Call Center, Omnichannel
[Ultimate Guide] How to Set Up a Call Center in 2022?
Lead management is the process of managing and tracking potential customers as they interact with a company. The goal of lead management is to identify potential customers, qualify them, and then convert them into paying customers. This is done by creating a system that tracks all potential customers, from the time they first interact with the company to the time they become a customer.
Lead management systems are software programs that help businesses track and manage leads. They can generally be divided into two categories: marketing automation and sales enablement.
Marketing automation systems track the behavior of website visitors and create lists of leads based on their actions. They then send automated marketing messages to those leads in an effort to convert them into customers. Sales enablement systems track interactions between the sales rep of the company and its potential and current customers. They allow businesses to keep track of all customer communications, including emails, phone calls, and social media interactions.
The purpose of tracking leads is to ensure that you are never missing out on a conversion opportunity. Failure to track your leads will keep your sales process hanging. Missing out on these opportunities will cost your company a huge amount of revenue. It is in your best interest to manage your prospects and convert them into a steady stream of revenue. To manually follow up on leads is tedious and can lead to some falling through the crack. A steady lead management system can do most of the tracking, requiring you to only follow through.
There is a process to convert every lead into a customer. First, the lead management system (LMS) will identify interactions across channels either as a response to a marketing campaign or a general interest in your services. It will collect all the information such as contact details, device information, and even demographic data. It will try to confirm if these prospects have the potential to purchase. Based on this, it will qualify the leads for the next stage. Once qualified, the leads are now assigned to agents based on their area of expertise. Eventually, the leads which didn’t convert are sent for nurturing.
Let’s discuss some of the features of a Lead Management System to understand its importance:
1. Getting Leads from Multiple Channels
2. Increasing Sales Engagement through Sales Enablement
3. Leadership Qualifications
4. Tracking and Notifying Leads
5. Automatic Allocation
6. Integration with Telephony
7. Reporting and Analytics
Conclusion
Lead capture is the process of collecting information about potential customers, such as their name, email address, company, or other contact information. Once you have this information, you can begin to market to them, which is known as lead nurturing.
There are a number of different ways to capture leads. One popular method is the use of lead capture forms on your website. These forms can be embedded in your website’s landing page linked to paid advt campaign or some event. The LMS can be tuned to extract this data from your other channels such as social media, live chat, mobile app, email, and more. With a lead management system, data collection becomes much easier and streamlined.
The prospect needs to be engaged as soon as the prospect has shown some interest. Businesses can follow cadence of sending mail, SMS, and calls to engage with the lead. Engaging and identify sales opportunities is a crucial step and this is where the prospect is pushed into the sales funnel, increasing the potential for conversion.
Now prior to assigning your leads to an agent, there is one more step. It is called lead qualification. Some people just fill-up the form to access your product data. They are most likely not interested in purchasing but are learning about the products in the market. Whereas, sometimes people also share fake information as they want to avoid sales calls. In either case, the lead information is invalid and should not be followed.
Once the legit leads are qualified, they can be scored so that the leads with the higher score is followed aggressively.
The lead management system is your agent’s friend. Once the system recognizes a genuine lead, it will send a follow-up mail or message to the concerned prospect to acknowledge their interest in your brand. On the other hand, the LMS will notify the agents and schedule a call for them to follow up on these leads. This small feature that the agents do not forget to check up on the prospects in the heat of daily hustle-bustle.
Automated allocation or intelligent routing is an essential feature of the lead management system. The sales agent is assigned based on various different criteria, product type, location, or even language. For example, if there is a high-value lead, then the system will assign the lead to the most experienced agent to ensure a higher chance of winning. These conditions can be pre-set so the allocation is done automatically.
Telephony integration is important for any LMS. Sometimes the leads are called using a manual dialer but for high volume leads business prefers progressive or predictive dialers.
C-Zentrix Cloud Telephony (with all kinds of dialers) can be integrated with most of the standard LMS so that you can access the leads and connect with them under one dashboard. This improves your efficiency and reduces agent labor as well. All the call records are available within the LMS.
Lastly, you need to identify the quality of your lead generation process and the agent performance. Lead management systems can generate weekly or monthly reports on average lead scores, agent performance, average lead status, and even the success rate. These analytics ensure the quality of your process and help you to make informed decisions.
Lead management systems are an important part of your sales business. They allow you to track potential customers, manage leads, and track the progress of each lead. This is the very first step of your conversion journey. To provide multi-channel outreach for your sales reps and have an integrated view of the leads, C-Zentrix Omnichannel Contact Center comes with a Lead module. This will not only enable the sales rep to reach using various channels (phone, email, text) but also provides an integrated view of the leads and whom to follow up.