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Recently we ran an experiment for an e-Commerce client of ours to understand the efficacy of C2C leads provided by Google.

Problem Statement: Client Call Centre perpetually complained that they were not receiving enough Call leads. Although the Form Leads ran through the same Adwords campaign produced more conversions. The client runs a car servicing consumer services business. It is interesting to note that we had advised the client against not using the C2C feature as it is difficult to trace the leads and hold accountability for the performance.

Experiment: We changed the mobile number in the backend for a period of 4 days. We became the defacto Call Centre for the client handling Google leads.

Experience: The experience was a learning. And it was hard indeed. Calls came in at 10.55 PM in the night and 6.26 am in the morning. A total of 25 calls were received during the 96 hours or so.

Results:

Calls never matured: 28%

Calls not relevant: 24%

Relevant Calls: 48%

#5HacksforleadsfromGoogleC2CFunctionality#

Insights:

1. Show Hunger – When a customer call you at 7.47 AM on a Friday, she wants you to pick up the call immediately. She’s stranded in the middle of the road with a broken car. She needs help and needs it NOW. She chose us over our competition because the search words chosen by us to promote our business happens to match with the search terms typed by her on the google task bar. Typical process journey of leads sitting in the CRM bucket and being handled from 9AM to 7PM by the Call Centre Executive does not work for C2C leads. So pick your calls 16X7. Realign your call centre work on Sundays and Holidays. Instead of one shift help desk, run it in 2 shifts.

2. Deliver on Specific Promise – Calls are far more specific vis a vis form leads. Customers ask for specific solutions to their specific problems. They have called us most probably after they have not found the solution closeby. Now this could be a bit challenging as we may not be servicing in a particular locality or may not have a particular size or colour in our inventory. Study this pattern and go for a combination of the following 2 actions.

3. Spot the opportunity and Go for it – If many customers are calling for Breakdown service repeatedly. Here is an opportunity in the offing. Go back to drawing board and tie-up with a service provider. Create a product process around it and you may create a Billion $ business. Amazon is continuously creating profitable business by studying searches which don’t match with what they offer.

4. Realign your Keywords – If the Call leads are way too far from your actual offerings or current SLA’s, better realign the keywords. E.g – If you don’t sell Sandals for Girls below 12 years, there is no point in bidding for keywords related to kids. Probably you need to specify that you sell sandals for women.

5. Set your Expectations – As this experiment teaches us the bitter reality of the Indian market. There are many smart alecs (friendly sales people) who use these Calls to do spam calling to sell their products, services or their candidature for job or even for a dealership. Now this is a necessary evil and cannot be avoided. So brace yourself for 60% efficiency.

Its our view that this feature is a great boon for getting profitable leads for small/medium owner driven niche’ service businesses like Private Ambulance service, Tutors, Pet spas, plumbing services, Electricians e.t.c

For large businesses which are process driven this could be great and cheap listening tool to explore new related business ideas as seen through their customers’ eyes.

Happy to hear your comments or feedback about running C2C campaigns and better hacks if any to improve success rates.

Recently while developing a chat bot for one of our clients, we did some research and found some interesting facts from the Botsphere. Here are 6 Must Know Facts.

1. Bots are already doing a great job of answering a lot of FAQ’s(frequently asked questions) in whole lot of websites and web platforms. Many of the repetitive instructions in terms of navigation through the long forms, online payment e.t.c are handled accurately and efficiently by the Bots. Reporting Company quarterly earnings is a perfect assignment for a Bot, because it requires a lot of precision in number reading and doesn’t require any creative syntax. This means a lot of call centre seats in Airlines, IRCTC, Insurance Companies e.t.c will soon be taken over by Bots without salary. In our estimate about 50% of the jobs in the low end of telecalling will get shaved off once Machine Learning and AI will enable voice to these Bots.

2. Siri, Alexa, Google Lens, Google Assistant are all Bots made of machine learning. They may look cool and trendy today. But soon they will be replaced by advanced Bots capable of reading, listening, talking, seeing and doing in one place. Google has already released Cloud TPU recently. Auto MO is an effort from Google to leverage the power of thousands of developers across the world to accelerate this process multiple times.

3. So be prepared to have smarter Bots in the future(maybe in 2 to 3 years time) who could probably blog or teach quadratic equations to high schoolers. So many jobs like telesales, customer service will have Bots taking over. Teachers will still be around. However they may have a Bot assistant.

4. These Bots will be neural and therefore will be far more cognitive and intuitive in their interaction. The interactions with them would be customized based on your language preference, your voice preference(male/female) and would be interactive.

5. Going forward, we may all have our phone Bots talking to the Bank Bots and doing many transactions with Bank, Repair Garage, Grocery e.t.c without human interaction. So my Bot will speak to yours. My Bot will be smarter than yours. We shall flaunt our Bots. Will Bots have miscommunication, confusion, ego clashes etal needs to be seen.

6. This won’t make us – the homosapians any less in demand. On the contrary, we will give ourselves a promotion Many of follow-up chores will be handled by the denizens of the Bot kingdom. Creative thinking, Feeling and Wanting – the 3 key functions of our brain will continue to be happily performed by us.