What to Expect When Selling Calls to Service Direct
For almost 20 years, Service Direct has been focused on building a best-in-class marketplace that connects consumers with local service providers. In that time, nothing has become more clear to us than the power of data and communication.
If you’re an Affiliate that is considering diversifying into Pay Per Call, or you’re an industry veteran looking for an additional partner to better monetize your traffic, we feel it’s important for you to understand how we operate and what we value as a company. In many ways, we think our approach is quite different from others in our space.
In this article, we’ll walk you through exactly what you can expect from us, along with what we expect from you, should we decide to work together.
Onboarding & Optimization Process
Whether you are sending us calls from our Easy Earn DID integration or our Earn API integration, once we receive live calls from your account, our team will begin scoring all of your calls. In other words, a live human will listen to every call you send and score them across dozens of criteria (more on that in just a moment).
Why?
It’s simple: our buyers are paying us on the caller’s intent, NOT on duration. In other words, just because your call hits a certain duration, doesn’t necessarily mean the outcome was good for us or our buyer. We are hyper-focused on making sure each of our Affiliates is driving quality calls that result in great outcomes for our buyers.
We Provide Regular Feedback Into Call Outcomes
As a new Affiliate, your Affiliate Manager will be in regular contact with you regarding what we see with your calls. If there are instances or trends where we are seeing problems, we will alert you to these issues and suggest ways to mitigate these poor calls.
It’s important to understand that poor calls reduce our profitability with your account, ensuring our system reduces our bids on your calls. In other words, it drags down our ability to offer you higher payouts that will allow you to make more money as an Affiliate with us.
We will also share with you calls where the outcomes are great for our buyers, in the hopes that you can focus more of your traffic efforts on those types of consumers. This will ensure our system is able to offer you higher payouts and more revenue from our network of buyers.
KPIs We Track
As mentioned above, we score calls across dozens of criteria, but there are a couple we focus on to ensure our network of Affiliates drives high-quality, inbound calls to our buyers.
Service Needed Rate
The first hurdle is ensuring when an Affiliate makes one of our client’s phone rings, that the caller has a service need that is typically handled by someone in our client’s industry. In other words, they’re in the area our buyers want calls from and they have a service need our buyer can help with.
If you’re generating lots of calls that are wrong numbers, solicitors, or ‘service not offered’, etc. then we have a problem and we need to fix it immediately. This wastes our buyers’ time and increases the likelihood they cancel our service. We worked hard to add them as a client, and we want them to be happy and stay with us for a long time.
Buyer Dispute & Scratch Rate
Because our buyers don’t buy on duration, but rather intent, we give them the ability to dispute calls they believe don’t qualify as viable opportunities. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we will automatically invalidate the call, but it’s an important feedback mechanism we use to determine our Clients’ happiness with our service.
If it’s the case that a high percentage of your calls are being disputed and ultimately scratched (read: marked invalid) by our Quality Assurance team, that’s a clear indication that the calls are of poor quality and we need to get the situation rectified quickly.
KPI Targets by Service Category
So now that you have a better sense of what we do to ensure call quality, and what we look for to measure the same, let’s talk about what we need to see from Affiliates to continue working with them.
Please note: these are just a small sampling of some of the service categories we buy calls in, to give prospective Affiliates a sense of what we need to see to scale our partnership. If you have calls in other categories, don’t hesitate to contact our Affiliate Manager to inquire about the KPIs we need to see in your categories.
What We Do If We Can't Meet KPI Thresholds
Our goal in onboarding new Affiliates and working to provide as much information as possible to optimize their account is to ensure the highest level of call quality. But in some cases, despite those best efforts, we’re never able to see the level of call quality necessary to warrant a continued relationship.
We obsessively focus on the quality of the outcomes for our buyers, and believe that the better those outcomes are, the happier our clients will be, and the longer they continue to buy calls from us. If they’re constantly answering calls that aren’t serviceable opportunities or never result in revenue for them, they’ll quit in anger.
So if it’s the case an Affiliate’s calls mostly fit in the latter bucket, unfortunately, we will have to terminate our partnership with them.
In conclusion
In conclusion, at Service Direct, our commitment to quality and transparency sets us apart. We prioritize strong partnerships with our Affiliates, ensuring they are fully supported and equipped to deliver high-quality, intent-driven calls.
By focusing on the needs of our buyers and maintaining rigorous KPI standards, we create win-win outcomes for all parties involved. If you’re an Affiliate ready to take the next step, we look forward to working with you and driving mutual success.
