double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Last month I wrote about the “perfect storm” for lead buyers. Like most storms, it didn’t last long.

Here we are, about a month later, and the refi market is shrinking fast. There are fewer and fewer people looking to refinance or able to refinance. As a result, the few leads that are available are sold more times.

Some of our clients and partners here at DoublePositive were seeing their transfer rates dip. They called us to say, “What’s going on?”

Rather than blame the economy (where does that get you?), we turned the question on ourselves. Are we doing everything we can to get as many new transfers over to our clients as possible? We already knew the leads were being sold the maximum amount of times, and speed-to-lead was no longer the secret sauce. We needed a new recipe that would allow us to contact more people.

Today I’ll share with you the first part of our answer, which we’re very excited about: our new inbound call-back service.

“You say outbound, I say inbound.”

Historically, when we call the consumer, they answer the phone 50% of the time – but lately that contact rate is dipping. Part of the problem now is, more consumers are using their cell phones as their primary phone number. They hide behind a personal firewall, screening their calls, especially numbers they don’t recognize. We had to find another way to reach them.

And so we followed a hunch. We assumed that consumers, if they saw the same number flashing in their caller ID a couple times, would wonder who is trying to reach them, and call the number back. To test this theory, and prove that we could get more consumers to answer their phones or call us back, we developed inbound call-back technology.

Here’s how it works:

1. DoublePositive (Call Center A) outbound dials on an online inquiry
2. Consumer does not answer the phone
3. Consumer calls back phone number on their Caller ID (phone number provided by RingRevenue)
4. Consumer routed to an IVR (also provided to us by RingRevenue)
5. Consumer can either choose to speak with our client or can be added to our DNC
6. Consumer chooses to speak to our client. Call routed to DoublePositive Inbound Call Center (Call Center B)
7. DoublePositive agent answers call, confirms interest and transfers call to client
8. Call Center B sends disposition in real time through DoublePositive to Call Center A and the lead is immediately marked as transfer and removed from the queue

To learn more about RingRevenue, our partner in providing inbound call-back services, check out the press release.

Lead buyers benefit from this solution, because not only are we the first to reach their leads with our outbound calling, but we’ve also found a way to capture those who are screening their calls and get them to call us back, improving transfer rates.

Lead sellers benefit because this service ultimately improves the performance of their leads. In a perfect world, we will contact more leads and transfer more borrowers to the lender. Ideally, lenders will convert more of those leads to loans, and will buy more leads. Win-win-win.

Statistically speaking, it’s still early, but the initial data indicates a slight rise in contact rates. It appears to be working. Week over week, more and more people are calling us back.

The cool part, to me, is how synchronized our two call center operations are. Though they are in different parts of the country, our centers are talking to the consumer and communicating with each other seamlessly, in real time. As a result, we are poised to contact more people and transfer more calls.

Check back soon because we have more to come. DoublePositive is rolling out a suite of innovative products in the coming weeks. In the meantime, please let us know what you think of our inbound call-back concept, in the comments below.