Outbound Call Centre And Its Metrics
A call centre may handle either outbound or inbound calls exclusively, or even both together. And the metrics for these two types are different and hence success rate is also calculated by different methods. Any small business which does not like to spend much on having their internal call centre outsources those services provided by these call centres; this is generally termed as outbound call centre outsourcing. One important aspect for a business to choose an outbound call centre is increased sales and customer service. In order to achieve this, the call centres must equip themselves with a strong strategy.
To understand what is an outbound call centre and the metrics of such call centres, you must understand what an outbound call in the first place is.
So What Is An Outbound Call?
The call which you recently received from any salesperson, who tried to sell his product or service is the simplest example of an outbound call.
By definition, an outbound call is a call made by a call centre, usually to a customer or other organizations. These might be calls like telemarketing, sales, fund-raising, surveys, and verification calls.
The call centre agents will make these outbound calls on behalf of any business or client from an outbound call centre.
A call centre may handle either outbound or inbound calls exclusively, or even both together. And the metrics for these two types are different and hence success rate is also calculated by different methods.
Any small business which does not like to spend much on having their internal call centre outsources those services provided by these call centres; this is generally termed as outbound call centre outsourcing.
One important aspect for a business to choose an outbound call centre is increased sales and customer service. In order to achieve this, the call centres must equip themselves with a strong strategy. Call centers in the Philippines, being one of the most sought-after BPO, make sure that they learn and understand the processes of the business they are working with to be able to develop a personalized strategy in providing support to their customers.
Effective Outbound Calling Strategy
Dialling Process-Based
The dialling template will be depending on your business requirements, for example scheduling a monthly call to remind the customer to pay their credit card bill.
The software will work in a way that it reads the preset parameters, and predicts an agent’s availability using data such as average call handling time, and connects to that agent when they are available.
It also does connect to the agent only if a human being attends the call since the answering machine detects the human voice, busy tones, beeps, etc.
Scheduled Call Back
For bills such as credit card, insurance premium, telephone, etc., some customers would request the agents to remind them through a call to make that payment.
And customer loyalty is received when they feel that they are heard. Fulfilling a customer need would enhance that loyalty. So to do that the agent should schedule a call to notify them regarding the bill payment.
If scheduled so, the dialer will automatically place the call on that particular date, thus providing enhanced call productivity.
DNC Compliance
In outbound calling time is the essence. Agents should be spending time on converting qualified leads rather than wasting their time on calls with unproductive leads.
So to attain this do-not-call feature should be used. This maintains a list of DNC numbers that will be filtered out from the leads list and ensures that those numbers are not included in the campaign.
Reports and Analytics
For every business to make a well-informed decision, data-driven reports are a must. With an outbound calling software, you get features to generate reports of many kinds which could be used by the business for analysis.
Agent productivity report, call details report, etc., is used to analyze the call quality and performance of the agents.
By using such reports, businesses can determine how the customer reacts to their services and how satisfied they are. Also, it would help to define or change the outbound calling strategy.
Outbound Call Centre Metrics That Should Be Tracked
Key Performance Indicator(KPI) is the indicator that is used to measure the success of any business. These indicators are to be observed to achieve the proposed business goals.
Such KPIs for Outbound call centres are as follows.
Average Handling Time
Maintaining a minimum average handling time is essential. Who doesn’t like to close a deal with just one call?
But it just doesn’t come easily for some businesses based on the service they provide or other factors. Identifying trends that work for your business and implementing them is an important step.
Conversion Rate
Your business’s revenue is directly dependent on the conversion rate metric and hence makes this an important one.
A high conversion rate means more sales and better business. If not, analyze where it’s lacking, the agents might be making a larger number of calls but fail to close the deal, which increases the cost per lead.
Call Abandoned Ratio
Imagine yourself receiving a call, and when you attend, it’s not connected to the agent immediately but kept on hold for some time, what would you do?
Obviously, anyone would cut the call; this increases the call abandoned ratio with the possibility of the business losing a potential customer by outbound call centre outsourcing.
Hence the call routing service should be set with parameters so that the customer will be connected to the agent immediately rather than waiting.