Do you really think you should outsource lead generation offshore? Let me change your mind.
It seems simple. You need leads. Onshore leads, offshore leads, any leads. For your business or for your customer’s business. In your experience the best leads are got over the phone. Going to an onshore call center will cost more than the customer or you are willing to pay. Going offshore for leads makes sense. It’s a fraction of the price but you still get the leads. Right?
Here are 3 things to consider about offshore lead generation:
Changing geopolitics. 2020 has been wild. These days, you just can’t be sure your partnership with an offshore BPO won’t collapse. Memories of pandemic disruptions are still fresh: when the Philippines shut down on March 18th, the U.S. lost a large chunk of its call center support and Australia lost 100% of its phone workers. Just like that.
Accents. The target contacts are more likely to say no to a heavily accented speech. While it’s easier for Filipinos with their Western-accented English, Indian accents don’t go down well with the Americans.
Unreliability. Dealing with offshore agents can get very tricky. If you’ve ever worked with offshore outsourcers, you know how unlikely you are to get a straight answer much of the time. Besides, a lot of offshore lead suppliers rely on the assumption that the buyer will not check every single one of their calls.
That last one was a pretty loaded statement. Here are the stories we’ve heard from our customers who work with offshore call centers:
They may speak to the wrong person, not the target contact. And they may get a “yes” of approval from this person... And pass it on as a qualified lead.
They may get a “yes” from the target contact but not the “yes”. The goal may be to get the target to agree to signing up for a webinar. The offshore agent may instead ask a question like “Have you participated in webinars in the past,” the target will say “yes” and later in the conversation will decline the webinar sign up. The offshore call center managers may try to pass this on as a qualified lead.
There have been cases of offshore call centers straight up splicing audio recordings to make it sound as if the target contact agreed to whatever the goal of the conversation was, even though they did not.
And yes, I know you’re running quality control checks on the data you get back. Yet a) data checks cost additional dollars b) is it so awful to want to trust your counterparty to provide you with honest data?
You’re probably waiting for the “what to do instead” part.
Outsource to voice AI.
A human-like AI voice that talks to people as if it was a real person.
If you’re thinking about creaky IVRs, you really shouldn’t. Modern voice AI platforms like Dasha can stir the conversation, go on tangents and even have all the idiosyncrasies that humans have (sigh, chuckle and insert fillers). While most robots spark suspicion by taking too long to answer, Dasha replies within 700 ms. To add to that, Dasha will put down everything your customer says so that you can export and analyze the data later.
Is Dasha the best AI voice generator on the market? We think so but the AI voice synthesis really does not so much matter on its own. What matters is the full voice AI platform that provides developers with the tools to create conversations that are truly human-like in nature.
With Dasha you get everything that a call center agent does except also that:
it will speak with any accent you like – or without one
it won’t lie because it is an algorithm
it will cost you a fraction of what you would pay for BPO services.
For lead generation, Dasha AI can run calls on scripts of varied complexity.
To find out more, get in touch with us.