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Progressives have very big budgets. So they have the dollars to train and educate and brand and train again and educate and brand and change consumer behavior into something that they think is better. Let’s say, online e-commerce, for example. But that’s hard.
I think for the rest of us a better model is give your customers what they’ve already told you that they want. That data is out there. There’s data that will tell you what consumers want and you should just give them that, especially today when it is so – relatively speaking – cheap, and there are so many viable options to provide these methods of communicating with your consumers. There’s no excuse not to in my opinion.
A good example is, I’m shocked at how many insurance landing pages I see today that do not have phone numbers on them. Now most of these are aggregators and not carriers, but we’ve already talked today about how hard and expensive your consumers on your page. It’s very hard and it’s very competitive. If you succeed, if you have a consumer looking at your landing page, you should allow them to interact with you however they want. If they want to fill out a form, a form should be there – we all have those. If they want to call, there should be an 800 number. If you don’t want to build an internal call center, you outsource it. There’s lots of outsourcing options. It can be as simple as hiring an inexpensive call center to answer with your name and then go to the Web and fill the same form out for the consumer.
They’re not technically sophisticated. They’re inexpensive.
If you look at the conversion lift you’re going to get, I would argue that there’s 5% to 10% of the consumers out there going to you landing page that would call, but they’re not going to fill out a form. You’re losing those and I would argue that conversion lift would more than pay for the cost of that outsourced call center option.
Another is chat. You know chat is not that big right now but I think if you look at the cost benefit analysis, it’s something that everyone should do. We use chat on our site. I get 10 to 20 chats a day. Here’s the value of chat: Chat is real time. Form is not. So, let’s say I’m a consumer and I want to talk to someone right now. I don’t want to wait until tomorrow or the next day. But, I’m a passive consumer. I don’t to talk to a sales person by phone because I’m going to get overrun by some heavy-duty sales guy.
I would love to chat. It’s very passive.
There’s some benefits from your perspective with the chat. First of all, your sales professionals can take the chat from anywhere. They can be at home online. They can see who else is online anywhere around the world and transfer that shoot to them and that person who gets the transfer chat can see the whole transcript. All the conversation with all your reps and all your consumers are stored in a SQL database. You can mine that data. You can put key words so that anytime a consumer says a keyword in any chat with any sales rep, bells go off and a manager jumps in. There’s some cool things with chat. It’s inexpensive. LivePerson is the market leader. There’s a company called Volaro which we actually wrote the IP for in my old company and sold it. There are lots of options and they’re inexpensive.
But the point there is let your consumers tell you how they want to respond and be there.
I figured I’d use our company, Double Positive because it truly was started using the methods and ideas that I just described. We were at one point a mortgage lead generation company, generating lots of mortgage leads and we found that our customers, our lead buyers were complaining about contact rate. It was too hard to get the consumers on the phone. So our perceived lead quality was dropping. So we literally went through a huge process and ultimately came up with the idea and then spun it out as a separate company, which is DoublePositive today.
But the sole purpose of DoublePositive was to improve the quality of online leads for lead buyers. To address the amount of effort and cost it takes for a lead buyer to fully and appropriately leverage leads. When you buy leads from a lead aggregator, or even if you generate leads from your own properties, there’s a huge requirement to consume those properly. You’ve got to dial the number and you’ve got to get the consumer on the phone. You’re only going to contact about half of them and that’s if you try up to seven times. Once you get that consumer on the phone only a certain percentage are truly interested. You’ve got to weed through those until you get to the ones that are truly willing to begin to talk to you about buying your product or service. That effort is huge when you’re getting 100 leads a day or 1,000 leads a day.
So we have built a platform to automate that for you and really for our lead buying customers to make it feel like software. We use third part domestic call centers, always at least three with up to 150 calls to the reps at any one time. Call centers are fully integrated on the front and back end with our technology platform. We are physically connected to about 50 lead suppliers across four verticals. We get about 15,000 leads a day. We’re connected to third party lead-enhancement services in real time as well like Targus Info and E-Bureau and this is what the model looks like.
So, basically we have supply sources coming into our engine. So we have lead supply, we have lead scoring and data appending services connected all in real time. Leads that come in are scrubbed, they’re appended, they’re sorted, they’re sent to three call centers. Call centers using sophisticated dialers get the consumer on the phone, typically more often that you would on your own and more quickly than you would have on your own, which is important in the case of a shared lead.
Then once that consumer confirms that interest, Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12
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