Episode 2.03: Importance of Call Centers in Digital Marketing Campaigns

Janet Mobley: 0:50

Hello, I am Janet and I’m the founding and managing partner here at Fat Cat. Today, I am joined once again by my lovely and talented and co-owner, Business partner and friend. Yeah. Caitlyn Noble.

Caitlyn Noble: 1:04

It’s been a long time coming. Hey, I am Caitlyn. I am the head of client services here at Fat Cat Strategies. Janet, what are we diving into today?

Janet Mobley: 1:12

That is an excellent question. Let me see if I can answer it. I think today what we’re talking about is the importance of call centers in a digital environment. Campaign makes a huge

Caitlyn Noble: 1:24

difference.

Janet Mobley: 1:25

Yeah. So like our clients come to us. They have all these questions about generating leads online. We love talking about that today. We’re talking about what happens after that lead is generated.

Caitlyn Noble: 1:36

Right. Exactly.

Janet Mobley: 1:37

What happens in the call center?

Caitlyn Noble: 1:39

And no shame. I mean, we’ve worked with clients of all sizes. Some of y’all just wing it. There’s no rhyme or reason to what you do. You answer the phone and you’re just happy you got a phone call. And some of y’all actually have built out call centers. So let’s get into why call centers matter. I’m going to start with the big question. Why should you even care about a call center if you already have leads coming in? Janet, do you want to talk about that?

Janet Mobley: 2:07

So here’s the deal. You’re paying really good money for those leads, right? You know it because you talk to us about it. We’re talking about setting PPC budgets. You’re paying for SEO campaigns. That wrap around

Caitlyn Noble: 2:19

your

Janet Mobley: 2:20

truck wasn’t free. Yeah, you wrapped your truck. You’ve got your phone number out there. So every single lead costs you dollars, US currency. But unless there’s someone there to take care of that lead. That’s right. So the lead… contacts your company they either fill out a form or they call unless you have dedicated staff who are trained to take care of that lead and protect it like the investment that it is right um then you could just be burning money and looting losing business and so the harsh Truth is that people do shop around. They’re going to submit multiple forms on multiple websites. If they need a job done, if they’re looking for a painter, an HVAC contractor, they need their roof replaced, they’re probably going to get quotes from multiple companies. And whoever calls them first usually wins. They do. You guys know that. You’ve heard it. We’ve heard people talk about speed to lead. So that’s on the outbound side. version of the story where someone filled out a form and now you need to call them back quickly but there’s another version of the story which is the inbound version where some homeowner actually picked up the phone and called your business directly are you handling that inbound call well or is it going to um is it ringing 20 times We’ve seen that. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen no answers. We’ve seen no answers. Right. We’ve seen a weird like auto dialer. Yeah. We’ve seen weird like auto responders that pick up. Yeah. And then you have to go through a phone tree. Phone trees are

Caitlyn Noble: 4:04

usually bad.

Janet Mobley: 4:04

Yeah. And then the other thing that is just, it’s one of my pet peeves. You know, we all, we, the marketing agency, we work really hard to generate the lead. You as the owner, you paid money, you worked really hard to generate the lead, but then you’ve hired somebody to answer your phone who has like a little mouse voice. Oh yeah. Gosh. We record calls for our clients, these inbound calls. And I have listened to probably, you know, a teenager who Like you hired somebody’s niece to answer the phone. Right. And she answers it in this tiny little voice. And then somebody asks, you know, do you guys install gutters? And by the way, you do. But she doesn’t know that. She says, let me check. Yeah. She says, I don’t know. And then you’re like, but I… And the lead is gone. You’re

Caitlyn Noble: 4:54

gone. You’re dead. Right. So we’re just kind of high level telling you why call centers matter on the digital side of things is… you’ve got to make sure that you’ve staffed somebody to connect you from that click to a conversation and from a conversation to a consultation and having the right scripting that matches what you’re selling on your website, what’s on your trucks, what’s on your billboards, your TV commercials, radio spots, whatever it is, they all are connected. So let’s get into five ways that your call center can supercharge your marketing. Janet,

Janet Mobley: 5:31

what’s like one of the first ways? So I rambled on at the beginning of this episode. The number one way is you’re really going to enhance that lead conversion. For every form submission and every inbound phone call, your frontline call center staff, they are the true foot soldiers helping you with that conversion from a raw lead conversion Right. A day. Ugh. they may not even remember that they filled out the form or they’ve already had somebody out to give them an estimate. So, but on the other hand, if you’ve got really skilled call center staff and they’re connected to your CRM with good scripting and good training, and they call that lead back within minutes, then the person who just filled out that form based on a Facebook ad that they saw, they’re answering their phone and they’re, you’ve just increased the likelihood that you’re going to turn that inquiry into a qualified lead and an appointment. Caitlin, what’s the second thing people need to know about this?

Caitlyn Noble: 6:52

So to supercharge your marketing through a call center, Janet talked about this at the top when we were kind of summarizing what we were going to say, but it really improves your customer experience. So when people call into your office and get a voicemail or worse, a rushed answer from someone who’s juggling multiple tasks, it’s a bad impression. A call center creates consistency. It creates an experience of a friendly professional rep who is trained in a brand voice, who can answer questions calmly with any concerns you may have and make your company really feel like they are the premium service provider. The clients that we have who have that dedicated person or people man, it makes our lives so much easier because we know that the leads that we’re generating through SEO and PPC, which we talked about in previous episodes, are going to set in those appointments. So I just think that’s super important to make sure you’ve got a great customer experience when they’re answering the phone.

Janet Mobley: 7:51

Yeah, and I’m just going to tag on to that a little bit. I’m kind of airing some grievances here, but whatever. It’s our podcast. We can do whatever we want to. I mean, I cannot emphasize enough to the listeners out there the number of times that the owner of a home improvement company who’s invested their time, their money, their efforts, and their dreams, honestly, their business dreams of being an entrepreneur, invested all of that effort and energy into building a home improvement company. Then you go out and you hire a marketing firm. We’re running ads. You’re paying for ads. We’ve got campaigns going. We’ve built you a website. You get an inbound call and nobody answers it. Come on. I mean, I just can’t. I just can’t. Let’s just

Caitlyn Noble: 8:39

not even have a phone number.

Janet Mobley: 8:40

Well, just don’t run the ad. Right, exactly. Just shut your doors. Right. Seriously. I know. And then they want to know, well, why isn’t the marketing working? Well, the marketing worked. What didn’t work was how you treated the lead. We are obviously passionate about this. You treated them like, They don’t matter because you didn’t even answer the phone. So anyway, we are passionate about this. We’re very passionate. We have five tips. So the third tip that you’re going to

Caitlyn Noble: 9:07

supercharge your marketing.

Janet Mobley: 9:13

The third qualification.

Caitlyn Noble: 9:15

Yeah, this is good, Janet. You’re actually, this is a good one.

Janet Mobley: 9:17

So you guys know not everybody that calls or fills out a form is qualified or Oh, yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t mean that they’re never gonna buy, but you know that there’s some folks that contact you that are just not ready right now. So if you have a good, trained call center manager and staff that they know how to ask the right questions about timing, budget, needs, et cetera, then you are not sending your sales team on a wild goose chase to chase low quality leads. So you’re saving everybody’s time including the homeowner’s time and your sales rep’s time. And if you’ve got your call center staff trained to have this really good quality conversations, you are banking tomorrow’s sales, next month’s sales, because you’re able to capture some of those people that are ready, but they’re not ready right now. So the goal of getting your call center staff really focused you know, dialed in is to make it so that your salespeople are, oh yeah, I honestly didn’t even mean that pun. Get them dialed in. Get your call center dialed in. What you want them to do is create a situation where when you issue that appointment to your sales rep, they are walking into high-quality, high-probability appointments. So that’s point number three of why call centers are so important. Caitlin, what’s number

Caitlyn Noble: 11:08

four? Number four totally feeds off of that, and this one makes my little marketing heart sing. If you have a strong call center, call person. I mean, I’m telling you all, we keep saying center. One person is enough. One highly trained person is plenty. They can… collect data and analysis on the types of leads that are calling in and or they’re calling out to based off of the form submissions. Every call is a data goal mine. What does that mean? What questions are people asking? What objections are coming up? What neighborhoods are the hottest? If you’ve listened to our previous episodes, you know that this is what we can use to go on and write blog posts about. We can build content on our website. We can make content on social media about it because you’re taking a note really of where people are interested in, what they’re not interested in.

Janet Mobley: 12:07

What homeowners care about.

Caitlyn Noble: 12:08

Yeah, what homeowners care about. So that info can go straight into your CRM, which we’ll talk more about in next week’s episode. But capture that information. Even if it’s in a spreadsheet for right now, write down what those questions are and let’s fine tune your marketing campaigns to see if there’s one specific location that’s really hot. Let’s see if there’s a reason people aren’t setting those appointments and what we can do. And it becomes your next email topic, ad headline, blog post, you name it. So I’m really passionate about that. And then the last one, in terms of how

Janet Mobley: 12:43

we’re going to supercharge. In our five tips. Yeah. So tip number five is your call center plays such an important role in integrated marketing campaigns. So when your marketing team and your call center are synced, magic can happen. So let’s say you’re running a PPC campaign and there’s a promo offer and in that campaign and the PPC campaign goes to a landing page with specific messaging on it about a product, about a color, about a trend, about a promo offer. If you don’t connect that campaign and educate the person who’s answering your phone, then they’re not prepared to have that conversation. But if you do have everything integrated and you’re being thoughtful and you’re connecting your PPC campaigns, your landing pages with the scripting that your call center is using, then when that inbound phone call comes in, then the conversation that the homeowner has with your company completely matches their expectation. Absolutely. Because they searched on a keyword, they clicked on an ad, they landed on a landing page, and then they called the company and the entire journey matches their expectation and what they were looking for. So in that sense if you’re talking about integrating from beginning to end your reps play such an important role in reinforcing your ad messaging they’re helping your company handle objections and they’re guiding that lead or that homeowner towards being confident enough and comfortable enough to set an appointment. So it’s consistent, it’s professional, and making sure everything’s integrated works.

Caitlyn Noble: 14:31

And I’ll throw out a tip. We’ve worked with a bunch of lovely marketing managers, marketing directors of these home improvement companies. And I know for many instances, a lot of those people would print out an ad that we’re running and give to their call center and they would just tape it up in the call center in the cube so they knew like this is the ad that’s running um so that’s just a quick trick

Janet Mobley: 14:55

before we move on to the third section caitlin you said something earlier in the episode that i want to circle back to 15 years ago when i first started working with clients in the home improvement industry one of my clients kept mentioning his call center

Caitlyn Noble: 15:10

and

Janet Mobley: 15:11

And you said earlier in this episode, your call center can be one person. That’s right. I was kind of naive 15 years ago. And when my home improvement client, the one I had at the time, was saying, oh, my call center, my call center. I was honestly picturing like an entire floor of people in cubes with headsets on.

Caitlyn Noble: 15:33

Wow, that must have been a lot of leads that company was

Janet Mobley: 15:36

generating. No, and so then later we actually, you know… Got to see. Got to see. Yeah. You know, we went and visited one of our clients because we’ve got some out-of-state clients. We traveled, we visited the client. We go and we see this call center and it’s a lady at a desk.

Caitlyn Noble: 15:54

Oh, yeah. With that printed out ad that we designed for that month’s

Janet Mobley: 15:58

promo. Yeah, with stickies all over her monitor. So… I mean, you guys know this. You’re not dumb. You’re listening to this podcast because you want to make your business better. But if you’re early in the journey and you’re going to shows or you’re talking to peers and you hear them talking about call centers, it can just be one person. And then it grows into two people. And then it grows from there.

Caitlyn Noble: 16:20

You’re jumping into the next part, which I love you for doing that, friend. Because you’re probably sitting here thinking, okay, great. This is awesome. Thanks for the tip. But how do I actually pull this off? I mean, I’m still answering my phones. Janet, let’s go through a few ways on how to implement a call, quote unquote, call center. What’s the first way?

Janet Mobley: 16:44

So I think the first thing you have to do is you have to decide, are you going to staff this in-house or are you going to outsource it? Right. So most of our clients, they go through this journey where they’re in the beginning, they’re answering all of the calls themselves on their cell phone. And at a certain point that doesn’t work anymore. So, you know, if you decide to outsource, I would encourage you to reach out to some peers, maybe in the network that you’re in. Let’s say you’re installing like jacuzzi bath products or, you know, you know, James Hardy Siding, you’re in the gutter helmet network. If you’re in a network, ask your peers, whatever it is, go to the your manufacturer that’s providing you with supplies. And if you haven’t met some peers who are outside of your service area, because you don’t want to be You know, you want to get information. Yeah. You don’t want to be talking to your competitors. Talk to a peer who you’re never going to compete with three states away. Right. Who you look up to and ask them, how did you start your call center? And they may point you to some outsourced companies that can. So before you take on, you know, hiring internally and managing a person, maybe you dip your toe in the water. We have a

Caitlyn Noble: 18:04

lot of clients who do this

Janet Mobley: 18:05

too. Yes. This is the path that we have seen be most common.

Caitlyn Noble: 18:08

And we get the question all the time. Yeah. Do you have any recommendations for outsourced third-party providers?

Janet Mobley: 18:15

Right, and so I would say tap your peer network because they’re going to have that firsthand experience. If it’s authentic. Yeah, it’ll be authentic experience with really hiring these call centers, and they can answer in a much deeper way questions than we can about how do you train an outsourced person company to handle objections, set appointments, you know, coordinate with your, your calendar. So the first step you need to do is decide, am I going to hire this on my staff as a W2 employee, or I’m going to outsource it. And there’s pros and cons of each. And I would just encourage you to tap, um, a peer or a mentor for, to get some insights on that.

Caitlyn Noble: 18:59

Definitely. And so whether you, uh, stick with in-house or you are going out sourced, um, scripting is so important we talked about this earlier um you you have to have people who are answering your phones or calling out and setting those appointments who know what you guys sell and know where you sell it so we’ve had horror stories where we’ve had an outsourced call center not even know the service area to the full extent

Janet Mobley: 19:29

you know so so a homeowner calls in in a neighborhood that you service but the Outsourced call center is like, nope, I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t go to that address. Nope.

Caitlyn Noble: 19:38

So don’t settle for robotic. You can really do some great role playing with real conversations that whether it’s this outsourced vendor or in-house. In-house, of course, you probably have more control over where you can practice, but definitely have training and definitely have scripting. That’s one of the other ways just to make sure you’re implementing your call center. What’s another way, Janet?

Janet Mobley: 20:02

Yeah. Another way I wanted to talk about the technology, but before we get into the technology, I just wanted to add on a point about scripting. We’ve been in this business as an agency supporting home improvement contractors for 10 years plus. Really 15 if you go all the way back. And what we have found, we talked a little bit about the manufacturers that you get your products from. many of them will have scripts that are very relevant to the product that you are installing. That’s a great point. So if you’ve never had to… offload that task. If you’ve been the one and you just know how to answer all those questions because you started the business and you’ve been doing it. Now you’re looking at like giving this task to someone else and delegating it. And you’re wondering, God, I don’t even know how to get out of my brain how to talk to homeowners and train somebody else. Go to your peer network and go to your manufacturer and see if someone will share with you some phone scripting. And I would bet $100 you can find someone who will share scripting with you. And that will be a good place to start. So then the next thing I would say… you’ve decided if you’re hiring internally or you’re going to outsource it, then you got to make sure you have scripts. The next thing you have to do is make sure you’ve got the right technology in place. So in the next episode, we’re going to talk more about CRMs. For this conversation, we are just assuming that you have a CRM in place. So when you start beefing up your call center, make sure that you are using all of the features of your CRM to support those call center efforts. So some CRMs have automatic routing to different call center staff. call tracking, recording. Monitors performance. Which can help you monitor performance. So, you know, just spend some time looking at what your CRM has in place and consider putting another piece of tech in place that communicates with your CRM, which is, you know, we use a program called What Converts. It records every single phone call. Our clients love it. And we can see the source of that phone call. Did it come from organic search? Did it come from a paid ad? Did it come from a Facebook ad? And so then we can expose your management team to that resource and they can listen to the calls and then see what happened in the CRM. So that technology component is going to be really important as you build out your call center. So Caitlin, what’s the last thing people need to know in this five minutes? All of the

Caitlyn Noble: 22:51

tips. We’ve already said it, and I’m going to say it again and again and again. Please keep your team connected, even if it’s you and Susie who’s calling. you know, and answering all the calls, calling people out and answering the calls, please stay connected with Susie and make sure that she, the team, they know what’s going on promotion wise. They know if you’re running a Memorial day sale, they know, um, if you’re closed, they, they know if you’re expanding into a new territory, um, that’s really going to be important. Also, I would challenge you to get that lead quality feedback. So, um, It’s one thing to have somebody who’s connected with what’s going on with your business. It’s another thing to get that feedback from that person to say, man, these were a lot of spam calls. Or I’m getting a lot of calls that are not in the service area. You should check with your marketing agency and make sure they’re advertising in the right location. Talk to them. Stay connected. Keep communication strong.

Janet Mobley: 23:57

Yeah, and that communication, to your point, Caitlin, is two-way. It is. You as the owner-operator, you want to be giving your call center staff feedback on how they handle themselves on the call, but then they have such critical insights to give back to you about what they’re seeing and what they’re hearing on those calls.

Caitlyn Noble: 24:19

It’s huge. This was short and sweet, but we did talk to you guys about why call centers matter, five ways your call center can supercharge your marketing, and then, of course, how to implement a call center. So, Janet, bring it home.

Janet Mobley: 24:34

So to wrap it all up and stitch it all together. Digital marketing is the thing that’s going to help you generate leads. It is. But your call center is what turns those leads into appointments, which turn into revenue. So it’s not either or, it’s both. It is. And if you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on ads, SEO, email, all the different marketing tactics, agencies, if you’re going to spend money on that and you don’t get your call center done, Dialed in. I love it. Then you’re really leaving money on the table.

Caitlyn Noble: 25:11

You really are. So here’s our challenge to you. We typically don’t challenge you. Audit your current follow-up process. How fast are you responding to leads? How consistent is the experience? If you see room for improvement, consider testing out a call center, whether it’s a small internal team, one person, a specialized partner. Just find somebody and do it. The payoff, I promise you, it’s going to be more booked appointments, better customer experience, and more closed sales.

Janet Mobley: 25:41

okay so if you’re ready to put your call center to the test we have a great solution for you lead champ by fat cat strategies what is lead champ it is a sweepstakes package that is guaranteed to generate hundreds of high quality homeowner leads visit fat cat strategies forward slash lead champ to learn more today

Caitlyn Noble: 26:02

oh yeah that’s gonna definitely supercharge your Call center.

Janet Mobley: 26:05

Oh, yeah. So when you do a sweepstakes package, if you have not included your call center in the planning and prepared them for the volume of applicants that you’re going to get when you run one of these contests, it can be a little bit

Caitlyn Noble: 26:25

scary. And spoiler alert, if you do decide to do this lead champ by Fat Cat Strategies, what is included in this package is, believe it or not… Call center scripting. Saying it, so. Next week, y’all, we’re going to talk about CRM’s, Customer Relationship Management Systems. If you’re still using a spreadsheet, sticky notes, and just your memory to manage those leads and customers, it might work for now, but it’s not going to get you to the next level.

Janet Mobley: 26:53

So thanks again for joining us for another episode of this podcast. If you can give us a half an hour, we are going to give you actionable tips, tricks, insights, and ideas to help you grow your home improvement company through online marketing. And if you found us today I found today’s episode helpful we would love it if you would share it with one of your peers a fellow contractor business owner don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast and we’d also love it if you’d go on your favorite podcast platform whether you’re listening on Apple or through Spotify and give us a review thank you that’d be awesome talk to y’all soon digital marketing for contractors is created by fat cat strategies for more information visit fatcatstrategies.com.