Mariane L’Ecuyer
Manager of Consulting
Elix
mariane.lecuyer@elixonline.com
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Q: Does Your Contact Center Measure Up to the Competition?
Outbound contact center managers face an array of challenges. Managing everything from employees and IT call solutions to business strategies and processes, today’s managers have become multidisciplinarians, always on the lookout for new formulas and best industry practices. It is with this in mind that Elix decided to gather the Best Practices and Golden Rules of various outbound contact centers, from the telemarketing and collection perspective.
This is the third article in a series that seeks to guide outbound contact center managers in optimizing their soliciting activities. The series will tackle various contact center challenges, such as segmentation strategies, dialer productivity optimization, resource management, and tools. This third article discusses the best practices for gathering and evaluating information and using call termination codes.
WONDERING WHY YOUR RESULTS AREN’T AMAZING?
Dialer users capture statistics on lists
and campaigns, on agent telephone data, and on the success or failure of their promotions. However, despite the information gathered, some information remains difficult to access because it is scattered among different tools and different reports. Even worse, the perception, evaluation, and conclusions reached may vary from one group to another, because there is no unified view of the statistics collected.
Knowledge is power! This is why a good contact center solution must include adequate measurement units, both real-time and historical, and why good contact center management must refer to best practices when using metrics and creating reporting templates. In managing outbound call activities, it is important to know what to measure, why you are measuring it, and how to measure it.
What, Why, and How to Measure
The first step is to determine exactly what should be measured to produce meaningful statistics that can be analyzed to
give a true picture of contact center activity. There are four areas that should be measured: the performance of the dialer and its calling lists, agent productivity, the profitability of the activity, and the criteria that determine success or failure.
Dialing Results
The main metrics to measure and some objectives to target: - Non-transferred calls: These are very good indicators of the contacts’ quality on a given calling list, as well as the call timing strategy used for a specific campaign.
Items measured should include:
| Signals | Contact Center average | | Invalid signal / No signal / SIT / Fax | 2% | | Busy | 8% | | No answer | 10% | | Voice mailbox | 31% | | Abandoned call | 4% |
- Answered calls. These are the targeted outcome of a list, and where the work of the agent begins.
Items measured should include:
- Wrong numbers
- Right party connect
It is very hard to give an objective for right or wrong party connect, since this will vary significantly depending on the type of contact strategy, existing customers versus prospects, as well as on the age, gender, and role of the contact within the household.
- Scheduled call back to complete the offer
- Completed offers
- Messages left, if part of the calling strategy
Whether to leave messages depends entirely on the contacts, the campaign, the list, and the nature of the promotion. Since outbound dialing is often a numbers game, leaving messages is often an obstacle to agent productivity and sales activities. Ideally, messages should not be left for prospects, since they do not know or have a relationship with your organization. In some
B2B situations, however, messages will be left. For existing customers, contact centers tend to leave messages in highly targeted campaigns or promotions, like renewals. In these cases, a more significant number of messages tend to be returned. If messages are left, two important actions must be taken. First, on the dialing strategy side, the contact center must identify when to leave a message, after how many attempts, and how long they should wait before dialing this contact again. Second, on the measuring side, they need to capture all statistics regarding the number of messages left, the ratio of returned calls, and the delay before callback, in order to improve their approach the next time around.
If a message is left, the contact center will also have to devise a strategy for answering the returned calls. Since the very nature of contact centers is to rapidly route a call to the next qualified and available agent, it is preferable to route returned calls to agents
of an inbound contact center. The agent who left the message will most likely be on line with another customer when the prospect returns the call.
List penetration rates
An important indicator to measure when it comes to dialing results is list penetration. The penetration rate of a list must always be measured because it represents the total number of records or contacts completed. A good penetration objective is around 75%. Penetration of less than 70% indicates a less profitable list, while more than 80% significantly reduces dialing algorithm productivity, since it is more difficult to reach contacts, and most of these are second, third, or more attempts.
Agent Productivity Statistics
Telephone statistics are the most commonly used indicators of agent productivity, because they can easily be collected manually, even if a dialer is not used. They have also been used by inbound contact centers since
the introduction of the ACD. Agent Productivity statistics are measured to show the telephone productivity of the agent and to benchmark them to the group or past results. Although useful, they do not indicate the quality of the response or the relevance of the sales approach. For this reason, we suggest that the quality aspects of monitoring activities be taken into consideration when evaluating global agent performance, as well as sales results. An agent who shows a longer talk time but also shows a higher sales ratio often represents higher profitability.
The most commonly measured call statistics are: - Contacts per hour
- Call duration (talk time plus after-call work)
- Talk time
- Not ready and/or after-call work
- Wait (between calls)
- Transfer
- Login time
It would be very difficult and pointless to present industry averages, since these statistics vary significantly according to sales strategies, campaigns,
lists, and promotions.
Business Profitability Statistics
Business statistics are the raison d’être of outbound activities. It is thus not only essential to measure them properly, but also to enhance them with other data in order to adopt a proactive approach to optimizing the elements of an outbound strategy, including calling lists, contacts, and the speed of call treatment to close sales.
Business statistics measured should include: - Sales Per Hour (SPH) or, for collection teams, payment agreements
- Conversion rates (% of calls concluded with a sale or an agreement)
- Cost per call
- Profit per call
It is impossible to offer global objectives for these types of statistics, because they vary according to calling list, campaign, promotion, and the nature of each organization.
Call Termination Codes
Obviously, one source of information used to better understand why
sales offers or solicitations fail is, without doubt, the call termination code. Almost all contact centers use these codes, but incorrect coding appears to be an important problem in some contact centers. Termination codes can be a rich source of information for customer response analysis and the subsequent adjustment of offers, agent skills, and expertise. However, in order to glean the correct information, it is necessary for agents to take the time to code each of their calls properly. If calls are not coded appropriately, the exercise is obviously useless.
When coding calls, less is definitely more! The list of call termination codes should therefore never contain more than 20 choices, including sale code and removal from calling list. Preferably, 10 would be more efficient. Also, the choices must be sufficiently clear and varied so that each choice can be revealing enough to use as a basis for the improvement of sales arguments, agent skills, calling lists and promotions.
This method also avoids over-use of “other”. Ideally, if an agent selects the “other” choice, he should be required to enter a brief explanation to improve the code choice menu or the understanding of the codes. The explanation could be simply two or three words to clarify what “other” means for that particular call. The target objective should be not more than 2% to 3% of calls coded as “other”.
To improve the success rate for code use, it is important to offer a scrolling menu that displays all possible choices, and to require that a code be selected before the agent can complete the file and close it. For these reasons, it is recommended that the agent’s cockpit be used to enter the call termination codes. The information can then be written to any database used to produce management statistics.
YOU HAVE ALL THE STATISTICS…NOW WHAT?
We have discussed what, why and how to measure—but what do you do with all this information?
Whether
you look at the raw data or create reports based on the statistics you have collected, the results will clearly indicate what you’re doing right and where your strategies or processes need improvement. Because some of the data collected depends on input from other departments within your organization, the results can often have an effect beyond the immediate realm of the contact center.
For example, dialer results depend mainly on the quality of the calling lists used. For this reason, list accuracy, with valid contacts and their telephone numbers, with the fewest possible wrong numbers, is extremely important. The number of busy signals received and voice mailboxes reached also has an important effect on agent performance. Calling lists are usually the responsibility of the marketing department. Good, detailed reports from the contact center will help marketing to improve the accuracy of their lists. The number of busy signals and voice mailboxes reached by the system becomes
the joint responsibility of marketing’s list creation and contact center campaign management. At the list creation stage, knowing who to call and when to call them are key elements in the campaign timing and contact center hours of operations. On the daily campaign management side, setting a dialer call back strategy and call rescheduling when reaching a third-party connect become key elements for cost efficiency and good agent productivity. At the end of a list/campaign, besides the analysis done by the contact center managers, the marketing people must analyze the statistics to determine the most opportune time to reach each contact. This information can then be reused when creating sublists or campaigns aimed at calling customers at the most appropriate time of the day.
List penetration rates can also help the marketing department to create lists and plan promotions. The end of a list should be dictated by the list penetration rate, and not by an exact date, unless a promotion
has ended. It is important to plan the right number of contacts for a given promotion, to avoid having to abandon a good list during a campaign because a promotion has ended. It is not recommended to make lists using only recycled lists. The opportunities for contacts are automatically weaker, which will affect the productivity of the dialer and agent morale. List penetration statistics can therefore provide important feedback to marketing about how lists should be segmented. This, in turn, will have a positive effect on future business statistics.
Dialing results also give a clear indication on business strategy performance and impact on contact centers. There is a direct correlation between the number of times the system dials before reaching a contact and the agent wait time between calls. Statistics for non-transferred calls can indicate a significant number of voice mailboxes, rather than live contacts, reached. For voice mailboxes, it is worth using the best calling
hours according to geographic zone, with planned strategies for a limited number of callback tries at different times. For busy signals, we recommend planning a tighter callback strategy. For example, following a busy signal, the strategy would be to call back 10 minutes later, then 15 minutes later and, finally, another day. A limited number of tries should also be planned. To optimize calling lists and campaign productivity, the recommended strategy for dealing with voice mailboxes and busy signals is four or five callback attempts within one campaign or a one-week list. Finally, if the data are not in line with the established objectives, different contributors will have to analyze the situation, diagnose the problem, and find a solution.
Once the call is connected to an agent, sales numbers and conversion rates need to be carefully evaluated. To increase conversion rates, that is, the percentage of sales within the completed contacts, which includes total sales, refusals,
and not qualified, two things may be done: - First, at the contact center level: improve training, telephone monitoring, and coaching--this topic will be covered later in this series of articles on outbound practices.
- Second, at the marketing level: improve segmentation, as discussed in the first article of this series.
Call termination code results, particularly if the “other” category is used sparingly and only with explanations, can provide valuable feedback to marketing for list creation and promotions, and to contact center management for agent training and coaching. The information from these codes can thus indirectly help to improve business statistics.
It is clear that an efficient, productive, and profitable contact center does not just “happen” and is not merely the result of choosing the best tools and solutions. Rather, it is the result of mutual understanding and collaboration among various departments or business units. Knowing what
statistics to collect, why you should be collecting them, and how to collect them will allow you to gather important and valuable information that can be used throughout the enterprise—after all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Analysis of these statistics will indicate what you’re doing right and what could be improved, so that you can better serve your customers and enhance your bottom line!
Click Here for the second part of this 8-part series. Stay tuned our next article that will focus and expand on the idea of interdepartmental collaboration, and how it can benefit the whole organization.
Mariane L’Ecuyer is Manager of Consulting services at Elix, an organization with over 16 years of expertise in contact center technologies and operations. To contact the author: mariane.lecuyer@elixonline.com, or1-877-909-3549, or www.elixonline.com
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