BrightCurrent Energizes Inside Sales Reps with NewVoiceMedia

BrightCurrent Energizes Inside Sales Reps with NewVoiceMedia

The clean-power agency takes on more leads with ContactWorld for Sales

Founded in 2011, BrightCurrent is an Oakland-based agency specializing in clean energy. A good portion of the company’s sales opportunities are generated in person, in retail spaces. “You may have gone into a store like Costco or Home Depot and seen a booth set up with somebody talking about solar energy,” explains Troy Searcy, BrightCurrent’s customer quality manager. “That would be BrightCurrent in a lot of cases.”

Despite its strong physical presence, the outfit sees much of its follow-up work performed over the phone by sales reps and service agents who work offsite. And until deploying the ContactWorld for Sales solution from NewVoiceMedia, this operation “was really spread out, and not very well organized,” Searcy says. A chunk of the company’s 100 employees were either making calls from their personal cell phones or using Google Voice or Voice over IP (VoIP) numbers, making it harder to control quality. “We couldn’t run any reports or metrics on the call data,” Searcy says. “We couldn’t get call recordings; we couldn’t keep track of how many calls were being made.”

This was a concern, because the company was expanding into new markets and needed to handle an increasing number of leads. Searcy says that many clean energy providers are “great at the home sales and installation side of solar, but not so great at generating, and following up on, new leads” from their websites and online ads. BrightCurrent now tasked itself with tackling a pipeline that had grown by 350 percent in volume.

Naturally, as BrightCurrent was poised to take on more campaigns, it needed stronger accountability among team members. This called for a central phone system that would go beyond the capabilities of its legacy technology, which was not equipped to handle such density and prone to occasional malfunctions. “Many times, the system was down and calls could not be made,” Searcy said in a separate statement.

BrightCurrent was using Salesforce.com’s CRM system, and so any add-ons had to be compatible with that platform. While BrightCurrent had researched and evaluated several software vendors that met this criterion, many of them did not accommodate remote agents and required that employees be tethered to workstations with very strong and reliable internet connections. This was one of the qualities that set NewVoiceMedia’s solution apart.

According to Searcy, implementation was done over a few weeks—it began near the end of May 2016, and the system went live in June.

Once the technology was in place, the change was apparent. “Just being able to track things, initially, was a huge improvement,” Searcy says. “We could see if there were certain reps who were outliers, in terms of the number of calls they were making and the amount of time they spent on certain calls. We were able to go back and, from a managerial standpoint, listen to some call recordings and retrain people who were working remotely.”

The total amount of time spent dialing a lead and entering information into the CRM system was reduced by 30 to 60 seconds, thanks to the click-to-dial feature. Reps now can make 75 percent more calls an hour, which translates to a total of 40,000 additional outbound calls a year.

“Having the local presence and area codes definitely helps to get people to actually pick up their phone,” Searcy adds, noting that call answer rates have risen 60 to 90 percent. “That turns into more home appointments and more potential for sales for us and our partners.” BrightCurrent’s rate for calls converted into appointments has increased from 5 percent to 8 percent.

Searcy notes that the company has also begun receiving more inbound calls, “so having people be able to call in and reach our call center reliably has been huge for us.” With ContactWorld, customers can call one number and get rerouted to an agent trained for a particular campaign.

Looking ahead, Searcy says that NewVoiceMedia will be crucial to BrightCurrent’s continued growth, as its flexibility allows new hires to get easily started on the system. 

The Payoff

Since implementing NewVoiceMedia's ContactWorld for Sales, BrightCurrent has seen:

• a 50 percent rise in call pickup rates (from 60 percent to 90 percent);
• a 3 percent increase in calls converted into appointments (from 5 percent to 8 percent); and
• 30 to 60 seconds saved per call, and a 75 percent increase in the number of calls agents can handle in an hour.