On this episode of the OneLeg Up podcast, Chief Mastermind, Vic Sun, is joined by two of OneLeg’s Tech Alchemists: Steven White and KC Urias to discuss all things tech. They specifically get into the weeds of Lead Perfection and Five9.
Transcript:
Hello, welcome to one leg up where we discuss how you can deliver the very best customer experience and how you can achieve marketing waste. I’m Vic. Sun. I’m the mastermind here at one leg. And today I have two very special guest joining me, Steven White and Casey Reyes, and both our tech alchemist’s on our technology team, Casey and Steven, how are you guys doing today? I’m doing fantastic. How are you doing, Stephen? I’m doing pretty good myself, Nick. All right, well, keep us informed, but better than that. How’s your how’s your Friday says things going on a Friday with both of you?
You know what, it’s been an absolutely crazy week, crazy good. There’s been constant flow of tasks coming in and a lot of new learning and jumping on new technologies to better suits who we currently have, that we’re preparing for.
And it’s been really, really challenging and exciting, but also exhausting. So I’m glad it’s Friday because I’m ready to take another service. Amen. That sounds good. And I think your birds are telling us the same thing. Yeah, the birds always want to be involved.
That’s right. That’s that’s that’s pretty cool. How about you, Stephen? Well, today is my fiancee’s birthday, so I’m very excited about that or to get some nice dinner. But aside from that, things have been good. Lots of projects have been moved along very quickly.
I’m excited about these updates we’re doing. So it’s it’s it’s been very rewarding work, to say the least. It’s actually you guys are menzer IT professionals. So, you know, while we’re generally technology agnostic, a number of our home improvement clients use lead perfection as their CRM to your customer relationship management platform.
And today, we want to discuss some of those features. We often find our clients or the industry at large. Right, overlooking and therefore missing some of the system efficiencies or tweaks or little Easter eggs. This little the little x ray that will help their technology platform really perform even better.
Really getting the maximum amount of use as well as I would say, for their clients, because it’s a client relationship management platform. Right, to usually perfection. So first, let’s chat about, in my opinion, probably one of the biggest features users are overlooking from within leep perfection.
And that is automated text messages, emails, you know, nudges, really drip campaigns, retargeting, remarketing, however you want to call it. That is one of the powerful features that perfection has. So let’s start off with with with Ukc. You know, can you tell us a little bit about it and what you’ve done for, you know, that that that
makes it customized, bespoke, more efficient and more effective? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things besides a lot of people not even knowing that perfection can be utilized as a text message and email platform that I set up for them is the great thing.
It’s great for tracking purposes. So say that you have one of those other email platforms that you’re bouncing around in between. Now, you’re going to have to update a contact list. You’re going to have to keep that contact list up to date.
But when these new leads come in, these new hot appointments come in, you’re going to have to jumble and try to get that updated for your email blast. Let’s say you got like 20 clients in one day. How are you going to keep that up?
So the great thing about having it all in one area, like on a live perfection, is that text message. That email has something called tokens that pulls right from the lead itself. So you want to talk to Jill.
You can have it say hello, little name token and write in that one section. Everything could be customized because it’s pulling it directly from the actual lead itself. That’s what the brilliant thing is about, having it tied to your CRM.
The other thing that’s great is you can put together a HTML template that you already have that’s completely customized to your company, or you can put together a plain text email, which is actually starting to become all the rage.
OK, well, so let’s unpack that a little bit and then we’ll get Stephen’s take on, you know, and what he’s done, you know, differently or you know as well as some customizations he’s done. And you talked about, you know, tokens and, you know, things like having a hub spot for a lot of you know, the listeners out
there won’t understand those things. So maybe let’s unpack that a little bit and explain really what is the advantage of doing this right for the for business owners who are not doing it right now and how they can do it easily if they’re not utilizing.
Right. So the biggest advantage is being able to have a email or text, mostly emails going out. That is the big, beautiful email that you think of when you think of customers sending receiving information from companies, but also having the plain text aspect of it.
And, you know, email companies are getting smart, smart, those Jenelle’s, those yahoos, the AOL URLs, all of those main email domains, they will block each HTML, because a lot of the people who are utilizing the HTML are people trying to sell you something.
So having that plain text option that you could send out at the same time as an HTML email, that is you being able to communicate with your customer regardless of their their filters on their email. And that is the biggest complaint that people get.
You know, you try to talk to your customer, you’re like, hey, we missed your appointment. What happened? They’re like, well, you didn’t say anything to me. It’s like, oh, did you check your spam folder? You don’t need to have that conversation.
You know, just get them to talk to them how you’re attempting to talk to them from the very beginning without having those issues being blocked in your inboxes. Now the. Yeah, go ahead. OK, I mean, I got I got it, I think it makes sense that especially nowadays, you know, you you remove the clutter and sometimes it’s
not about being efficient and saying, well, here’s a template that looks so nice with all the bells and whistles, because html, it sounds like it does get block more than plain text. And so, you know, a lot of companies don’t know that.
And so one of the things that we’ve done is we do a B testing, you know, for many of our clients. And what you’ve done for some of your clients is in well, we’ll do both. But, you know, we’ll make sure that we’ve got plain text that’s easy to be delivered or at least, you know, has a
tendency for higher delivery rates. So I guess my question to to to to you both, and I don’t know if you want to take this case, yours even is how do you make that engaging? Like how do you meet that?
Because people who said, OK, I’ve not used that before, now look into it. And if they start using the templates, they still may not be effective. They still may not end up getting the results they want. So how do you make those emails and text messages effective?
Yes. What we’ve done is a lot of the AB testing when it comes to plain text emails. Now, you can bolt as many phones as you want. You can put as many colors and bullet points in those plain text emails as you want.
But what you’re missing out on is having the links that take the customers to that more dynamic experience. So. And how many links? How many links in general? Yeah, just you just want one one call to action. That’s the main most effective way to communicate.
And how long should the the email be? Like five paragraphs, maybe? Yeah, of course. I think you’re going to read a whole five paragraph e-mail. No, no, no, no, no, no. So the average user, I would say, probably will get through three full sentences before they begin to lose interest in what you’re talking about.
So one to three to four sentences at most. And if it’s a text message, one sentence, one sentence, that’s very impactful. And it sounds like, you know, less is more. Now, they’ll take they’ll take it to the very, you know, OK, so that that all seems like easy to accomplish.
What is the difficulty in writing these emails like? You know, there is a lot of companies out there. They don’t have copywriters like we do. And in and professional, you know, writers who who go into conversation, conversational architects, basically.
So what do you recommend if they don’t have that in-house? It’s really tough and you want to find somebody like what we have going on here at one leg that has had all of that testing under their experience, which we who already know what’s effective.
And so you want to be able to take people who have done that research before you’ve even talk to them and work with people like that. So that way, it’s just a very, very quick. OK. I already know that people respond to this type of wording, plug and play, get it going on the road.
OK. And we’ll we’ll come back to that, because I think part of the the thing is well, that needs to be clear is that even with that, there’s you know, you still do have to customize based on the company.
And there’s a there’s a bespoke way that you you attach their culture in the messaging based on the ideal customer profile, as well as the user journey. How about you, Stephen? Like what have you seen from within lead perfection that people just get?
You know, you just you’ve seen it a few times in the last couple of months and you’re surprised. Wow, they’re not using it. They should be. I would say one of the biggest things within lead perfection is customizing a user experience based on where their lead sources from.
And it’s, you know, they try to do this one size fits all. Let me just call everybody as much as I can. And at the end of the day, there’s people that, you know, the low buying intent leads that just get more and more upset.
There’s a high buying intent, leads that are getting missed. So if you’re sitting there and you think there’s a one size fits all solution. You’re doing it wrong. You know, you touched something there and you happened to be a five nine expert, now I know this is this podcast, you know, it’s very specific to perfection.
But five nine, one of the biggest dialers in the United States in the world, you know, they have a direct integration with the perfection. And I know many of the home improvement companies that we have as clients as well as prospects that we’ve spoken to do use five nine.
So you talked about dialing and calling their can you touch a little bit about, you know, you know, maybe not explain the whole system? Yeah, I know you can do that, but but maybe what’s what’s one or two things that you’ve seen, you know, going in and continuing off from your Premiere, from your previous thought there of
how you customize that experience, you know, using the lead section five, nine day Olexander. That’s a very complex system. It is. And some of the challenges and you know, this is funny, like one of the first things I do when where we hear from a new client is you want to find out how does their company handle
things? Give them a quick call. Very quickly, since this is your first interaction with this client, you’re going to find out, you know, how they’re handling a person calling in. Usually I’d say 70 to 80 percent of the time.
Our first call is met with a very outdated phone recording system, usually lands in maybe it’s even been someone’s cell phone, which is just mind boggling. I don’t know how a company handle that. But, you know, just an outdated system that leaves a person calling in if if their information is valuable, is that person calling in?
It should be very valuable. Sometimes it’s just lost. You know, we don’t they don’t capture it. And and at that point, I mean, forget the rest of the process. But let’s say they do have something in place and it’s just, you know, leave a message or hopefully somebody answers.
If it’s if it’s on ours, if it’s off hours, it’s leave a message. And the message is in someone’s office, in the back office, where John has to come in on, you know, Monday morning. And he listens to the seven voicemails and maybe he forgets something in the process, then that information is lost as well as just
haphazardly done. And I think it’s overlooked. OK, so so it sounds like you you’re you’re you’re you’re saying, well, five, nine, be able to do some deducing that from what you’re saying. So, you know, if companies are simply having perfection and then they they may have just an outdated way of doing things, maybe they’re just their PBX
system simply sends the caller to a voicemail. If no agents pick up or no agents are available. Right. Or if it’s offered to a cell phone. So how would you use five nine if you’re already using that, for example, to be able to go and make sure that you maximize the customer experience?
Again, this is we we focus a lot on customer experience. How do you use that word? Five, nine? Absolutely. So one of the one of the big things with five nine is they have this really amazing possibility to improve.
It’s called an IVR interactive voice recording system. So it’s essentially just a way for a person to talk to a person without talking to a person, you know, gone to any any business. You’ll hear. Press one to do this.
You know, that’s that that’s what essentially is, let’s say, like the carpet leading to or you’re walking up to the home or you’re walking into the business. The first thing they see is your is your big, beautiful sign that says, hi, welcome to our company.
This is that in the voice recording world. And what I find time and time again is that it’s overlooked and ways that you can improve that to improve the overall user experience. Just very simply, you can have somebody in your office, you know, someone from your company, have that very personal recording that leaves kind of it makes
it so that their first interaction is a good one. And and in doing so, it sets a stage for the next step, which is essentially talking to one of your your callers or an office manager who would turn that into hopefully an appointment and then do a sale if you’re if you are leaving.
If you’re if you think that the first interaction isn’t worth improving, then at the end of the day, you’re losing out on that first impression with your clients. Right, and again, it’s important for for people to know that, you know, we’re five nine.
It sounds like you are able to utilize recordings. You can customize recordings. Give me an example of a project that you’ve done where you’ve you know, you just give us three things that you did that you find most companies don’t do even when they use five nine.
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things we did as a person calls in, let’s say they call in and they get cold feet. Maybe the IVR has a recording that they don’t they don’t like or they heard something they didn’t like.
And they end up hanging up that person’s information. Surprising. Five nine has the ability to make it so that you still capture that person’s information, even if they hang up right away. No one’s a lot of people aren’t using that ability.
It’s just the person calls in. They looked you up on Google or they saw your ad or they got your information somehow and they end up hanging up. And you don’t value that person’s information. That’s lost opportunity, to say the least.
That’s one way where I made it. So somebody’s calling in. We’re able to capture their information and then follow up on that person’s information, just to say one example. Another example is using some some of our professional voice actors and also improving the voice, recording it so that a person calling in gets a few nice tidbits about
the company. You know, we’ve been in business for thirty seven years. We’ve got you know, we’re a family owned company, you name it, these kind of soothing words that a person likes to hear that improves that first interaction so that they know that they’re talking to a reputable company that has experience, that has done maybe many jobs
over time. These are just a couple examples, things that make it so when they first have that interaction with somebody, it just improves. It makes them feel a little better about and a little more open as they start to have that conversation.
You know, they are calling in. They are interested in these people calling in. They’re trying to find out a bit more about your company. They’re making that call. So why not give them the basics of your company to make the job of the caller a little easier?
And then hopefully that makes the job of sales personal easier. So as along the way, it just helps them down the path to get to that that final sale point. That makes sense, and, you know, a part of that that that, you know, we kind of moved a lot to the Dila because I know this is a
major piece for for companies that use five nine. It is quite complex using it. You know, even large companies that we’ve, you know, acquired as clients as well as prospects, you know, we’ve seen them not utilizing it the way that they should, or at least they’re not utilizing, you know, the platform for its maximum potential, because for
the lack of understanding, one of the things that I liked about what you said was, you know, using the ADR and IVR is more than just an interactive voice response. It can actually what what you said, it can capture people who’ve hung up.
You can tie that down for text messages. And for those companies were truly serious about customer experience. You know, you can actually create, you know, interactions with where you can go in project and say, well, look, the average amount of times that you’re going to be waiting is here.
Would you like us to call you back? Right. And then you basically just stop having that person wait on the phone. They hang up the barrier before they hang up, that you have the verify, you know, the phone number and the information, and then they go ahead and get a phone call.
Right. And then available agent becomes available. These are rules that you guys have both worked on. But of course, you know, we’re talking about it here because we want to let people out there know there is hope. You know, it’s just there.
It just may be you don’t have the people who know how to utilize that properly. And the one thing that I’d like to share is just this little tidbit. So in South Korea, they you know, they they they’ve done these studies on traffic lights.
And so what they actually started in South Korea, where they had a countdown so that when people you know, when you see the the the red light, it tells you it’s counting down to when it’s going to start to turn green.
And and and collision fatalities went down by almost 60 or something, 70 percent of the study online that you can look at. And again, this is quite significant. And what they found was people’s anxiety and frustrations, their feelings when they’re waiting, you know, it dramatically drop.
They became at ease because you have you gave them an expectation like, OK, I’m 15 seconds away from it. You know what I mean? As opposed to just like when is this thing going to end? If the same thing for Aivaras?
You know, you can do that. You can set the expectation for people. You know, I happened you get referrals a lot from one of our partners in the medical field. And, you know, there’s this one call center that I was referred to yesterday.
And then when we went through it, it was like, would we discovered their system? They’re using five. It was like 15, 18 minute wait times. And it was just like, wow, why don’t you just tell your clients and we’ll call you back and you give them the expectation.
And they literally looked at the you know, the zoom. They were like. We can do that. Yes, you can do that. You can tell you don’t have to have the wait. And this is medical, right people? I mean, when they call in, it’s it is a matter of life and death rate.
Sometimes it can just happen. That’s why they’re saying on the phone and a customer experience, that’s really, I think, a big deal, including in home improvement, where potentially, you know, they’re calling, they’re waiting, and, you know, they don’t like your IVR.
So you’re covering pretty much everything. But really, this is focus on customer experience. So I want to I want to go back to both of you guys and maybe we go and ask Casey. This time is I want to go back to the text of the emails.
You know, just what’s one thing that you’ve seen or two things that you’ve seen is, OK, now you’ve got the text set up in the email, some automation from within. Let perfection, you know, to your clients, et cetera.
I’m still not getting the results. OK, OK, OK. I’ve done everything you asked me to do. I’ve got a template going out, HTML, plaintext. I’m sending it out to everyone. Still not getting a good response. You know, people have asked us that, you know, my rehashed campaign is emails and texts and nobody responds right after we denville
like they just don’t respond to it. And we we sent 17 of them in a month. What’s wrong with that? How have you been able to fix that? I mean, if you’re only seven, sending about 17 of them in a month, you’re you’re targeting a very, very small audience.
You don’t need to be tapping new leads all the time with text message. You know, that’s the brilliant thing about them, is even if somebody hasn’t talked to you in a while or maybe it’s somebody that’s brand spanking new that you haven’t even had a chance to engage yet.
You can set up those text messages and emails specific to how the person is in the projects. So maybe it’s somebody that you’ve already talked to before and you have an email and a text message put together that specifically says, hey, I heard that you had a great experience.
Do you have anybody else that you know who’s interested in these projects? Give us a call and we can make it worth your while. Not necessarily saying it like that, but something in a way that is enticing to reach out to those people that you haven’t talked to a while or those initial response.
People were maybe you met them at a fair. You talk to them face to face already. And you already have that. That email or that text message set up that says, hey, I know you talked to Repp name here, that it automatically pulls from the record.
I’m just following up about that. So what was your experience with the with the company so far? Do you have any questions? The key is always, always, always personalization based on when that person has already interacted with your company and where they’ve interacted with your company and how you’re phrasing things.
You want to make them want to talk to you. And so you want to offer as much support as possible. And Steven, what do you think has added to to the text of the email that has made the ones that you guys have been creating so much more engaging or just people can’t help but click for OK
them? Ways to improve the tax so that it just becomes irresistible to respond. You can do it with a simple few words, if you start to kind of pull on the strings of loss aversion, you can improve someone’s response.
You can also, if you decide to add a link to that, that has a friendly message from maybe it’s from the owner of the company explaining, you know, maybe we we didn’t do everything we could the first time around.
Give us another shot. Maybe we can make we can run your business. And I think that if it’s if it’s a genuine if it’s a person that looks at that video and sees that we’re being genuine and we would like to have a conversation with them, at the very least, they’re going to call back and say, you
know, maybe I’m not interested anymore, but they’re going to call back. And when they call back with with the right training, any call center agent could set. You know, you have a person you have on the phone and something that Steven actually set up.
If he had a thing that was right in the header of the email that says, I am so sorry that we messed up and we lost your business, and people would call back and say, oh, you don’t need to apologize.
You didn’t mess up. It’s just, you know, I was busy with so-and-so and you wouldn’t believe how much that would pull in. Oh, well, I do leave it because I’ve seen it in the home. I think that not talking to you.
Yeah, I know. It’s I think it’s unintuitive stuff that what I’m getting at is is what you’ve talked about, which I really like, you know, sometimes adding those of the verbiage that’s really very engaging to people. I know I’ve seen text messages that you guys have created rates.
As you know, we goofed up on a project and then when we propose it, owners are just like, no, that’s not the right appropriate professional language. And our intention is, well, neither is the ones that you send 10000 times.
It only had like two people come back and respond. Right. Because that’s waste. Right. I mean, I’d rather have somebody say that’s a little odd, but then you’ve got like one hundred seventy people respond and go, no, you didn’t goof up because, you know, that’s the that’s like regular verb language that people use every day.
And when you say, well, we didn’t earn your business apologizing and you assumed that you didn’t do everything that you can, that humility comes across to people as we look. You know what? You’re the only company is doing that.
And again, that’s differentiation. Right. So I think, you know, to to wrap this up, I think part of what at least, you know, our audience and the people who are listening, you know, customization and bespoke and depersonalization, Tacy touched on this and adding these very important, simple, simple is is hard to achieve.
But they’re simple in the sense that, you know, I think most people can add a link to an email or a tax. Right. It might take a little bit more of, you know, technical savvy to be able to create a short playing or an attachment and just a link on a word.
You know, those things you may need to to connect with companies like us or other people in your team. And then it’s the video piece. I like that with Steve. Even, you know, video is really the thing that makes everything so engaging nowadays.
People almost demand it. Right. So if you if you look at an email and a text and it says words, and if it’s coming from a company, you’re more likely and your people are more compelled to engage that if there’s a video to watch.
Right. Because people are like, I want to look at this, I want to watch this. And again, short is sweet and kind of you to recap here, even on videos, you don’t need five minute explainers. You know, you need 15, 30 seconds.
Production value goes a long way. But, you know, if you have a company guiding you there and and saying, look, film it this way and this is the words you use. We’ve done that many times for clients. Then you come up with the right effect.
Right. The desired effect. The emotional quotient, you know, is included in that. So I think, you know, this there’s so much more we can talk about. I think this is was, you know, maybe another episode, maybe two other episodes.
I know we’ve been we’ve been asked by a lot of lead perfection users, hatch users, as well as five nine to to do this for a long time. And now I kind of think we should be doing this every once a week.
So I appreciate both of you guys getting on this, you know, episode. I look forward to having you guys again. That’s it for us for today. We hope you’ve enjoyed our chat and learn a couple of things. And as always, you know, we here at one leg believe like poor marketing, it pollutes the planet.
And that business is full of tired, outdated, indistinct, unremarkable and underperforming marketing. That sucks. But what sucks even more is that many companies have forgotten the most important thing about the customer. We’re on a mission on behalf of our clients as customers to change that.
To learn more, go to zero marketing waste dot com, where you can subscribe to our blog and this very podcast. You can always find us and follow us by looking for the flamingo. Bingo. And the one leg Handal wherever you socialize online.
See you soon. Thanks, everybody.