign that lead inside of our system. We’re pinging white pages and then strike iron to pick up all the demographic data on that person and a cascading of, if White Pages doesn’t have it we try Strike Iron and it has ended up being a fantastic solution for us. We were using the answering service in July of this year. August was a transition month, we were changing website, website, and website, and by September we had all the websites up and running using the CallerReady service. We saw a 100% increase in the call transfer rate between July and September and if you look at the prior periods, so comparing September and October of last year to September and October of this year, we had a 49.7% increase in raw calls that made it through qualifications and agent ID step, which was a huge improvement. We had a 31.9% increase of the qualification to transfer and an overall 97.5% increase in overall calls to transfer. We were paying the answering service 89-95 cents a minute, we’re saving thousands of dollars a month in labor costs as well. The agents initially had a couple of issues, but it was very, very quiet, it was not a big issue. Right now the system runs very well and our next step is, we’re going to start doing some outbound similar to what you are doing when we get leads that are kind of in an overflow situation where we don’t have direct buyers, as we do exclusive leads. So it has been a terrific solution for us, probably one of the best IT projects we have done in the last five years.

Joe : Thank you Clellan, we appreciate the endorsement and the great results. So I have some prepared questions, but if anybody has a question about lead to call, please raise your hand. We would rather get your questions than mine. Okay.

Speaker 1 : (I have two questions. With the CallerReady platform links back to the SMS and then 45 seconds later makes a call, the person who gets the SMS, does CallerReady know not to call the person because they could be on the other line when the call comes in? 20:57)

Joe : Yes, okay so the question was, okay you send an SMS, if they call in do you still outbound them? are you barraging them? Is the system out of control?

Jeff : Do you want me to answer this one?

Joe : Okay, go ahead.

Jeff : So if you want to get kind of geeky with the tech, right? So when someone comes into your website we’re going to send it through a CallerReady redirect and we’re going to assign it a unique click ID for that person. So whether they call on that number or fill out that form, now we have married the click ID to their phone number because they call in and we have the caller ID, if they fill out the form we have their number, right? So if we send out a text message or if they respond by email or they call back in, we’re always going to identify how we connect the online to offline transition of that is that unique phone number with their unique click ID. So when they come in we can actually make different routing rules, how to treat that call and what bucket to put them in. So if someone calls in and they responded off the text message, hey we know this person called in, lets not keep sending them all these text messages, lets move them into a different bucket. Depending on how long they were on the phone or what the disposition of what that call was or whatever it’s, you can set your predefined rules of how to kind of treat that leads.

Joe : So to say it a little simpler, CallerReady is a CRM, an automated CRM so there are unique belly buttons based off the phone number and/or email address. So it’s all based on status. It’s essentially think of it as your automated CRM and you can configure how it’s going to be done, but if somebody replies “stop to text,” that flags their record and we’re not going to text them. if they press nine to stop receiving calls, not going to receive calls. If they have hit max attempts, going to hit max attempts. There’s another question back there.

Speaker 2 : (When you get a lead off the web like this, you (? 23:03) and text them, how do you comply with specific TCPA ruling about this…can’t decipher 23:05)

Joe : It has to be TCPA compliant, it must be 100%.

Speaker 2 : How do you put that into the text to (can’t decipher 23:22)

Joe : Oh no, not opting in on text, opting in off the form, if they fill out the form.

Speaker 6 : (can’t decipher 23:31)

Joe : Yes

Speaker 2 : The other thing is, if they call in on a landline, then how do you (can’t decipher 23:38)

Joe : If they call in on a landline we’re not texting them, but treated as an inbound call. You are asking, do you outbound them back? Generally the inbound call will get routed through the dynamic distribution to Clelland’s case, his system is going to determine which agent it gets offered to and then it gets brokered. If it’s pay-per-call or if you are configuring your buyers or your advertiser, it’s going straight in to the network. Like in May’s case, it’s going straight into their call center.

Clelland : So you are dialing it without doing the text message if it’s a landline.

May : That’s right.

Joe : Yes.

Speaker 2 : (can’t decipher 24:25)

Joe : Right, but inbound calls the connection rate is very high, so there’s not really a need in general to be outbounding. I think that is considered a gray area of TCPA. One of the techniques if you couldn’t get it into your call center, let’s say you press one on a single call center and not available because it’s noon time, your delay is too long, you can put intelligent abandonment on. That is another form of automation, where you come on the line and say, ‘Rather than continue to wait on hold, you can hang up now and keep your place your place in que and we will call you back as soon as an agent becomes available and then you have a live agent call or another customer message call and connect them. We had another question here.

Speaker 3 : What do you find is the maximum or the right number of SMS’ and the number of automated dials out before (can’t decipher 25:25)?

Jeff : So it depends on the vertical and ultimately your end buyer. To be honest, I mean, this is me, like I’m going to be paying to call so I probably tend to be a little bit more aggressive running white labels than brands, but I try to go for a 3-5% complaint rate. So if I’m getting anything lower than that, I’m probably not being aggressive at how I’m getting people and if I’m getting a higher percentage of complaint rate than I’m probably being way to aggressive and I need to tone it down. Typically the most important dialing patterns are getting into those first 15 minutes and that is why I try so hard because they just filled out the form and I want to get them on the phone because that’s when most likely to pick up and I’m most likely to make the sale if they get into the call center. For text messages, I’m really just using my text messages more if you have people call off the text messages if we send it to them, but I’m using text messages more for priming, right? Hey, if you send them a text message and then dial them, get them to pick up their phone and if it’s after hours or the weekends when the call center is closed, letting them know, hey, by the way our call center is closed, here are our hours of operation, call us back, here is our number. That way they know and when the call center opens up, we will send them a text message priming them and then I will start my outbound dialing pattern.

Joe : I think we may be out of time or do you have a question?

Speaker 4 : I have an answer to that question in my presentation (can’t decipher 26:44)

Joe : Oh. Any other questions now? Okay, thank you all for attending and thank you to the panel. We will be here at the networking session. Please stop by if you want to talk about the lead-to-call and what we can do. thank you.