Brush aside these call center insights, and you could miss out on valuable sales information.
When you manage a call center, you have any number of metrics to evaluate your team. But some call center insights are more consequential than others.
Let’s take the ever-popular call time metric. There are cases where you want to keep your call time on the shorter end of things. However, call time as a metric doesn’t give us a whole lot of information, especially in phone sales. Call time does have its place, for sure, but it needs to be in context.
Do longer calls equate to more sales? Do shorter calls lead to more revenue? Of course, call time is not the only metric. There are several important metrics and insights to pay attention to, such as these call center insights that could change your business.
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The critical call center insights you aren’t paying attention to
1. Frequency of dialing bad numbers. This one’s a big deal. Dialing a number on the Do Not Call list probably won’t get you in trouble if it’s a very rare thing and an apparent mistake. The Federal Trade Commission looks at factors like whether you have a written policy to comply with DNC rules, how you train people, and how well you maintain your DNC list. However, given that the fine for violating these and other telemarketing rules is “up to $43,792 for each violation,” this is one you absolutely want to pay attention to. If you find you’re calling numbers on the DNC list, you may need to scrub your list more often. Or you could get dialing software that does it for you automatically.
2. Customer satisfaction. Call center insights around customer satisfaction are vital, whether you’re selling an ongoing service, such as life insurance, or a one-time purchase, as in the case of real estate. The importance here is obvious; we all want happy customers. The trick is getting the information. While it’s not uncommon to ask survey questions at the end of a call or via email, you want more data. Pick up the phone and call your customers. In high-volume call centers, you may even have a department specifically for customer satisfaction calls. Actively gathering information will give you far more insight into how customers perceive your company than you can get from a passive request. As a bonus, you may even be surprised at how much these little check-ins can boost your customer satisfaction.
3. Employee satisfaction. Gallup, well-known for its expertise in polling and analytics, conducted a meta-analysis on employee engagement and satisfaction. The study included more than 112,000 teams and 2.7 million employees. The results are clear on this. The companies with the most engaged employees had 81% lower rates of absenteeism, 10% higher customer loyalty, 18% higher productivity, and 23% higher profitability. How happy are your employees? It really does make a difference.
4. Revenue per call. This is one of the call center insights that can help level out numbers and give you a warning if it looks like sales are going down. Rather than overall sales, which could depend on the number of calls you make, revenue per call can give you an idea of where things are heading. So if it takes 10 calls to make $100, your revenue per call is $10. Suppose next week you’ve brought in $1,000 and made 100 calls. Your revenue per call is still $10. Let’s say your next sales number is $2,000. You’re definitely bringing in more money, but what if you had to make 400 calls to get that? Now your revenue is at $5 per call. These are the kinds of numbers you want to pay attention to because clearly, something is going on.
5. Callbacks from voicemails. This one is self-explanatory, but it’s still a little tricky since different industries could have vastly different numbers. For example, you may get more returned calls selling paper products to restaurants than cold-calling people about vacation condos. Even so, try to find an average for your industry and see if your numbers are close. You could even compare your own numbers over time. What can this tell you? It may be time to A/B test your voicemail messages or come up with a new one altogether. Or you might need to return to a previous voicemail template if an older one was working. You won’t have a 100% returned calls rate, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get there.
There are plenty of call center insights to pay attention to, but these five get overlooked too often. And they can do wonders for helping inform your strategy.
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