For the last five years, a leading UK business IT and telecommunications company has been using Tollring’s iCall Suite call analytics and call recording service to help streamline all areas of call handling.
Armed with such a detailed knowledge and understanding of the solution, iCall Suite is now a vital component in the products and services they supply to their own customers.
Their Telemarketing Director provides an insight into how iCall Suite has helped the company to achieve success.
Gaining new business is their primary focus.
As head of telemarketing with the remit of generating new business, much of the role is measuring and improving the performance of his telemarketing team.
His constant challenge is to cultivate good behaviours, ensure everyone is using the right processes and identify areas for further training.
This means he needs to measure work rates, talk times and performance, which he describes as policing, training and monitoring’.
In addition, maintaining good customer experience is a continuous activity. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, their customers required significant support. To achieve this, they needed call recordings to capture every customer discussion, with details on what was agreed or discussed at any given time to provide reassurance to both the company and its customers.
Statistics are a driving force across all areas of the business. No more so than in the telemarketing department with the team making outbound calls to set up appointments to sell telephone systems.
The call recordings captured and stored within iCall Suite play a vital role in enabling them to manage the performance of over 30telemarketers. The Telemarketing Director and his managers use the recordings to identify individuals who are doing well and encourage more of the same, as well as to discover those not doing well. He says that the recordings capture ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’.
He has a group of call listeners who review every successful call that results in a booked appointment. They also listen to over 75 percent of the unsuccessful calls that are made direct to managing directors in search of both positive and negative patterns to help improve performance. As he explains,
Ongoing analysis of call recordings and call analytics is critical to driving business performance. They regularly evaluate the missed opportunity cost of any unreturned missed call and review call back activity, both to educate their team and drive the accomplishment of targets. Call analytics coupled with CRM insights also help them to enhance customer experience through trend analysis, resulting in a structured and planned yet ever-evolving approach to telemarketing.
Reviewing call recordings has become ‘business as usual’ in the telemarketing team. They are aware that calls are reviewed, driving positive behaviour and the benefit of internal feedback for ongoing improvement. Productivity KPIs are shared with the team on wallboards to keep telemarketers (and their supervisors) informed and to support them in hitting their targets.
As business users of iCall Suite themselves, they benefit from first-hand product knowledge of the benefits of the solution, which has helped them to productise and resell it to their extensive customer base.
The Telemarketing Director says,
Their telemarketers are currently bringing in between $4m to $5m of new orders per month.
Their considerable success has been achieved by making incremental improvements of 1% or 2% across every area of the business, rather than trying to make massive changes. The small improvements have multiplied across many elements such as data science, training and by improving the level of experience of those making the calls. These ongoing advances, coupled with resource optimisation, have enabled the company to sell more through their leaner, more focused and better performing team.
The Telemarketing Director operates a league system where his people are promoted or relegated between teams based on their performance.
“This is not just about the statistics, but by looking at each person’s behaviour, their actions, and how they conduct themselves on the telephone. This then provides our field sales team with access to true and accurate records when they visit each prospective customer.”
They also use Tollring’s iCall Suite to monitor inbound calls. During the Telemarketing Director’s previous role as Group Operations Manager, he used Tollring to improve the company’s response to inbound customer calls. iCall Suite’s analytics revealed that callers were waiting an average of nearly two minutes for their call to be answered. Using iCall Suite monitoring and analytics to make everyone in the business accountable, he ensured that every caller to the business was greeted by a person in under 15 seconds.
The company is looking forward to future developments in Tollring’s product and will continue to maximise the current extensive feature-set. As the Telemarketing Director says,
