Converting people is a crucial component of an outbound call center for sales and marketing. Conversion rate is arguably the most important outbound call center performance metric since it has a direct impact on the bottom line. Every other metric, such as customer satisfaction, call duration, and answer rate, is used to measure progress towards conversion rate.
Without high conversion rates, your company could be losing potential customers and the additional revenue that comes with them. Fortunately, there are several ways you can improve performance and create a high-converting call center.
Hire the Right People
Your company is only as good as the people who are representing it. Make sure the agents you hire are friendly, calm under pressure, and passionate about the product or service. Call center agents spend all day talking to people, so they need to be people persons who enjoy making connections with others. If not, they may get burnt out and become unhappy at work.
You can discover what type of people your job applicants are by using screening questions in interviews. One way to do this is to ask scenario questions, about how the candidate has reacted to certain situations in the past. You could also ask them about standard outbound call center metrics to gauge their understanding of important KPIs. Screening your applicants for specific characteristics will help you become a high-conversion call center.
Set Your Agents Up for Success
Even if you have the best agents, they can’t convert potential customers without help. Thorough training will prepare your agents to handle a variety of situations they will face and will enable them to make connections with customers. Your agents should be trained on making pitches, up-selling, and handling negative responses.
Your agents aren’t able to put all their training to use if the customer doesn’t even answer the phone. With 94% of unknown calls going unanswered, it has become increasingly difficult for your agents to make a connection. Displaying branded caller ID with Hiya Connect’s Branded Call feature will make it much more likely that your customers will answer your calls.
By preparing your agents properly, you are setting them up to serve the needs of your customers which will lead to a high-converting call center. Another important way you can set your agents up for success is to ensure that they enjoy coming to work every day. Make the work environment enjoyable and motivating so agents can perform their best.
Get Consistent Messaging
Every phone call your company receives is an opportunity to tap into the needs and desires of your customers in order to get them to convert. However, the first step to get your potential customer to stay on the line. An opening hook is a great way to accomplish this and not get an immediate hang up. Whether you’re answering an inbound call or doing outbound efforts, the opening line should be warm, friendly, and informative. This sets the tone for the rest of the call.
It’s also important for your agents to have scripts they can follow during their call. This will guide them on how to answer any questions and guide the customer to convert in a timely and professional manner. With the right messaging, your agents will have the tools necessary to convert potential customers and contribute to your high-conversion call center.
Monitor Your Progress
There’s only one way to know if your efforts are having an impact on your call center: track your progress. This can be done by evaluating the quality of your calls and by tracking specific outbound call center metrics.
The quality of your calls can be listened to manually for quality assurance purposes. When you find a call that performed well or didn’t meet expectations, you can listen to it and determine any patterns that influenced the performance. Other ways you can track customer satisfaction are by looking at a net promoter score or customer satisfaction score.
Some other metrics to pay attention to that will help you become a high-conversion call center are answer rates, call attempts, and call durations. Looking at these metrics and reviewing call performance with your agents will provide you with examples of calls to replicate and places for growth.
As you implement these tips for building a high-conversion call center, your conversion rates will soar with time. One way you can better track outbound call center metrics is to work with a voice performance platform like Hiya that provides industry-leading performance analytics. Easy-to-read dashboards make it simple for you to show executives the impact of your work. Curious what other specific metrics you should optimize at your call center? Download Hiya’s Contact Center Metrics eBook to learn more.
