Ep.6 Social Garden Launches Melbourne-Based Call Centre

November 9, 2017

Video Transcript

Mike:

Hi, my name’s Mike Bird, I’m the CEO and Co-Founder here at Social Garden. I’m with my business partner and our COO George Glover, and today we’re talking about a new product that we’ve released called LeadConvert.

So, one of the key reasons we launched our call centre product, LeadConvert, and it is based here in Melbourne in our office, is that we felt like there was a tremendous amount of opportunity for us to create more value through the value chain, beyond that lead originally being generated.

So we’re using that data-driven, predictive analytics approach to the lead generation process and to marketing automation, and now we’ve already been able to see that translating that into the offline environment has been really effective at lifting those key numbers that we look at – like lead to appointment, and appointment to sale.

George:

One of the things that we’ve been obsessed with right from the get go was how do we generate revenue for our clients and prove it – we saw the call centre as a real opportunity for us to move further down the funnel and have more accountability on the end result.

Our sales assistants, their role really within the process is to book appointments.

Mike:

I think one of the key things as well is that historically, we generate leads and run a campaign, and we’d receive feedback typically 4 weeks later or 2 weeks later after we’d been meeting with the client.

Now, because the sales assistant team is sitting in the same room as the campaign managers, we’re able to reduce that time delay.

George:

I mean the phone call is a great place for us to collect data and we use those phone calls, as we’ve already discussed, to book an appointment for the end user and for our clients.

But really what we’re doing when we’re having that phone call is extracting information, talking about what’s the job to be done in the customer journey.

Why are they looking to purchase this product or why do they need this product? What’s the timeframe for this product? Or, what are the potential objections for the product?

And we can use that information and pass it over to our sales agent so they have context when they go into the room and sit down, around what it is that person is really looking for.

Mike:

We started the beta period 6 months ago and we’ve got our call centre up to 10,000 phone calls per month so already we’re collecting a huge amount of information around  – how do we optimise the sales process, what are the key numbers we need to be looking at.

And already we’re seeing things like the speed to call (from the time a lead is generated to the time to the conversation on the phone begins), how does that influence sales outcomes.

We’re seeing that if we can get that lead time down to minutes, rather than hours or in some cases days, that has a dramatic influence on the return on investment our clients receive.

George:

And it means our clients agents can really focus on the end piece, and the top 20-10% of customers who are in that stage where they’re really ready to buy.

We focus on more of the long tail customers who are in the market and still really important (and who will eventually get to that stage), but we focus on understanding where are they in terms of the customer journey and how do we tailor the customer experience for them.

Mike:

I think the three products really work well together.

From the leads being generated to scaling that very top of funnel activity, looking at using marketing automation tools and lead nurturing to look at the mid funnel, and then obviously now with the call centre being able to make that final transaction to convert that appointment or convert that sale.

George:

And the feedback that we get from our clients is – obviously they love the fact that their leads are being handled in a really short manner of time. But I think one of the really key things, is just the amount of analytics and the type of analytics.

Mike:

With that in mind, we’ve been able to translate what we’ve been doing in the property market in the beta phase, into new industries as well.

So we’ve had some good initial success within the solar market and we’re all about the solar push as well, so it’s great to be working with more clients in that space. Looking at the education sector and also now we’re looking to enter the finance space as well.

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