No matter how successful your sales team is in your call center, there’s always room for improvement. Luckily, there are plenty of call center tools that help agents be productive and close deals on the phone. If you want to see better numbers from your agents, the key is to rely on the data. You get valuable information from your marketing efforts and call center software.
The 5 Most Important Metrics to Track and How to Track Them
These metrics should all be familiar to you. Knowing the data is one thing, but knowing how to track it accurately and what to do with it is another. With a little extra focus on these points, your sales team is sure to shine.
1) Contact Ratio
When you’re trying to make sales over the phone, your first objective is actually to make contact with your leads. Hence, your contact rate is an important metric to track for sales success. The contact rate is the ratio of leads on your list to conversations that happen. If your phone contact rates are not as high as you’d like, you can start increasing them by with local area match. After all, studies show that people are around four times more likely to answer their phone when they see a local number. Using tools like Local, State, and Group DID matching can boost contact rates.
Another way to improve contact rates is to use a predictive dialer. This type of dialer increases a call center’s productivity by as much as 500 percent. A predictive dialer enables agents to save time by not dialing each number by hand. Also, it automatically skips invalid phone numbers altogether. This automation means they spend less time waiting for people to answer and more time talking to leads. The added productivity boosts those contact rates, which, as we covered above, is essential to more sales success.
2) Converting Leads to Valid Prospects
Another metric to track is the conversion rate for turning cold leads into valid prospects. Mainly, when your agents can get leads to show some sign of interest, you want to track that, because it’s a sign that what you’re doing is working. This metric tracks the calls progress through the sales funnel. Whether it’s collecting additional contact information or a lead requesting pricing information, you want to know what stage of the process a prospect has reached.
It’s crucial to track this type of conversion rate per agent, not just for your company as a whole. You want to keep track of which tactics work and which agents are most productive. Hopefully, you have access to some useful call center tools that help you document this conversion rate. For example, CallTools offers Live Agent Monitoring, which lets you supervise calls in real time. This feature combined with real-time reporting makes it easy to track all call data as it happens.
3) Conversion Rates of Sold Customer
While it’s vital to track the rate at which your business converts leads into valid prospects, it’s also crucial to keep track of the conversion to the sold customer. This metric is simple. It compares the number of total leads to the number of sales. This metric is one of the most critical for outbound call centers and is most likely to have a significant impact on your bottom-line.
Fortunately, the conversion rate is easy to track. Just as with some of the other outbound call center performance metrics, you can track the conversion rate with the help of Live Agent Monitoring and Real-Time Reporting. These features work together to report the performance of both agents and the company as a whole. This way, you can identify which agents are your best salespeople and whether you should provide additional training to your team.
4) Average Talk Time
As you might guess, average talk time is the average of the amount of time your agents talk to leads. You track this partly because you need to know if it’s time to add or reduce the number of employees you have. Alternatively, you may need to provide more training if the average talk time is not where you’d like it to be.
The real-time reporting feature from CallTools helps you track this as well. If you find that you’re not happy about the average talk time for your agents, note that using a predictive dialer should help. After all, this tool already tracks the average talk time to determine dial rates and get an agent speaking to the next lead as soon as possible. When your agents don’t have to deal with manual dialing, wrong numbers, or getting sent to voicemail, average talk time improves pretty quickly.
5) Optimial Time-Of-Day to Make First Contact
Part of improving sales is figuring out which hours provide the best chance of contacting leads. Once you start tracking what the peak hours are, your agents should have better success with their contact rates and even their conversion rates. Additionally, this helps staff your call center appropriately, so you have enough agents working during the right times.
When you use the right call center software, determining peak hours is easy. Reports should have timestamps built in making it simple to keep track of how successful agents are at getting in touch with leads. Analyzing the data you have to determine which times of the day are best for calls result is a more productive call center.
If you’re interested in learning more about call center tools that help improve productivity and overall sales, contact CallTools today to request a demo!
