I work with a remote team and need to guide them in improving their sales (it’s a call center), can you share your experience on how other companies improve call center actions?

Hi Nuria,
It is not easy to respond this question in a generic way, because each type of business is different and requires specific kills, KPIs and supervision.
If we speak about KPIs, when it comes to sales I would highlight:
- # clients contacted a day
- Most important. % of effectiveness: e.g. % clients accepting offer / % clients contacted;
- Cross selling in existing customers is very important: % new products/services sold to current customers
For me there are some number of KPIs that are not relevant or, even worse, can make the productivity low. For instance.
- The # of calls taken: if the agent is given the customers to contact, this does not make sense, as it will depend on the quality of the database.
- Making the communication as short as possible: I would never recommend this old KPI. This goes against customer satisfaction and also sales. The agent has to use the time needed to close properly the deal.

But, as I said at the beginning, there is a lot of information that I miss to provide a more precise advice.
I remain at your disposal if you want to share more information.
Regards, Juan

Hi Núria, I fully agree to Juan. This is very complex. Beside KPIs, it is also very important that the agents know exactly their target group, their needs, product benefits etc. - the agents must be trained intensivley, report their learnings and improve their calls day by day. I am always testing different contents of customer contacts (tonality, offer, pricing etc). Are the product managers and sales people involved? Do they listen to calls and give feedback afterwards? If you need more information, we better should talk on the phone… Regards Andrea

Hello Nuria,
I can answer to your question specifically on my field which is Telecommunications B2B and in Italy.
I think each market and nations has his specifics, so the advices have to be considered relatively.
I agree with Andrea, which answered above, I can add that the most important thing is to target the right customer. After that you can improve all aspects and KPI’s of your agents, but if you work on a good customer base, the results will come !!
In my experience is much more preferred to have relations with customers, in order to show them you are reliable, consistent ( make calls to the same customer by the same person, give phisic address in order to show the client you are a solid company and so on).
Then all depends what you sell,if you can invest time on the research or not.
I would be glad to help you further if you want to contact me.
Ciao

Giampaolo

Hello Nuria,

everything my colleagues wrote is right and helpful. You write - increase efficience - kept customers in contact, # of calls taken.
keeping customers in contract is retention. Success in retention means actively selling contracts (outbound). This requires a action which should be determined to a defined user group identified via contract typus and final date. Then there should be a concrete offer of the provider. Helpful are the call patterns of the customer to have argues. The agents should be trained so that the call handling time (most important KPI) is short. Offer - yes/no, two arguments according to the call patterns, finish.
What I see during the last years is that the variety of calls, degree of individual offers, one2one communication is shrinking dramatically. On the other side the performance increase because well-trained agents ask well trained questions following lists and templates.
Another KPI is the illness rate and its correlation to the promotions. It is a sign for the quality of the promotion.
Finally increasing performance goes with standardization: teams for outbound, teams for inbound, teams for retention, teams for campaign a, e.g. a new handset, teams for campaign b, e.g. new tariff, etc.
I hope this helps and reaches you not too late.

Kind regards from Bernd