Top Fascinating Tips to Make an Efficacious Outbound Call Strategy

Posted by Rahul Garg

Having a word with customers easy if they make the call first because when you try to make contact with them, you often end up in their voicemail system. These days, people don’t prefer to answer calls coming from an unknown number, and this should be enough to understand why the job of people like telemarketers, salespersons, etc. is getting tougher with time.

According to the latest surveys, outbound calls related to sales or marketing purpose don’t even last for 10 seconds. With poor answer or contact rate, improving sales growth seems next to an impossible task. When you struggle to improve the sales of your products and services, you are unlikely to see any improvement in business growth.

To make sure that brand message reaches to the targeted audience, businesses avail services from outbound call centres. This is an astute move because when professionals take matters into their hands, the success rate is likely to snowball. Don’t want to join forces with renowned outbound call centre service providers? Here are some tips that will aid in making an efficacious outbound call strategy, so pay attention to them:

1. Make a list of crucial KPIs with the aim of tracking them

For established outbound call centres, KPIs (key performance indicators) matter most because they reveal those areas where you are doing well and also tell where the improvement is due. Therefore, if you are working on an outbound call strategy, think hard about indispensable metrics and pen down them on paper. After this, keep a tab on them while running an in-house outbound call centre. A few KPIs that we would like to suggest you are:

Occupancy rate

Occupancy rate, an outbound call centre KPI, shows how willingly agents are doing their job. In simple words, this KPI shows how much agents are occupied. Keeping this KPI in control is crucial because if it soars continuously, the problem of high agent turnover is likely to strike in the later stages. While if it is below than the threshold level, you will face unnecessary hassle while attaining desired objectives.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is self-explanatory. If you are getting connected with prospects and having a meaningful conversation, your aim should be on closing sales. It is important as there would be no mean in involving in an effective conversation with prospects if you don’t know how to close the interaction on a positive note. Needless to say, sales growth dwindles if the conversion rate does.

Average handle time

To enjoy success, your aim should be on making maximum calls in a day. For this, you must keep the AHT (average handle time) in check. This is so because if you bore potential customers by unnecessarily stretching the call duration, the hassle of high call abandonment is very much on the cards. That’s why keeping AHT in control is extremely important. It is imperative to note that AHT should be reduced but not at the cost of FCS (first call close).

2. Make your calling scripts error-free

Doing outbound calling isn’t easy as it causes so much frustration because you have to make prospects understand the same thing over and over. The thing that can take the anxiety away is ‘Reliable call scripts.’

As we have already told that, outbound calls don’t last for even 10 seconds. The major explanation to this is when prospects sense that the other person on the call is nervous or acting too friendly, they are likely to put the phone down. When the number of call hang-ups starts amplifying, you most probably fail while running an outbound call centre.

That’s why developing error-free call scripts is significant as they won’t only help to set the tone at the start of the interaction, but also ensure all the questions asked by prospects get answered in an appropriate manner.

So, if you are willing to run a successful outbound call centre, don’t be careless during the script creation process.

3. Involve the prospect in the conversation

By and large, only those calls result in sales, which have the interest of both parties (prospects and potential customers). Usually, in-house outbound call centres’ agents start talking about the merits of products/services as soon as their call is answered. Instead of securing benefits, this results in call hang-ups because monologues irk prospects and encourage to disconnect the call for the sake of relief.

If industry reports are anything to go by, if potential customers speak for at least 70% of the call duration, the chances of successful sales improve significantly.

Therefore, if you persist with the decision of not bagging services of established outbound call centres, make sure your in-house calling agents are drawing the interest of potential customers into conversations.

4. Play smart after being encountered by potential customers

Nowadays, reaching out to decision-makers has become a challenging job because they have secretaries, receptionists, etc. having strict instructions to not connect any sales-related call during the business hours. Getting past gatekeepers isn’t easy as they show adamant nature while having a word with outbound call centre agents.

That’s why specialised outbound call centre service providers train their agents in such a manner that helps to deal with the gatekeepers and paves the way for an effective conversation with decision-makers.

So, if you are running an in-house outbound call centre and don’t want the sales of your products/services to get affected due to gatekeepers, teach the technique of playing cards perfectly to your in-house calling team.

Final thoughts:

Making successful outbound calls has become an imperative task as the sales growth is at the stake. Of course, getting presumed outbound call centres on-board is a much safer option, but an in-house outbound call centre can be run in a seamless manner if the above-mentioned pointers are kept in mind.

Thanks for reading!

Tags: Outbound call centres Outbound call centre