It’s easy to think of call centers as simply existing so your workforce can go home for the night or stay home on weekends. Along with
for people who need help day or night, centers can also be excellent at scheduling appointments.
But not everyone realizes that they can also be great at out-bound or in-bound lead generation. It’s actually one of the most common call center activities, even though some teams may be throwing away 50 percent of their lead opportunities by not pursuing/servicing them all.
Try the following strategies for creating and meeting lead goals:
- Develop and optimize. Your campaign can have the goal of “generate every sale possible,” but you need to prepare specific ways to accomplish this, including what customers to contact and how often to do so. Don’t hope that customers will simply know to ask for extra service, so your team doesn’t have to ask them. Lead generation queries also shouldn’t stop at one call. The discussion should continue with every interaction with that particular customer.
- Create a lead-focused script. Rather than telling the agents to generally “push for more lead generations” and hope they do so, a script can give everyone correct and current phrasing to make these conversions happen. It also provides some consistency between call center agents, and can suggest ways to counter common objections, or other qualifiers. For instance, a caller can ask a few questions about the person’s habits, interests, budget, decision-making abilities, and determine how any or all of these can lead to the same point of saying “I want to learn/buy more.”
- Focus on all leads. Some sales programs suggest chasing after the ‘hot leads’ first, or sometimes only on these, since they’re the easiest, compared to a prospect that may be reluctant or resistant to try what you’re offering. You could even create different scenarios in the script for the easy and tougher prospects. But think big picture and longer-term.They may not want to buy today, but you could certainly plant the seeds for future interest and approval, especially if you can get them to specify when to discuss it further: Tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Be sure to follow up if a specific timeframe is offered. Include more informative and positive details about your company rather than continuing a hard sales push also can be smart.
We all know how wonderful good customer service can be. But in the right hands, this positive feeling about a company can be converted to useful leads. Customer call center agents are in a perfect position to not only help clients with direct needs, but also find ways to get them excited about a larger involvement.
