I attend many business development meetings where people try and generate tons of ideas about better customer service with digitalisation, simplifying processes or designing the next product feature. However, my last experience in the telecom sector was different because we were discussing the lead generation from existing conversations. Lead generation is my favourite topic because it improves revenue growth cost-efficiently.
Could existing customer service help with qualitative lead generation?
A traditional approach towards lead generation is to catch new contacts through social media (Facebook, LinkedIn), blogs, keyword search (Google) or website visits (Leadfeeder). Sure, this is one of the options, but sometimes it works more like pouring water into a leaky bucket (https://www.ventureharbour.com/b2b-lead-generation-strategies/).
Could we rethink this approach and try another angle?
Most of the large service providers have their own call centres – such as banks, telecoms, insurance, utility. Customer service is the first line of communication for any company and deals with most clients so the quality aspect is really important, but most companies tend to overlook the sales possibilities of customer service. Could we change this?
Existing conversations – a great lead generation source
Generating leads from existing conversations is an excellent source of business growth. The customer service representative solves technical issues, redirects more incoming requests to digital channels, builds stronger relationships with existing customers, etc. Exceptional customer service has been here for decades.
Could you imagine the following conversation:
- Customer: Hi, there’s something wrong with my TV screen. I can’t see the picture, it freezes and jumps. Could you please fix it?
- Telecom technician: Hi, I’ll take a look at it. May I ask about your devices – TV and router types?
- Customer: My TV is Cosmos, it is quite old, but has been working great for me for a couple of years already.
- Telecom technician: OK. Now, I see there was an error in the network, fixed it for now.
- Customer: Yes, it’s working now. Thank you so much!
- Telecom technician: Thank you! Have a nice day!
The technician provided a solution right away and the customer was satisfied. But what about the qualified lead generation? The sentence “My TV is Cosmos, it is quite old, but has been working great for me for a couple of years already” could be a hint for a sales opportunity. As the technician focused on the technical issue, the company should have detected the signal and started working with it.
Catch leads from existing conversations and increase your revenue with Feelingstream
Lead generation from existing conversations is much easier than it may appear at first glance. The Feelingstream toolkit (shortly described here) can be used to discover new sales leads, detect conversations indicating customer churn but also bottlenecks in the processes or errors in customer service. Large companies lose a massive amount of money if they do not focus on existing customers.
For example, we have successfully validated that the telecom sector can find 3 new sales leads out of 10 calls to sell to existing customers and this increases their sales by 5%. This is a huge improvement! Moreover, this achievement is reachable in one week once they start using our AI tool in the organisation!
