You can have a great dialer, a wonderful staff, and effective management, but if your lead queuing strategy is wrong, your outbound campaign is going to fail. Great agents can’t sell to people who aren’t home. The best product for working couples isn’t likely to be sold from 9-5. Your restaurant supply company isn’t going to close any sales between 11am and 1pm local time, when the restaurants in question are struggling to handle the lunch crowd.
Outbound dialing has been on my mind lately, and so it’s worthwhile to go over the factors you can use to order your leads when the dialer is queuing them up for your agents. Here is the list of factors most commonly used, in no particular order:
- Priority: It might seem confusing to talk about priority as a factor in establishing priority. Its useful to have a condition that can be set as a tiebreaker for other factors, or to indicate an actual preference. It may be that everybody in Shelbyville loves cheese platters, but most people in Springfield have an aversion to cheese, so you may set it so that citizens of Shelbyville have a more immediate priority than citizens of Springfield.
- Newness: Call center staff, from the newest trainee to the CEO, love fresh leads. It can be a boost to morale during a tough day of dialing to let everyone know fresh leads are coming down the queue. Putting a timestamp on the lead at the time it was loaded into the system allows you to track several things, such as lead expiry. It also allows you to say dial the newest leads first. Old leads tend to be old leads because they’ve been dialed through already, but new leads have the magic of being untried.
- Disposition: there are a number of synonyms, but disposition is the one I’m using here. Leads that have never been dialed may have a blank or a preset disposition. Once the lead has been attempted or been handled by an agent, it will have a disposition. Some dispositions are better than others. “New Lead” is a good one, of course. “Busy” is better than some give it credit for. Sometimes a call center will reschedule Busy leads for tomorrow or further down the line, or even after “No Answer”. That’s probably a mistake. If the line is busy, there’s somebody there right now. They just happen to be on the phone. The worst disposition is “Do Not Call”. Don’t call those.
- Time Zone: Time of day calling doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If you don’t know the timezone the lead is located in (at least in theory), then you don’t know if it’s a good time to call. Calling east coast leads at 9am Eastern is a good idea for B2B dialing, or if you’re targeting those who are probably at home. Calling west coast leads at 9am Eastern is almost always a bad idea, and may be in violation of the law. In North America, it’s usually possible to guess a timezone rule based on the area code and local exchange, and databases of such are available.
- Heat: This is usually decided at the time of lead loading. “Hot” leads might be leads that were pulled from a web enquiry, an inbound call to another service, or collected at some event. The principle is that some leads are worth calling within as short a time as possible of collection. In the case of web leads, this could be seconds. You want to call when the client is thinking about you and anxious (or at least willing) to talk. Hot leads get queued for immediate dialing, with only hotter, newer leads getting priority. Normally, this heat factor expires after the first dial.
Of all these factors, heat is the only one that should be a sole queuing factor, and it usually renders the others moot for the first dial. If you think about it for a minute or two, it becomes clear that the others aren’t suitable for a sole dial criteria. If you decide that priority is the only factor for dialing, you wind up after a few days with all your high priority leads exhausted while you still had lower priority, brand new untouched leads in the database. If you call only leads in the Central European time zone, you may miss out on some great opportunities in France. If you only call based on newness, you’re wasting older leads where the phone was busy at the time of the call. All too often, call center managers will point to one factor and insist it’s the only one to consider, then change their minds once they’ve dialed their leads a few times. A default queuing mechanism that takes into consideration heat, disposition, date inserted and priority, in that order, allows you to call your newest “new” leads first, while still keeping busy, no answer and answering machine leads at hand for when the undialed leads have been exhausted.