Competitive contact centers regularly measure their effectiveness. Using the best contact center reporting metrics, leadership can identify the areas of strength and where improvements can be made. When it comes to outbound calling success, there are several metrics that make a real difference. Here are eight to consider.
#1 Call Rates
The strength of your outbound sales calling can’t be judged by eye alone. Sure your team of agents may all look engaged and productive, but the only way to truly gauge efficiency is by tracking the number of call attempts made. Benchmarking the number of outbound calls per agent, campaign, and team can provide useful insights into agent or team productivity. At the same time, if one campaign is taking up much more of the agents’ time, the call script might require revision.
#2 Lead Processing
The number of calls out can indicate that your sales team is keeping busy. But are they actually being effective? That’s where the number of leads processed is a better indicator. Effectively processing a lead will give your contact center actionable information in determining:
• Value of leads
• The effectiveness of sales script
• What is and isn’t working
#3 Conversion Rate
What you really want to see is your agents converting the leads into successful sales, so this one is an obvious metric to measure. Typically measured as a percentage (# of calls/# of sales), the goal is to get a higher conversion rate. A lower percentage means your cost per lead is higher, which negatively impacts contact center revenue.
#4 Calls Per Lead
Trying to gauge the quality of your lead list, this metric takes into consideration the difficulty of making a sale on the first call (First Call Close, is another potential metric). Not every first contact is going to get a sale, but if the leads need many calls to make the sale or they never convert, your organization can revisit its lead list and agent reporting for areas of improvement.
#5 Average Hold Time
With many contact centers now employing automated dialing, there may be instances when a potential customer picks up the call and is put on hold to wait for an available agent. That’s a recipe for disaster as it leads to call abandonment and reduced overall profitability.
#6 Off-Call Time
You want your agents to spend the bulk of their time on the phone with potential leads, asking questions and offering the right solution. That’s where the sales revenue is generated. So, it makes sense to measure the amount of time your people have to spend on other tasks — prepping for a call, documenting after a call, calling disconnected numbers, talking to dead-end leads, even dialing out.
#7 Forecasting Accuracy
Your resource budgeting depends on accurate forecasting of several factors, including:
• Calls per hour
• Contacts per hour
• Amount of time spent on call
• Leads processed
• Off-call time
• Peak times
• Staff shrinkage
The better your understanding of all of these, the better able you’ll be to truly determine the revenue value of your campaigns.
#8 Revenue Per Call
Revenue Per Call (RPC) calculates the agent’s effort in increasing sales by dividing the total amount of sale by the total number of calls. Cost Per Call, on the other hand, measures cost incurred for each minute of handling the call workload. This may be focused only on the labor cost, but might also factor in telecommunications, facilities, and other service costs.
Don’t only look for shortcomings with your attention to metrics. If a particular agent has higher call rate averages, for instance, try to determine why. Perhaps there is something that individual is doing differently that you can share with other agents and incorporate into team training.
With contact center software today enabling leadership to react quickly and make live changes, it’s even easier to react in real-time to these metrics. Let Evolve IP set you up for success.
