A Sales Manager’s Guide to Boosting Call Performance

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As a sales manager, you have a lot on your plate. On any given day, you’re training new recruits, coaching sales staff, setting new goals, analyzing data, and determining strategies. And through it all, you’re expected to drive team performance.

To accomplish all of this, you need data, particularly as it pertains to your team’s activity: how many calls and contacts, what agents are saying and not saying, which agents are closing deals, and more. Having the right information is crucial to helping agents fine-tune their efforts, as well as developing a sales strategy for your entire team. This is why call tracking can be a sales performance game-changer.

Call tracking, the ability to gather critical data about phone calls and phone interactions, is often assumed to be only a marketing tool—a powerful one, no doubt, but a tool whose usefulness ends after the phone rings. The marketing team receives its data on the source of the call, while sales reps are left to their own devices to close the deal. However, the leading call tracking systems provide critical information to the sales organization and are being used across both functions.

Good call tracking systems are increasingly focused as much on what is happening on the calls as what interactions led to the call in the first place. They can help managers train, coach, and maximize the performance of their sales agents with powerful results: research reveals that even a one percent improvement in first phone contact with customers can result in more than a quarter million dollars of annual savings in the operational costs of an average call center.

A fully functional platform should combine call tracking, telephony, and integrations with sales management platforms, allowing supervisors and trainers an unparalleled ability to fine-tune the performance of sales and customer service agents.

80 % of consumers still would rather resolve their issues with a live agent over the phone.

Part I.Why Calls Matter

Despite the availability of email, text, chat, video, social media, and other 21st century means of contact, 80 percent of consumers still would rather resolve their issues with a live agent over the phone. But if phones aren’t effectively manned, customers go elsewhere: 94 percent of customers who fail to connect with an agent during their initial call will seek out a competitor. In short, live agents are indispensable; but they’re also expensive compared to automated channels, costing roughly $6 to $12 per contact, with each new sales hire costing an average of $10,000 to $15,000. This makes it important for businesses to maximize agent effectiveness—and yet only 31 percent of organizations adequately monitor agent interactions with customers.

The lack of real-time monitoring means that agents can continue to make the same mistakes for days, weeks, even months, before action is taken.

In order to maximize agent effectiveness, supervisors require a tracking platform with more than basic capabilities.

1. Call monitoring

A manager’s ability to listen to agents in real-time is critical for quality control. Call monitoring allows supervisors to ensure that agents are minding the details, like using appropriate greetings and adhering to the correct call structure. Equally important, call monitoring should allow listeners to find those moments within a call that go beyond the set scripts—uncovering tactics that can be shared across the entire team.

What Sales Managers Need to Make the Most of their Calls

The call tracking platforms that provide sales teams with the most value tend to have the following four characteristics:

2. Call recording

Supervisors can’t listen to every conversation in their call center, but the ability to record calls offers them the ability to monitor agents at their discretion and to have access to calls from the past so that they can monitor progress over time. This is particularly useful when an agent is having obvious issues or when all of the necessary information hasn’t been collected from a call.

4. Keyword recognition

Because managers don’t always have the time to look for vital moments within calls, it’s important to have a tool that searches for those moments. Quality call tracking technology will note keywords and phrases that indicate positive or negative moments within a call. The right tool will even direct readers or listeners to the appropriate place in a text or recording, saving them the lengthy process of scrolling through a transcript or listening to an entire call.

3. Easy-to-access transcriptions

Like recording, transcriptions allow supervisors to peruse agents’ conversations and find ways to fine-tune their responses. Transcriptions can be skimmed more quickly than calls, dropped easily into emails, and provide documentation of issues and/or excellence.

“Only 31 percent of organizations adequately monitor agent

interactions with customers.”

Part II. Optimizing Your Sales Team with CallTrackingMetrics

CallTrackingMetrics (CTM) is an example of a platform that offers the functionality and training opportunities to take your team to the next level. In this section, we’ll explore some of the features that make it possible.

Call Recording

Whether inbound or outbound, CTM records and stores previous calls, allowing users to study agent performance, customer preferences, script effectiveness, and more. CTM’s call-recording tool can help with the following areas:

• Training. Recorded calls allow managers and agents to review past conversations and find the strengths and weaknesses of agents, scripts, strategies, and call sources. Supervisors and HR officers can compile libraries of past calls in order to demonstrate positive performance as well as missteps to avoid.

• Documentation. Incomplete or incorrect information can make it impossible to follow up on a lead or act on a conversion. CTM’s recorded calls allow agents, accounting, or distribution teams to revisit a conversation to verify email addresses, location, contact information etc.

Live Listen

Even though recordings are made available immediately, sometimes it’s in a manager’s best interest to listen live to—or even participate in—a call. This feature can be used as a real-time training tool to help coach agents through new or difficult circumstances. Supervisors are able to join in immediately and provide guidance or answers before customer satisfaction is negatively impacted. Also, to address privacy issues, CTM generates customized “whispers,” (alerts that calls may be recorded or monitored), to inform customers that their conversation might be part of a quality assurance program.

Speech Analytics and Transcription

A large library of recorded calls is difficult to learn from without a way to sort the information and find relevant interactions. CTM uncovers the crucial moments in your calls in two powerful ways:

• Speech Analytics. CTM’s speech analytics tool scans calls for specific words and phrases and reacts according to the rules you set. Negative customer reactions can be captured via keywords like “unhappy” or “dissatisfied,” triggering texts or emails to supervisors. Positive keywords can reveal conversions or present opportunities for further contact. CTM’s tool also scores calls based on the content of calls. This makes it easy to effortlessly quality-check performance.

• Transcriptions. Sales calls are transcribed, with conversations broken out by speaker, making it quick and easy to scan a conversation. CTM identifies keywords throughout the transcribed call, allowing you to jump to that moment in the audio recording.

Real-Time Agent Reporting

With CTM’s browser-based softphone, managers can be flies on their call center walls—and even keep tabs on agents working remotely around the world. CTM lets supervisors view which agents are currently on calls and which agents are available, along with a wide array of other helpful data including: calls missed, the number of rings it takes for agents to pick up calls, the number and percentage of conversions by agent, and revenue generated by agent. This information not only spotlights the performance of individual agents, but also provides powerful snapshots of overall productivity.

Salesforce Integration

CTM’s seamless integration with Salesforce allows businesses to incorporate call tracking into existing sales and customer service processes.

Agents don’t have to leave Salesforce to receive calls and place outbound calls. Using CTM’s Salesforce Softphone, all calls are launched right inside of Salesforce, associated to the correct lead and opportunity, and logged as activities. All calls are then accounted for and are seen in the context of the progression towards closing. Management can identify patterns in call volume, while agents can pinpoint where outbound follow-up calls are still needed.

As each call comes in, agents view rich data about the advertisement and website visit that led to the call, obtaining context before they even answer. After the call finishes, the call recording remains within Salesforce, allowing agents and supervisors to recall details and next steps.

Advertising channels are automatically added as campaigns in Salesforce so that sales managers can see not only which channels are driving calls, but also which are creating more conversions. This gives managers the opportunity to provide feedback to the marketing team, as well as fine-tuning their agents’ performance within these channels.

ConclusionMaking the Most of Every Call

Research reveals that phone calls connect with prospects at a rate of 8.21 percent, while email contact converts at a lowly 0.03 percent. And 65 percent of Fortune 500 companies cite phone contacts as their highest quality leads, resulting in the greatest volume of sales.

To ensure—or even exceed—this worthwhile return on investment, your call strategy must be built on current and detailed information. This means giving your sales agents and their supervisors the call tracking ability they need to be more effective, productive, and efficient. A system like CallTrackingMetrics can help them make the most of every call—reducing costs and generating the conversions necessary to take your sales to the next level.

Call 800-577-1872 today to learn more about the advantages of

CallTrackingMetrics’ call tracking tools for sales. Or click here to schedule a demo today.

www.calltrackingmetrics.com

CallTrackingMetrics

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