Newsletters

Customer Support:   (972) 395-3225

Home

Articles, News, Announcements - click Main News Page
Previous Story       Next Story
    
Is Reporting Holding Back Your Sales Performance?
Drilling down into the right data will increase your teleservices performance

by David Schreck, CEO of Intelemedia Communications - January 16, 2014

Is Reporting Holding Back

Your Sales Performance?

Drilling down into the right data

will increase your teleservices performance





Do the reports give you insight into your performance?

You need deep analytical data and applied insight to continually improve performance.


Introduction

How many reports do you review on a daily, weekly or monthly basis detailing your inbound telemarketing results? Are you getting the right data?

Most reports show high-level, obvious facts such as number of calls, overall conversion rate and abandonment. What action do you take, based on the reports? Are they telling you what you already know? Are you getting only final tabulated results? Do the reports give you insight into your performance? More importantly, are they telling you the root causes behind the results?

Beyond basic data, your reporting should indicate five important actionable insights:

1. Where are you performing well?

2. Where are you not performing well?

3. Why you are performing well?

4. Why you are not performing well?

5. Specific corrective actions to improve performance

Intelemedia Research

While high level “vital signs” of performance tell you in general terms how your call centers are doing, you need deep analytical data and applied insight to continually improve performance. Let me provide an illustration of how to apply deep analytical data to solve a specific challenge.

Let’s say you walk into an environment where sales are two percentage points below budget and abandonment is five percentage points above budget. Obviously, the reports told you the problem, but do you have applied insight to determine steps to improve performance?

First, concentrate on time interval reporting. While knowing the overall rates for conversion and abandonment is good, it is equally important to know how each is ranked throughout the day. Is each not achieving objectives consistently, or are there key time intervals driving down the overall average? Time interval reporting is an excellent tool to dig deeper and uncover the underlying root cause. Look for specific pain points when analyzing a time interval report by reviewing each 30-minute and day-part interval to compare results throughout the day. Identify time intervals that fall outside the average in both positive and negative ranges. You need to understand what factors drive these changes. This is one area to focus on. Next apply the same approach to days of the week and weekends. By doing this, you are digging deeper into the various time intervals that may impact your overall conversion rate.

This analysis will tell you if your conversion rate is consistent across all media, and, if not, which media is performing better. We identified the key factor affecting their negative performance.


Second, compare call volume by time and date intervals. When overlaying volume to time and day intervals, you will see how call volume maps to your time interval analysis. Are weaker conversion rates and higher abandonment correlated to higher volume intervals or days? We have seen cases where particular hours of the day were receiving a high volume of calls, yet those hours were achieving the highest conversion rates and budgeted abandonment. Other hours with lower volume had much lower conversion rates and above budget abandonment. Armed with this data you have ideas for actionable solutions.

Once you’ve looked at the volume and time analysis, turn your attention to conversion by media. Specifically look at conversion and abandonment rates compared to types of media buys and media companies themselves. The conversion by media report compares the metrics to type of media – radio, TV, etc. Once you understand the performance of your media mix, you can add volume of calls by media type. This analysis will tell you if your conversion rate is consistent across all media, and, if not, which media is performing better. Also, run the analytics as a comparison over time to see if changes to your media mix are affecting your results. One quick example on this front; we recently had a client whose conversion rate decreased by four percentage points. After running the time interval and call volumes, we found no major factors affecting the performance change. However, when we ran a media type report, we uncovered that the client had made major changes to the media mix. The analytics compared the past two weeks to the media mix of prior weeks. The client had moved their media mix to a shop that produced conversation rates eight percentage points lower than the average. In this case, they also increased their percentage spend from 30% to 60%. We identified the key factor affecting their negative performance.

Next turn your attention to the agent environment. You should receive a detailed listing of each individual agent’s performance segmented into weekly, monthly and 90-day resulting periods. We typically call this an agent ranking report. When analyzing a series of these analytical reports, we suggest concentrating on the following:

· When grouping agents into performance segments, do you see large performance variances between the segments?

· What is the distribution of calls between each group? Are the majority of calls going to “rainmakers,” new agents or underperformers?

· Do you have too many new agents and underperformers taking your calls? And by shifting the percentage of calls to the performing agents, what performance increase will result?

This analysis not only tells you exactly who is performing well, and not performing, but you now have detailed tactical action to improve results, i.e. move the calls to the performing agents.

If you read our whitepaper Who Is Answering Your Calls, you read how to increase profits by shifting more calls to the top performing agents.


You now have actionable data to improve your performance.  You will learn quickly if you have the right staffing throughout the entire day, and specifically, which time slots are working well, and which time slots need corrective action.

The chart below illustrates a recent client’s variance in agent call performance between their two centers. We categorized the sales conversion performance and call distribution to agents from two centers. You see four sales performance groups within each call center, four distinct conversion rates, and four separate distributions of calls – top performers, mid-range performers, low performers and new agents. Upon review you will notice the following:


· Each center has performing and underperforming agents.

· Call Center A is delivering the majority of their calls to the underperforming and new agents, while Call Center B is delivering the majority of their calls to their top performing agents. You now have more information than the fact that one center is better than the other. You see that the top performing center is sending more calls to their top performing agents, resulting in better overall performance.

· As stated earlier, you now have actionable data to improve your performance. Work with the call center to change the distribution pattern of calls to high performing agents.

Total Calls

Sales

Conv %

% Calls to Total

Call Center A: top performers

138

44

31.9%

11.1%

Call Center A: mid range performers

100

28

28.0%

8.1%

Call Center A: underperformers

430

90

20.9%

34.7%

Call Center A: new agents

570

80

14.0%

46.0%

Call Center A: Total

1238

242

19.5%

100.0%

Call Center B: top performers

1148

370

32.2%

51.9%

Call Center B: mid range performers

733

220

30.0%

33.2%

Call Center B: underperformers

200

42

21.0%

9.0%

Call Center B: new agents

130

14

10.8%

5.9%

Call Center B: Total

2211

646

29.2%

100.0%

Grand Total

3449

888

25.7%

Finally, review a series of staffing diagnostics analytics. Staffing analytics tell if you have a sufficient number of agents for the volume of calls—not just

overall, but by time throughout the day. Typically, the report presents the number of calls per agent ratio by time interval. You will learn quickly if you have the right staffing throughout the entire day, and specifically, which time slots are working well, and which time slots need corrective action. The sample below illustrates a typical staffing diagnostic report.


Having a series of analytical diagnostic reports can allow you deeper dives quickly to compare and analyze several key factors that could contribute to the performance.  You have a suite of diagnostic tools and quantitative data to determine what specific actions are required to improve performance.


In summary, you started with the challenge that sales conversion and abandonment were not meeting the required objectives. Having a series of analytical diagnostic reports can allow you deeper dives quickly to compare and analyze several key factors that could contribute to the performance. These include:

· Key metric performance by daily time intervals

· Key metric performance by day part, weekday and weekend

· Call volume to performance comparatives

· Media mix analysis

· Agent ranking and call distribution

· Agent staffing

You have a suite of diagnostic tools and quantitative data to determine what specific actions are required to improve performance.

Case Study

Let me share how Intelemedia put our analytical diagnostic tools to work for a customer. Recently a direct marketer was achieving a conversion rate of 11.2%. The client had two concerns. First, the 11.2% conversion rate was not generating the desired profitability. Second, the client wanted to generate $1,500,000 of additional revenue per year. To achieve this increase, they needed to generate 40,000 more calls, but also needed to increase their conversion rate by 2%. The client asked for help in accomplishing these two goals.

We began with the diagnostic reports described above. First we reviewed the staffing analysis. Immediately, we identified significant opportunities for improvement. Specific time intervals had major drop offs in staff availability which resulted in higher abandonment and lost sales. More importantly, the agent specific information identified agents that had significant decreases in the number of calls they handled during certain half-hour intervals. This highlighted an opportunity – to increase staffing during high volume call time slots.

Next came the agent ranking report. We looked for agents who consistently achieved the desired conversion rate. The chart below shows us that 39 agents averaged an 18% conversion rate, while 102 agents averaged 10.2%. The client did have a group of agents who could meet the desired conversion rate. A deeper dive illustrated that the 39 top agents – the ones who achieved a higher conversion ratio than the client needed – averaged 56 calls per month, or just 3 calls per day! Obviously, if these agents were assigned to handle more calls per day, the client would close more sales. Our job was to identify these agents and direct the call center to shift the call delivery to their work station.

Total Number

of Agents

Average Conversion Rate

Average Number of Calls Per Day Per Agent

39

18%

3

102

10.20%

8

Armed with this information the client took the follow corrective actions:

1. The client established a business model illustrating key metrics to achieve their goals. The key teleservices metrics included an average conversion rate of 13.2% and abandonment not to exceed 9%.

2. We provided three key management reports: Call Center Scorecard, Agent Ranking Report and Staffing Analysis.

3. The client and our staff met with their outsourced calls centers to present the goals and metrics, review the new, ongoing reporting tools and highlight the areas of opportunity.

4. Ongoing, we conducted daily and weekly performance reviews with each call center, utilizing the three key management reports.

Each day we sent our client and the call centers a set of reports highlighting call center performance in the area of staffing, agent performance distribution and conversion rates. In addition, a weekly scorecard was established, allowing each call center to quickly understand their performance.

The end result? A three point improvement within three weeks! Three months into the program, all objectives had been met. Conversion rates increased to 14.2% consistently; sales are surpassing the objectives, and abandonment remains under 10%.

You need well-designed reports that hone in on key inhibitors and provide specific actions for improvement.

The first key to success was utilizing a set of in-depth diagnostic reports to identify opportunities for improvement. The second was applying key reports among the participating call centers highlighting their metric goals, informing them how they were performing against their goals and sharing the diagnostic reports highlighting inhibitors to their performance…right down to the half hour interval and agent level.


The in-depth reports highlighted inhibitors to success, and also what suggested actionable changes were needed to achieve desired results.

SUMMARY

As you can see, deep diagnostic reports are critical to maximizing call center performance. Rather than gathering reams and reams of data, you need well-designed reports that hone in on key inhibitors and provide specific actions for improvement. Furthermore, these reports need to be shared and discussed with the entire team – including outsourced call centers.

So ask yourself – what are my reports NOT TELLING ME, and how do I get the data I need to make decisions that improve performance?

David Schreck, CEO of Intelemedia Communications

David is President and CEO of Intelemedia. Intelemedia offers a new breed of call center services by combining industry-leading technology with a platform uniting top performing agents from multiple call center companies. Since 1993, Intelemedia has developed elegant telephony and database solutions for the call center industry that transform how organizations more effectively manage call handling and caller experience within their customer service and sales acquisition environments. His wealth of experience integrating technology, sound business processes and strategic sourcing is the driving force to the success of Intelemedia’s call center applications. David’s approach to “client-centric” teams focused on understanding and meeting customer needs has created a track record of developing high demand products. Prior to joining Intelemedia in 2001, David spent 16 years with Moore Corporation where he established Moore's industry-leading national strategic print management outsourcing unit. In addition, he led the company’s initial thrust into e-business, successfully introducing electronic forms as a high growth and viable business within the printed form industry.

Intelemedia
1255 W. 15th Street, Suite 700
Plano, Texas, 75075
Voice: 972.498.9800 | Toll-free: 800.300.2150
Fax: 972.889.5300
www.intelemedia.com

 
Return to main news page