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Brain Games And Breakthroughs In Call Center Automation

Forbes Technology Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Chris Rediger

We often play brain games in the “Nerdatorium” -- the office where our developers do their magic. We take a customer service scenario and play out the tech solutions to make it a better experience.

One such scenario involved buying a sweater online. We looked at the sweater, put it in the cart and stopped before making the transaction. What tech solution would encourage a hesitant buyer to finalize the purchase? How could the retailer keep follow-up to bring them back? How could we make that solution work for our platform?

Redefy’s platform enables customers to engage and follow through with a home purchase or sale. One of the ways we engage potential customers is through a call center, which is very different from most traditional real estate companies. Given the volume of contacts we get, our inside sales associates can easily get bogged down prioritizing leads and following up on those who weren’t ready when we first talked to them.

Prioritizing and timely responses are critical functions required to make our inside sales department efficient. Manpower, especially a trained associate, is costly. Could we automate low-value functions to create high-value conversations? Was it possible to stay in touch with older contacts in a personal way without hiring additional staff? We were pleasantly surprised by the ease and success of the tech solutions we implemented.

Controlling The Floodgates

Like the sweater example, a potential buyer or seller may come to our site and register. Our inside sales associates, who may already be talking to a contact, can’t know at that exact moment that someone is on the site looking at homes. As critical seconds pass, and the visitor inevitably leaves our site, we end up losing an opportunity to engage an active user in real time.

Our solution came in the form of intelligent contact center software that uses behavior-based parameters we set to prioritize workflows. The active user is recognized, immediately prioritized in the queue and the system makes the call for an available sales associate. Even better, the associate is given time to review the information before the call is made, which saves the customer from having to repeat what they just input.

Once we integrated and customized this solution into our platform, we experienced a 40% increase in call efficiency. Instead of an associate spending time looking for the right person to dial next, the system prioritizes the queue and makes the call as soon as an associate becomes available.

We’re also able to keep the length of the queue proportionate to the number of active associates in the call center; this keeps high-priority calls from falling to the bottom of a long queue and losing valuable time. It does require management at the developer level to keep that queue manageable and coded for variables we need to control.

Economies Of Scale

For the person who looked at the sweater and then abandoned the cart, the solution is a little different. Perhaps something came up, or they had questions about the sweater that caused them not to finalize the purchase. This kind of queue can quickly go well into the thousands, making it difficult for a smaller call center to handle in a timely manner.

We’ve found that we can make a certain number of attempts to make contact within a specified amount of time. Once we pass that marker, it’s time for another solution.

It would seem logical to outsource at this point, But real estate has regulations and very specific things that can and can’t be said. We couldn’t possibly train an army of temps to understand this business in a day, So our goal for this solution was to quickly engage a contact to gauge interest and redirect back to our in-house team. Allowing an outsourced caller to “say anything” was not an option -- we wanted to have control over the conversation itself.

The solution was to employ Scale, a platform created by two Bay Area teens that’s rapidly growing into a vital operations solution. Since our implementation, larger companies like Alphabet have discovered its usefulness. For its phone call service, Scale employs contractors around the country to ask very specific questions to gauge interest and redirect contacts back to our inside sales associates. These human callers ask just a few targeted questions that have a limited answer base. Based on their notes, contacts can be quickly vetted and reprioritized through our contact software.

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The beauty of this system is the ability to design the conversation and engage as many contacts as we want in a short time. True to its name, this service scales with the need because of a large on-demand workforce. With this microtask solution, we’ve found we can save a lot of time going through old contacts -- some as old as 12 months.

We know these calls don’t necessarily translate to a ton of active leads, but we know all of these people have been contacted and have heard the name "Redefy" again to keep us top of mind. However, the time these calls save gives us more valuable manpower for high-value tasks, which does translate to greater sales performance.

It’s no secret that the best tech is the one in which the user doesn’t know what’s happening behind the scenes. With this platform, we can quickly get contact interest verified and send algorithmically prioritized calls back to the call center. The in-house associate benefits from a summary of notes to review before the call is made, ensuring a better quality conversation that meets the customer’s needs.

We continue to play brain games and experiment with technology, looking for smart solutions to automate small tasks in order to improve high-value tasks and results. The time we spend in research and implementation is far outweighed by what we gain.