customer story
How Columbus Energy streamlines its lead generation efforts with voice AI
Columbus Energy has been providing green energy solutions for homes and businesses since 2014. Today, they are the most recognizable brand in the Polish photovoltaic installation industry. So far, they have been trusted by 23,000 households and entrepreneurs, which translates into 138 MW of their capacity on the Polish photovoltaic market. In addition, they are currently expanding the group of prosumers who are investing in heat pumps and energy storage in addition to solar panels.
Key results
AI virtual agent implementation resulted in:
12,185 minutes
Time saved on lead qualification for a 2-day campaign with a database size of 19,895 contacts. The virtual agents freed up 203 working hours for consultants by disqualifying the leads that were not eligible for the offer.
61-64%
The answered call rate connected with the marketing campaigns handled by virtual agents. The average email open rate has reached an incredible 23%.
97,334
The total number of outbound calls in all campaigns
Challenges
The Columbus consultants contact hundreds of prospects every day. As with any outbound activities, only a small part of the contacted database is both genuinely interested and meets the requirements to have photovoltaic solutions like solar panels installed.
A big part of the consultant’s job is a monotonous and tedious process of going through lead qualification, which is neither interesting nor challenging. Because of the quantity of the calls, the consultants often don’t have enough time to really engage in each conversation and create a meaningful customer experience when talking to eligible prospects.
Solution
Virtual agents prove great results when working hand in hand with live agents, not replacing them. They take care of the mundane, repetitive processes, freeing up human consultants to focus on the meaningful conversations like sales negotiations. Here are three virtual agents which Columbus implemented within the Talkie platform.
Implementation scope
Lead qualification
The virtual agent calls prospects and performs lead qualification to see if the person is eligible for the offer and if they are interested. If all the requirements are fulfilled, the prospect can be routed to a live consultant or schedule a call at a convenient time.
Lead warming
Columbus knows how important it is to contact leads who leave their details using an online form. But consultants need to sleep and rest, and can’t call promptly every time a lead leaves their contact details. However, a virtual agent can. It can do preliminary lead qualification and answer questions, both warming and increasing lead engagement for just enough time until a sales consultant can contact them.
Event promotion
Columbus organizes a lot of interesting events online. To quickly invite a big number of prospects and customers, they use the voice bot to call potentially interested people and invite them to the event.
“Talkie virtual agents helped us reduce contact center costs and the need to hire new consultants while maintaining customer service standards at the highest level.”
Magdalena Meus, Customer Relations Director at Columbus
Benefits
Implement Talkie to get benefits of voice AI for outbound campaigns
- Increase the number of people contacted without increasing the internal headcount
- Easy implementation and integration of Talkie voice bots
- Improved scalability
- Standardize call conditions (time of day, messages used, tone of voice) to run effective A/B tests and improve conversion rates
- Upskill agents to handle calls that require the human touch
- Outsource cold calling and other repetitive customer interactions without losing quality and control over the outsourced team
- Reach prospects outside of regular business hours