Tick. Tock.
Your call center agents only have so many seconds in the day to sell extended warranties. And if you want them to reach their goal, you need to be ruthless in removing anything wasteful that stands in their way.
What are those areas? How can you improve your call center’s productivity?
Let’s dive in.
You Need to Find a Baseline
Off the top of your head, try putting some numbers to these metrics for your reps:
- Number of outbound calls per day
- Average length of each call
- FCR (First Call to Resolution)
- For our purposes, the resolution here is a sale
- Cost Per Call
That’s just scratching the surface of measurable inbound and outbound KPIs.
But ultimately, you won’t know how to improve your call center productivity if you don’t know where to focus.
Fortunately, you can generate unlimited custom reports with Inline CRM. By harnessing real-time data, you’ll be able to make a game plan in no time.
Discuss Goals Frequently
Let’s say upon reviewing your reports that your call center reps should be making three more calls per day to hit their monthly sales quota.
What do you think would be the most effective way of telling them? Keep in mind that data suggests setting clear expectations maximizes productivity.
- A company-wide email outlining the new goal
- A whiteboard where reps make tallies after each call they make
- Ongoing discussions about the new goal
The last option is the correct one. Why?
Emails can be deleted or forgotten. Manual tallies might reinforce the goal, but waste time that could be used on making another call or following up with a hot lead.
In fact, teams that discuss their goals weekly are exceedingly confident in their ability to meet them.
Now, let’s think about the reasons for this.
By discussing weekly, whatever goals you set are fresh in your agents’ minds — and they’ll voice the obstacles standing in their way. That could lead to updating a process, changing the way you onboard sales reps, or documenting how to troubleshoot complex customer objections.
Go Beyond Call Center Scorecard Metrics
You can assign all the numbers you want to your reps: Sales goals, monthly revenue, average hold time. But your agent is a human. They should be treated like one—and when you do, you just might notice some extra productivity as a result.
Consider that:
- 70% of employees are most engaged when they know their company’s strategy
- 25% of employees would rather be rewarded in extra PTO than a cash bonus
- More than half of employees have left a job due to their boss
What does this mean?
Ultimately, employees want to do well — and they will align their behavior if they understand why. They also want to be rewarded for a job well done (but how they’re rewarded matters, too). And if you’re a manager, asking how an employee’s day is going or expressing you’d value their input on an idea can positively affect morale.
And happy workers are productive workers.
Use Customer Experiences to Drive Efficiency
It’s a fact: Companies that experience positive revenue growth collect more customer experience data than non-growth companies.
It makes sense when you think about it.
Your customers are the ones spending money with your company. They know better than anyone why they did—or didn’t—sign up for your service.
So please: If you aren’t conducting customer surveys, start now. You can use Inline CRM to send follow-up emails based on client interactions from your marketing platform. You can even segment the email you send based on the outcome of a call!
For successful sales, ask:
- What was the #1 reason you bought from us?
- What would have helped you make your decision sooner?
- How could the sales process have been easier for you?
For unsuccessful sales, ask:
- What was the main reason you decided against our product?
- Is there something we could have done differently?
- Would you consider us in the future? Why/why not?
Once you have enough customer input, you’ll know what’s working and what’s not. That means streamlining your sales scripts, updating your messaging and more to drill down to the words that make people sign up.
Use an Extended Warranty CRM
If you ask your employees what’s stopping them from selling more, more than half would say it’s the tools and technology they use.
When a majority of employees agree on something, you need to pay attention.
And when they use a complete Customer Relationship Management tool, they don’t have to do much—because it improves call center productivity for them.
Our users say they’re able to save multiple hours every week. That’s extra hours they can use to focus on the bigger picture and sell more policies.
Try it yourself, for free! Request an Inline CRM demo today.
