How NGNCloudComm increases Contact Center ROI by automatically prioritizing the most profitable leads to be contacted first
ROI Focus
The underlying code for NGNCloudComm was first developed in 1995 and was built from the ground up as a Contact Center focused solution. The focus of the design behind NGNCloudComm is to increase the productivity of its users. To this end, one of the key features of NGNCloudComm is the flexibility for Contact Center supervisors and managers to apply lead selection quickly and simply without needing help from IT. These lead strategies not only ensure compliance with constantly shifting laws but also allow Contact Centers to prioritize that the most important and profitable leads are contacted first. With NGNCloudComm, if you chose to do so, you do not need to have your supervisors or your agents making manual decisions on how to handle your leads, carrying the risk of not really implementing the business strategy you have in mind. This saves your Contact Center time and money on top of increasing the ROI of your leads by improving your success ratios. In this article we will discuss how to achieve implementing your business strategies when it comes to lead selection and how can you define them in NGNCloudComm and provide some real-world customer examples.
Relationship Between Record Strategies and Business Rules
If you missed our recent article “The Brains Behind Grupo NGN” you can click here to learn more about the powerful options to apply Business Rules within NGNCloudComm. In NGNCloudComm you define your Business Rules to manage the flow of every interaction regardless of your business vertical. From deciding whether an interaction is within legal time limits to how to Schedule future interactions based on the Result and Disposition of the interaction in a way that two goals are achieved. First you establish exactly how your company wants to handle every situation and second you free your agents from having to enforce those rules. When it comes to the outbound part of the business, the effectiveness of reaching the correct leads is paramount. How, when and/or who should handle the leads becomes a strategical decision, which can easily be set up within NGNCloudComm to identify when leads should be contacted in what order for the most successful and profitable/optimal results. Too often we see companies leave those decisions to their agents.
A Grupo NGN customer in the collection space informed their agents that being the end of the month, they should concentrate contacting only those customers that owed more than a specific amount of money to maximize their collections for the month and to achieve their monthly goals. A few days later, after the end of the month, management lamented that they did not achieve their goals. Upon further investigation we discovered that the agents mostly followed management instructions with one difference: since they were allowed to choose, some agents skipped perceived difficult calls thinking that other agents “would take care” of those difficult calls and then proceeded to handle lower priority and easier calls. Unfortunately, every agent thought the same way, so some of the largest accounts were never contacted when they should have been. After implementing automated record strategies with NGNCloudComm they never again missed their monthly target because agents were handed the leads to contact according to management plans, and if they skipped the calls, the system made it clear to management they were skipping them.
Here is a table of example situations to help further explain how Record Strategies and Business Rules work together for your Contact Center:
Example Situation | Record Strategy | Business Rule |
Check if | ✕ | ✓ |
Do not allow an agent to call a lead outside of legal dialing hours | ✕ | ✓ |
Prioritize leads that are between the ages of 35-44 | ✓ | ✕ |
Automatically call a lead back within 1 minute if the first attempt gets a busy signal and continue to try while it is busy in predetermined intervals | ✕ | ✓ |
Send a text message rather than dialing leads that mark “Text Message” as their preferred communication | ✕ | ✓ |
Sort leads by a predetermined score calculated by a Contact Center | ✓ | ✕ |
Stop calling a lead after a set number of max attempts and define next steps | ✕ | ✓ |
Call a lead outside of | ✓ | ✕ |
Temporarily skip calling a region based on unexpected situations ( | ✓ | ✕ |
Automatically give newly uploaded “hot” leads contact priority | ✓ | ✕ |
Automatically send result data to any 3rd party CRM based on the result of the call | ✕ | ✓ |
Example #1 – Satellite Radio Vehicle Leads
More than 117 million cars on the road come with a radio equipped to handle satellite radio and it is estimated that 3 of every 4 new cars has it. Reaching out to people who have purchased a new car to sell them a satellite radio subscription is a big business opportunity. There are many Contact Centers that work with the satellite radio companies to receive leads of new car buyers with a satellite radio. Agents reach out to these new car buyers to let them know what options they have for a satellite radio subscription.
How New Car Buyer Satellite Radio Leads are Distributed
The satellite radio company wants to ensure that their leads are given to the best performing Contact Centers. Of course, the Contact Centers want to receive the largest amount of and the best quality of leads so they can be successful. One Grupo NGN Contact Center customer used NGNCloudComm to consistently be the top satellite radio subscription seller month after month. The satellite radio company rewarded this Contact Center with extra leads each month because of their success. How did they do it?
Who is Most Likely to Pay for Satellite Radio in Their New Car?
There were several data points this Contact Center was able to review to determine lead quality:
- Age and gender of the car buyer
- Make and model of the car
- Purchase type – cash, loan, or lease
- State, City, and Zip code of the transaction
- Demographic information on the buyer
One of the key features of how NGNCloudComm handles Record Strategies is that users can add any field to be used for building out the strategy. Grupo NGN doesn’t force customers to adjust how they work to make NGNCloudComm work. Our motto is “Let your imagination be your only limitation” and we mean it. When you create a Record Strategies you will have access to every System Field in the database, but then you are able to add in any Customer Field that you need specific to the leads that you are uploading. So, it is no problem for NGNCloudComm to automatically select and sort leads by the Make, Model and Purchase Type of a car. Honda Civic Leases can be placed ahead of Ford Explorers bought with a loan for example.
What this Contact Center was able to discover about who was most likely to purchase a satellite radio subscription was possibly counterintuitive. Due to privacy issues, we can’t share all the details that went into the lead score, but I can tell you that our customer found that luxury cars like BMW, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz were less likely to purchase satellite radio subscriptions than other less expensive makes and models.
Note that this customer didn’t filter out any of their leads, but rather prioritized which leads should be contacted first and during the most prime hours of the day. So, a newly bought BMW would still be called it just wouldn’t be put in front of leads the Contact Center knew to be more likely to close on a subscription.
By applying their lead score and using NGNCloudComm to automatically sort and prioritize their leads, this Contact Center saw a significant increase in sales and qualified to receive additional leads every month from the satellite radio company.
Example #2 – Insurance Leads Agency
This example is about a customer serving as a Contact Center for a Leads Broker in the insurance space. The Broker would place insurance related ads all over the internet, then potential customers would fill different forms requesting to be contacted for information, qualification etc. Leads reach the Contact Center automatically and dialed right away to qualify the prospect. Once the prospect is qualified, it would be assigned to the most qualified customer of the broker, transferring the call and the data to them based on certain criteria such as the number of daily leads purchased, multiple language customer support abilities, etc.
There were a couple of issues with a traditional approach:
- Leads were dialed in order of arrival, independently if they were just informational calls, urgent requests, etc.
- If the existing leads did not match any of the criteria seek by the broker’s customers, the leads would still be called
- Once a person is qualified, it would take the agent between 5 and 10 minutes to select the appropriate candidate to assign the lead. Around 50% of the leads were lost because the customer got tired of waiting
The winning strategy implemented with NGNCloudComm was:
- Prioritize most important leads based on the importance of the leads. Hot leads were dialed before informational leads
- Leads would also be prioritize based on the number of potential vehicles to be insured
- Leads would be also prioritized based on available Broker’s customer’s needs. For Example, some of the criteria from those customers related to excluding existing insurance contracts (lead was already contracted with the same agency), number of vehicles, time of the day (agency opened or closed), ability to serve Spanish leads, etc.)
- Remove the agent from deciding where to send the lead to. NGNCloudComm would select automatically which one would be the most optimal agency to transfer the call to, based on real time parameters, and display it on the agent’s screen to proceed. Once the agent clicked to transfer the call, the system automatically uploads the data to the CRM of that customer, so it has all the information while talking to the prospect live. This step reduced the time a lead had to wait before being transferred from the 5/10 min to 1-2 seconds virtually eliminating leads hanging up
All those simple changes increased the efficiency by more than 300%
FILO LIFO FIFO LILO vs ROI
We aren’t talking about pet names in this section. FIFO, LIFO, FILO, and LILO are accounting terms that stand for First in Last Out, Last in First Out, First in Last Out, and finally Last in Last Out. A lot of Contact Centers handle their leads using one of these four options simply because their CCaaS doesn’t allow them powerful Record Strategy options.
- FILO or First in Last Out is a common default lead selection. New leads (First In) go to the back of the line or the bottom of the list (Last Out) to be contacted. It makes sense on one level, make sure leads are contacted in order of arrival before trying to contact new leads, right? The problem with a FILO strategy is that hot leads are not getting contacted as quickly as they should be and that can mean lost sales. If a Contact Center knows that a specific zip code closes better than other locations or that leads that opt in and use text messages have the highest closing rate and a hot lead matching those conditions is uploaded, that Contact Center doesn’t want to have that lead buried at the bottom of their lead list and not contacted right away. But that is exactly what happens with the all-too-common FILO strategy
- LIFO, FIFO, and LILO handle leads slightly differently but they all have the same core problem in common. Leads are contacted according to when they are uploaded rather than prioritized by how likely they are to result in a sale
NGNCloudComm allows you to select and dial leads according to the value each lead has for your company, on your terms with a dynamic and effective strategy. Leads shouldn’t be sent to an agent simply because they were the First or the Last leads to be loaded into your CCaaS. Leads should be sent to agents because they have the best skills to handle the type of leads, and most likely to close the leads. Your ability to apply business and record strategies along with skills based routing can drive up your Contact Center’s ROI.
Lead Strategy Templates and Real Time Adjustments
Even the best laid plans of mice and men go awry. No matter how accurate and successful your Record Strategy is, there will inevitably be interruptions or reasons to put the Record Strategy on hold or to make temporary changes to the Record Strategy. Weather events is a common example. Nobody who is dealing with emergency weather alerts such as a tornado or a blizzard wants to deal with a Contact Center agent. Conversely Contact Centers do not want to contact what would otherwise be quality leads and lose out and sales because of bad timing.
Supervisors have access to make temporary changes in real time to the lead selection criteria from the Manager Console. These options include:
- Which variation of your Business Rules to use
- Set Callback Handling Settings to determine how leads that schedule a callback will be handled by default
- Change the default routing of a Connected (CN) call and determine whether to send it directly to an agent (CSR) or to select a different option such as sending the call to an IVR or to play a recorded message
- Change the default routing of a Busy (BU) call
- Add Filter Conditions to determine which leads to focus on attempting to connect
- Determine how to Order your leads to ensure the best leads are contacted first
Get the Total Experience
“Let your imagination be your only limitation” is our motto and we take our customer relationships seriously. Learn more about our 99% 4 and 5 star customer support rating and see our G2 reviews from satisfied customers. Grupo NGN goes beyond just Customer Experience to include Management Experience and Agent Experience to ensure a Total Experience for our customers.
Contact Us today to set up a demo to see how NGNCloudComm record strategies can improve your Contact Center’s ROI.
