How to Improve Your Sales and Lead Response Time With Call Automation

08 Sep How to Improve Your Sales and Lead Response Time With Call Automation

391%. 
That’s how much higher your sales conversion rates could be if you respond to a lead within one minute of their request for contact. Couple that with the fact that 78% of customers give their business to the first company to contact them, and you can see how essential a prompt response time is if organizations hope to be profitable. 
Unfortunately, the average sales team is so inundated with emails, texts, reports, and a litany of other tasks that they don’t have time to contact all their leads, much less respond to them within a minute’s notice. Enter call automation. 
A data-driven way to streamline a company’s sales processes, call automation systems not only generate authentic texts and calls to each lead in near-real time, but they can even remove the burden of mundane tasks from agents’ shoulders. That way, your sales teams can operate with greater efficiency, and are freed up to focus on their most important job: closing deals. Here’s how it works. 

The Problem: Slow (or No) Response

Lagging response times damage the bottom line. Whether it’s a higher probability of making contact with a lead or ensuring that prospective clients don’t get lost in the mix, a rapid response time goes a long way in gaining new business. Consider these stats: 

• Companies are 100 times more likely to make contact with a lead if they respond within five minutes than if they do within 30 minutes. 
• Companies are 21 times more likely to convert a lead if they respond within five minutes than if they do within an hour. 
• The average lead must be contacted at least six times before a salesperson can get a hold of them. 

These stats show that promptness, perseverance, and follow-through are essential if sales teams hope to get clients to convert, but sometimes these traits are lacking. The Harvard Business Review conducted a prominent study of over 2,200 companies and found that 24% of those studied take over 24 hours to respond to a web-generated lead — and 23% never get back to their leads at all. Considering that many companies rely on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and that the average lead costs between $47–$349 per lead depending on a company’s size, businesses could lose out on opportunities for new profit. They could also be wasting their lead-gen investments. 

The Solution: Automated Call Systems

Emails, sales reports, data entry, meetings, and simply the need for a break can all weigh salespeople down, preventing them from contacting all of their leads. Even if they did manage to operate with 100% efficiency, some businesses have so many leads that it would be impossible to reach out to them all. 
By handing over the more tedious responsibilities to an AI-powered solution, companies using automated call systems have been able to resolve both problems — and raise their profit margins in the process. Here are the biggest benefits they’ve seen. 

Mass Management

The most recent data shows that organizations obtain an average of 1,877 leads per month. Of these, 80% are market qualified, and 12% of marketers don’t even know how many leads they have.
With so many leads to keep track of, some sales teams may find it difficult or even impossible to efficiently manage them all. Automated call systems resolve this problem by sending out text messages to each lead as soon as their contact info is imported into the platform. That way, each lead can receive at least one contact attempt (though they may be qualified to prioritize the most likely potential customers first), ensuring that no lead is left behind.

Quicker Contacts

The impact that response time has on the bottom line is clear, and call center automation can improve it in several ways. The result isn’t just a broader net that reaches every lead, but a means of communication that’s more efficient for both the agent and the lead.
Lead-to-call automation can take place through email or phone call, but also SMS text message. This is often the preferred mode of communication for many prospective clients today, as shown by these stats:

• Email open rates are only 20%, while SMS message rates are 98%.
• Email response rates are only 6%, while SMS message rates are 45%.
• The average email response time is 90 minutes, while the average SMS message response time is 90 seconds — and most are answered within five seconds.

Sending emails back and forth to leads that may not even convert weighs down sales efficiency, and the phone tag that takes place for days or weeks can drag efficiency down even further. From the customer’s standpoint, the prompt response times of an SMS text message sent through lead call automation is not only a more convenient way to communicate, but it can also resolve their issues or answer their questions sooner than any other route. By attaching useful, concise links to an automated message, you can direct leads to the resources they need for requesting demos, answering FAQs, or even signing up.

Higher Satisfaction

If a person walks into a brick-and-mortar retail store looking to make a purchase and can’t find a soul to help them, it won’t be long before they take their business elsewhere. The same is true in B2B industries — except much more revenue is typically at stake.
By shortening response times and promptly routing leads to an available agent, call center automation improves customer satisfaction. Just as in-person customers prefer companies that meet their needs the quickest, businesses can be made to feel like they’re receiving gold-star treatment when they receive a response to their inquiry in seconds rather than days. Such promptness also conveys a sense of superior business operations and expertise, further improving your brand image.

Easy Customization

Each industry has its own unique traits and needs. Agents in the healthcare industry will not communicate with their leads the same way that manufacturing salespeople will, so call center automation software must be able to accommodate industry-specific demands for the tailored response that potential clients will expect. 
Not only that, but specific regulations may also apply to certain industries, requiring that some content be a part of (or absent from) the conversation. Failure to comply with these rules may constitute subpar business practices, and even costly fines.
Aktify’s call center automation software can be easily customized to meet industry standards and deliver a message consistent with the tone and vernacular common to specific fields. Our deep learning algorithms are designed to create natural-sounding messages and can be configured to incorporate required phrases, common terms, and more. That way, leads will feel that the messages they receive have been generated by an actual person, making them more likely to respond.

Automate Your Calls With Akify

Consolidated management, faster response time, higher customer satisfaction, and industry-specific customization — that’s what call automation brings to the table. It all adds up to higher conversions for your sales team, and that means greater profits.
At Aktify, our call automation platform uses the latest AI and machine learning algorithms to deliver authentic-sounding conversations, route interested leads to available agents, schedule sales calls, and automate the repetitive tasks that are hindering your salespeople’s productivity. No more wasted leads and no more potential buyers that walk away due to a lengthy response time. The result is a 10+ times greater ROI on your investment and a boost to the bottom line. Contact us today if that’s what you’d like to see for your company.