If you’re like most business owners, your daily tasks are pretty busy, and those outbound calling campaigns can get hectic if you’re not properly armed. If you aren’t new to outbound calling campaigns, you have probably taken time to look over the past results to see what should be changed. The employees within the normal call center organizations all have their ways of doing things. If you’re not a telemarketer, then it’s hard to tell why those things are done a certain way, because they just are. Besides, when something is successful, why would they want to change it? Outbound calling campaigns success requires a balance of a variety of concepts and many times, it’s best that they are left alone. However, with careful evaluation, you might just be able to tweak those call center practices and give your team some insight that could lead your company to even more success.
Below is a list of things that you may want to evaluate – call it an outbound calling campaigns checklist, if you will …
Call Monitoring in the Call Center
Many use Quality Assurance in order to monitor calls that take place within the call center. By monitoring the calls, you will have an insight of how the call center is handling your calls. During this time, you should analyze each call center representative and look at the bigger picture – many monitoring programs use graded evaluations, which come in handy.
Core Components
Does the call center you use have the core components?
-Is your scripting guide effective?
-Is the offer of your call center compelling?
-Who is the target market of your call center?
– Do you know what the dialing strategy is in the call center?
If you feel that some adjustments should be made within the core components of the call center, don’t be afraid to make them because if those core components lack what is needed, your company could be on its way down a slippery slope.
Technology
How is the technology in the call center you’re using? Do you have the right amount of agents assigned to your campaign? Are they maximizing contact while decreasing abandoned calls? Many times, it would be best to have one person in charge of the settings on the dialer. You see, when you have too many people controlling it, it could cause duplications, which isn’t something you want. For this reason, it would be a great idea to keep track of the date, time and changes that have been made. This way, it will be easier to track and report so that you can determine what works best with a specific program.
Call Recording
If your company uses call recording, then that is a good thing – they have invested a large amount of resources in establishing their recording system. Speak to the call center and ask them to screen the recorded calls on a routine basis. During this time, we’re not listening for things like how a representative handles a customer or the quality of a call. Instead, we’re looking for ways that we can decrease the average call time. We’re also listening for potential misinterpretations and potential training opportunities.
Reporting
When it comes to outbound calling campaigns, many call centers enjoy getting reports. However, you need to speak with the call center and make sure those reports are being used. If you discover that the call center isn’t using those reports, then you may want to consider getting rid of the reports and freeing up some time to work on something else instead – or you could work on a more useful report that the call center could use.
Call Center Training
Listen to 20-30 calls so that you can see where the representatives are having the most difficulty in their calls. What responses are they not able to handle? Are they losing opportunities in the beginning of the call?
Goals
It’s a good idea to set goals in the call center – this gives them something to strive for. Goals and incentives go hand in hand. Call centers tend to do their best when incentives and creative contests are being implemented.
Communication
How is the call centers communication? Is it clear and consistent? Good communication is the key – after all, that’s why businesses hire telemarketing agencies.
Conclusion
In order to ensure you’re doing your best to improve the performance of your call center, this checklist will come in handy. Take a step back and take a look at the big picture on a routine basis. Many times, you may not find any changes that need to be done. However, from time to time, you may find that by tweaking something within your organization, your outbound calling campaigns will become even more successful.