Have you ever gotten a call from a call center, then gotten another call from the same number 5 minutes later? Maybe you were screening your calls, or you saw the caller ID come in while you were on the other line. Anyway, super annoying. Chances are that you weren’t too happy. Did their call center software break? Did they have you in their list multiple times? Or are they straight up incompetent? It doesn’t matter. They upset you.
You can’t get through to every contact in your list the first run through. People are away, not home, not answering, whatever. You have to recycle your leads at some point to make a second/third/Nth attempt. You have to be smart about it, or you can wind up making people upset.
Automatic Lead Recycling
Quality call center software gives you options to set lead recycling rules based on the way the last call ended up. You can specify the number of dial attempts, the maximum number of connections, and minimum times before the next call attempt. It’s important to think through the cases and what they might mean, though. For example:
- Busy: if the call was busy, don’t reschedule it for some time tomorrow. There was likely someone talking on the phone. Your contact was there! Try again in a few minutes.
- No Answer: the phone rang and rang, and nobody answered. Don’t try again in just a few minutes. What are the odds that they’ll walk through the door in the next five minutes? Try again in a few hours, or maybe at a different time tomorrow. Some call centers will set the time to 23 or 25 hours, so that each attempt happens at a different time. If they only get home at 6pm, at some point you’ll try calling them after 6pm. You can also set it to try again after 8 hours, so if you called in the morning, you’ll try again in the afternoon. Do try to not call too many times over a couple of days, though.
- Answering Machine: If you left a message, don’t keep calling. Wait at least a day or so. Multiple messages on a machine make you seem needy, desperate, or rude. If you didn’t leave a message, treat it as a no answer.
There are other cases as well, but you can see the kinds of things you should be thinking about. If everything is going well, automatic lead recycling should keep you going as you work your list.
Manually Recycling
Sometimes, however, you’re near the end of your list’s useful lifetime, or your predictive dialer hit a large block of “No Answers” and you won’t make it through the rest of the evening. Then it’s tempting to manually recycle a bunch of leads. This usually involves selecting a number of leads, possibly a call termination type, and hitting a button. Magically, a bunch of leads that wouldn’t be dialable until tomorrow are now back in the queue and being dialed.
Manually recycling can save the day, but it does come with some drawbacks. The biggest one is that you don’t normally have the luxury of choosing leads that were last called a day or two ago. After all, if you had a bunch of leads like that, they’d automatically recycle all on their own. Therefore, you’re recycling leads that were already called pretty recently. Maybe even five minutes ago. It’s a tough choice, but if it’s one you’re making too often, you need to look at your recycling rules vs. the number of leads you’re actually working.