Lead

In call-center terms, a lead is a caller who has shown interest in buying but hasn’t bought yet: a quote request, a question about what you charge, or an emergency the caller wanted to think over before committing. For a service company it is a call that did not end in a booking but still could.

Lead, prospect, customer

• Lead: anyone who has raised a hand, by calling, texting or filling in a form, and left a way to reach them.
• Prospect: a lead you have qualified: in your service area, needing work you do, and ready to decide soon.
• Customer: a lead who booked and paid.

Call centers also split leads by direction. An inbound lead called you; an outbound lead is someone your team contacts first. A trade business lives mostly on inbound leads, which is why an unreturned call is a lost lead rather than a lost cold call. Before you text a caller back, check what they agreed to on the call; the TCPA page covers consent for calls and texts.

Why it matters for a service company

Picture the 9 PM call about a water heater that is dripping but not flooding. The caller asks what a replacement runs, hears that the office will confirm pricing, and says they will think about it. Nothing was booked, so nothing is on the board. In a shop where the owner answers from the truck, that number goes into the phone’s recent-calls list next to forty others and is never dialed again.

That caller was already yours. They found your number, called, and told you what they needed. The only thing between that call and a job is someone calling back before a competitor does. The mechanism is simple: the first shop that calls back with a real arrival window tends to get the work, because the homeowner wants the problem to stop being their problem.

How DispatchLine handles it

DispatchLine gives every call an outcome. Calls that ended as a callback, a quote or a question without a booking go to the Leads page of the portal with the caller’s name, number and address, the two-line summary, the recording and transcript while recording is on, and a one-tap callback, and stay there until you mark them won or lost.

Related terms

• Intent, what the caller wanted, as the agent read it.
• Triage questions, the questions that produce the details on each entry.
• After-hours, when most of these calls arrive.
• Call answering and the missed-call calculator, for what a callback is worth on your own numbers.