4 call center metrics for outbound sales success

4 call center metrics for outbound sales success

Call center metrics are the specks, flakes and nuggets of gold that reveal the real truth about your call centre.

Visually everything may look ok, your agents are busy looking busy, calls are being made, everyone’s looking engaged, even Doug’s off his Facebook, and to you this looks like success. A happy, energised and productive team, chipping away at their sales targets. Or are they?

And this is where call center metrics can help. Call center metrics can tell you how your agents are performing, the strength of their call scripts, the value of their leads, the speed of the tech they’re using, and if Doug really is an asset to the team.

They are the cold hard data that reveal your strengths and weaknesses. And this is what will get you hooked, the ability to analyse, compare at any moment to see where new opportunities lie. And for outbound success, focussing on these first four call center metrics is an important habit to get into:

 

1. The number of call attempts made

The rate of calls made out per agent, campaign and team is a great way to measure the strength of outbound sales calling, and whether an agent and team is on track.

Benchmarking these call center metrics for later comparison, along with actual leads that are processed, will help you get a good idea of overall agent and campaign results.

You can also compare these with other teams and other campaigns to see who is performing better, and which ones need to be tweaked. And for the team with higher call rate averages, look to find the source of their success.

Is it because of more optimised call scripting? The use of a powerful multi-dialler? Help from a blended inbound-outbound system? Or the combination of many things?

There are many features that could be at working helping to increase in call rates, and once you get a grasp of what they are you can isolate, replicate and implement these practices across all teams.

 

2. The number of leads processed

While increased call rates is sign your outbound team is in the flow, the number of leads they actually get through to and make contact with is the call center metric that counts even more.

Processed leads, are a clear indicator of not only call efficiency but also call effectiveness. The aim of processing leads is to get a clear answer from who you call, so you have real things to action upon. And this relate to different scenarios, such as:

• interested, needs time
• not interested, don’t call again
• unqualified, not the right person to call
• invalid, not a real number
• success, converts into a sale

Measuring and comparing the percentage of each of these possibilities can help you gauge the effectiveness of your sales scripts and lead calling efficiency.

Is the list you’re calling fresh? The script you’re reading relevant? The information you’re using up-to-date? The people you call the right demographic? Do you have a lead cleanser to get rid of disconnected numbers? Once you start to figure out what is and isn’t working, you can lock in the techniques that are working and get rid of the things wasting your team’s valuable time. And if you have powerful contact centre software you start making live changes at any time, introducing new lists, tweaking scripts, giving customer service tips, helping your agents stay in the flow from call to call and increasing the chance of converting their leads into sales.

 

3. The amount of time spent on calls

It’s great to invest time in quality leads, to not charge ahead with a pushy sales script, but spend the time asking the right questions, finding out the main points, and offering the right solutions. But what if you’re agents are spending too much time on dead-end leads?

Time does add up, and it’s important you keep a measure on agent activity. How much active time do your agents spend prepping, calling disconnected numbers, doing admin when they wrap up, rather than being on a call?

The more time being spent on any of the tasks, particularly outside of talking to a customer, perhaps indicates that the phone system they’re using is not up to the job at hand.

An effective call centre system should streamline all these tasks, with features such as power dialling and screen pop ups helping agent make better calls to more qualified leads, and automation to CRMs to save them having to manually update customer details.

Keeping an eye on this call center metric can tell you a lot about how much time in minutes, hours, days and years are being wasting in the end. And by focussing on effective ways to save on time translates to increased profit margins.

 

4. The accuracy of call center metrics forecasting

Accurate forecasting comes from being able to gather all your call center metrics, analyse and prioritise the data, to help you plan for your next sales campaign and staff roster.

Once you start to see trends you can then forecast with greater confidence the expected performance of specific actions, including the:

• Number of calls agents should make each hour
• Number of contacts agents should reach per hour
• Number of calls made to the right contact
• Amount of time that should be spent on each call, what should be your average
• Number of processed leads expected per hour, day, campaign
• Number of call-backs, without affecting outbound lead efficiency
• Number of successful sales made per agent per day and so on
• Average revenue value per sale

All of these metrics give managers the ability to see if they’re using the right lists, call scripts, sales techniques and dialling systems, helping them set more realistic goals for future campaigns. It also helps them predict peak times and slow times in a day, week, month or year and roster appropriately for them.

And the real value is that after a few campaigns, managers can compare and analyse to see if the call center metrics they’ve been tweaking is making a difference to the bottom-line – or if they need to also hone in on staff attrition rates, training costs, customer satisfaction scores and other factors affecting team performance.

Once this is understood, this lays grounds for a powerful outbound template that can be replicated in future campaigns.

 

The art of replication

What the goal of all of this is to inch closer to an effective outbound sales template, a winning formula that you can use time and time again for sales conversion rates and customer satisfaction scores that keep on climbing. While templates are never perfect and always need to be worked on, they are a helpful guide for planning future campaigns and knowing what call center metrics matter to outbound success.

 

Want to supercharge your outbound sales efficiency? Download our comprehensive 35-page ebook on the 14 cost-effective ways to run an outbound centre.

Image via Flickr CC/Ton Nolles