Stop Cold Calling: Use Customer Support Data to Generate Targeted Leads Instead

The digital age has changed the sales landscape. Traditional sales methods like cold calling are fast losing relevance.

Today’s customers can find what they need with a quick Google search. They don’t need companies calling to offer products they don’t want. 

The modern customer wants personalised experiences, tailored communication, and interactions that respect their time and preferences. This has forced sales teams to adapt their lead generation strategies to include more warm outreach.

Finding warm leads is easier than you may think. One of the most overlooked sources of warm leads lies within a business’s own customer support data. 

Every support ticket, email, chatbot query or incoming phone call is a potential lead. These interactions can pinpoint high buying intent so you can approach the most receptive prospects.

They can also reveal the most pressing pain points that you can offer targeted solutions for.

Why Cold Calling is Becoming Obsolete

Cold calling, long since a cornerstone of traditional sales, is no longer the most effective way to find new customers.

Customers are less receptive to unsolicited calls, especially those that are generic and irrelevant to their needs. And living in the information era means people are bombarded with countless intrusive marketing messages, which many simply ignore or outright reject.

As a result, cold calling is yielding lower success rates. The overall cold calling success rate has dropped from 4.82% in 2024 to 2.3% in 2025, according to Cognism’s State of Cold Calling Report 2025. 

Statistics also show that it takes, on average, eight cold call attempts to reach a prospect, and out of 100 calls, only two convert into a warm lead.

A high rejection rate, coupled with intensive time and resource investment, makes cold calling highly inefficient. If return on investment matters, untargeted outreach can be a costly misstep.

Data-driven prospecting is a more efficient and cost-effective way to increase conversions. 

From Cold Calls to Warm Outreach

Cold leads are people who are not aware of or haven’t shown interest in your brand. Some may know of your business through adverts, or become aware of it through cold calls from your sales team.

Some cold leads do convert into sales quickly, but most progress into warm leads.

Why not skip cold calling and go straight to warm leads?

Warm outreach targets individuals who have had prior engagement or expressed interest in your brand. This could be someone engaging with a chatbot on your website or signing up for a newsletter. 

Customer support data serves as a treasure trove for such intelligence. Using data-driven insights from your service desk system, you can find leads that are more likely to convert into customers. 

Analysing Service Desk Data for Warm Leads

Customer support interactions are rich with clues that, when analysed correctly, can deliver qualified leads. Here’s the type of data to mine to find these leads:

Product inquiries 

A customer inquiring about a product’s features, comparing pricing, or checking availability displays a high level of interest. These inquiries are ripe for a follow-up by the sales team.

Demographic and behavioural insights

Information such as age, location, profession, or even website traffic patterns can help you build detailed buyer personas. This can help you reach out to prospects with more targeted products that they are more inclined to buy.

Complaint patterns

Common or recurring complaints showing up on social media or forwarded directly to your support team can highlight pain points that your product or service could solve for potential customers.

Abandoned purchases

If a prospective customer went as far as to click the “add to cart” button, they’re not just a warm lead—they’re a hot lead. Sometimes a distraction may divert a customer’s attention away from a transaction, or they intended to complete the purchase later but forgot. 

Reaching out to gently alert them about an incomplete transaction can be the nudge they need to move them into the final stage of the sales funnel.

Competitor disillusionment

Customers who express dissatisfaction with a competitor’s service offer a “strike while the iron is hot” opportunity. If you can offer a better solution or customer experience, your competitor’s loss could be your gain.

The data you mine from your service desk software can help you build a rich pipeline of prospects who have already engaged with your brand.

Leveraging Customer Service Channels For Lead Generation

Businesses interact with customers on various channels, each offering unique opportunities for lead generation. 

Most service desk software can support multiple communication channels, making it easy to bring all customer interactions into one central platform. Many also include built-in analytics that can return a wealth of insights about customers’ intent and readiness to buy.

Here are the customer service channels to mine for warm leads:

👉Chatbots: Chatbots are typically used to assist customers in finding basic information quickly. But chatbots can also be used to collect user data and track areas of interest. You could analyze your chatbot data to identify leads seeking specific solutions or showing strong buying intent.

👉Phone calls: Most people call a service desk when they have an urgent issue they want resolved. Therefore, phone calls often provide accurate insights into customer sentiment and reveal high-priority issues. Your sales team can use the call transcripts to identify urgent needs or hurdles to making purchases.

👉Emails: Emails to your support team are often less urgent in nature but may reveal more in-depth or ongoing concerns, desires or objections. With proper data tagging and analysis, your sales team can spot recurring themes or pain points that they can turn into sales opportunities.

👉Landing page sign-ups: Opt-ins and sign-ups on landing pages demonstrate proactive interest. These people are probably familiar with your brand and interested in exploring your services further. Offering an incentive, like a discount on their first purchase, can be the nudge they need to make a purchase.

👉Service desk tickets: Your service desk receives queries on a wide variety of customer issues. With intuitive service desk software, you can categorize each ticket, allowing you to group similar issues and segment your customer base. This allows you to create more personalized sales outreach campaigns per customer segment.

👉Social media: Monitoring your social media channels can reveal customer sentiment. This can help you identify potential brand advocates or at-risk customers. It also allows you to intervene immediately with dissatisfied customers before the situation spirals.

👉Community forums: Clients engaging in discussions or seeking help in forums often highlight deeper product or technical issues. These can influence your product development and help you improve the user experience, which can attract the customers who were hesitant about buying your product before.

👉E-commerce store interactions: A customer who has browsed products, compared products or pricing, or added a product to their cart demonstrates a high level of interest in your brand. A follow-up email from your sales team could rekindle their interest and prompt them to follow through with a purchase.

Turning Customer Support Data Into Targeted Leads

A deep dive into customer support data is the first step. The true value lies in how you use that data. 

Here’s how to translate support data insights into lead generation campaigns:

1. Segment inquiries

Categorise customer queries into themes, such as technical issues, product requests, pricing sensitivity, and so forth. This segmentation reveals common concerns and potential entry points for personalised sales outreach.

2. Respond to dissatisfied prospects

A well-timed call or email addressing concerns can turn an unhappy prospect into a satisfied customer. According to HubSpot, if you reach out to a lead within five minutes, you are 100 times more likely to qualify that lead.

3. AI-powered lead scoring

Use a lead-scoring tool that assigns a ranking to leads based on engagement level, behaviour, and history. Your sales team can then prioritize sales outreach, starting with high-intent leads first.

4. Leveraging analytics

Most service desk systems can track support ticket volume, the type of queries and the number of prior engagements with a lead. These metrics help identify high-priority leads and the types of solutions they seek.

5. Personalised follow-ups

Referencing past support interactions in follow-up communication shows that you care about the customer’s needs and history with your brand. This builds trust and can significantly increase the chance of conversion in the future.

6. Behavioural triggers

Monitor user actions such as email open rates, content downloads, and repeat website visits. These actions suggest a prospect is actively considering your services and is likely open to further engagement.

By taking a data-driven sales approach, you shift from reactive to proactive sales outreach, pursuing warm leads which have a greater chance of conversion.

Final Thoughts

Customer service data is more than just a record of past problems. It’s a valuable, yet often overlooked, lead generation tool that can help you uncover prospects’ needs so you can step in with the right solution at just the right time.

When you use support data to guide your outreach, you move away from generic cold calls that rarely hit the mark. Instead, you start having more relevant, personalized conversations—the kind that actually lead to conversions.

About Post Author