Call center is a very popular topic among the HRtime community. Someone wants to conduct training, develop scripts, KPIs or a motivation (read: bonus) system. In fact, all of the above are tools, none of which are universal.
The real goal is to improve sales efficiency, increase conversion rate, and create a positive image of the company among customers. After all, a call center operator is often the first person a customer interacts with in a company. Talk to him wrong and you lose him. These goals are not achievable by simply changing scripts or training: you need a comprehensive approach.
I once had the opportunity to completely change the work of the call center of a development company. I boast: the conversion rate tripled, and the call center was transformed into a telephone sales department. Subsequently, this experience came in handy for 3 more trading companies, already in the B2B sector.
Everything that is said below applies not only to phone calls, but also to chats. It is basically the same there. Although with nuances.
Methodology: a comprehensive approach
In the company in question, the work of the call center was very dissatisfied. Operators were trained, scripts were rewritten by the marketing directorate, and KPIs were changed. It was of no use. Only the turnover grew. It is important that the call center serviced mainly incoming calls: advertising requests from people wishing to buy apartments in residential complexes under construction.
We asked ourselves three questions:
What do we want from the call center?
What do people contact the company with, what do they want to hear?
How should operators behave in order to satisfy the client and achieve results?
It took quite a bit of painstaking work to answer this question. It turned out that in a team of 12 operators, 3 of them have the best results, 3 have poor results, and the remaining 6 are in the middle. Exactly Pareto’s Law 20/80.
We listened to more than 500 call recordings of the best and weakest operators. We identified the main questions people ask in a call center. We compared the speech behavior of the first and second groups of operators. The results of this research turned out to be very interesting.
What do we want from the call-center?
The path of a company’s client to purchase an apartment, i.e. the sales funnel, is built in 5 steps:
Learn about the company and its offer;
Contact by phone with questions;
If everything suits you, visit the construction site, talk to the sales manager and make a decision;
If the result is positive, conclude a contract for the purchase of an apartment.
Where is the call center’s place in this process?
Initially, it was assumed that low-paid and not overqualified people worked there. They were given one task: to get a phone number from the caller to pass on to a sales manager, or directly to the sales department.
We pay people for what we want to get from them. Accordingly, the operators’ KPI, on which a significant part of their income depended, included the number of phones collected, or calls transferred to the sales department, as well as the number of calls received: the more, the better.
Understandably, this incentive was to get the customer’s phone and end the conversation as quickly as possible. In addition, they were instructed to be sure to find out the customer’s name and how he learned about the company. This was required by the marketing directorate in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the advertisement. All of this was part of the mandatory script, for violation of which the operators were also fined.
The average monologue would go something like this:
– Hello, my name is Anna. How do I address you?
– Please tell me, how did you find out about our company?
– Now I will switch you to the sales department. Or if you are not convenient, leave your phone number, you will be called back.
This hardly suited the clients, who called with completely different purposes.
What do people come to the company with?
Most of the callers were interested in the same questions:
How much does a square meter cost?
What apartments are available?
What are the delivery dates?
Where is the residential complex located?
Naturally, after hearing counter questions about the name and source of information instead of answers, many people hung up. Sometimes they reacted very aggressively. In general, only about 20 percent of people left their coordinates or agreed to be switched. Typical reaction: “Why did I call YOU?”.
Separate and important, – about the question “How do I contact you?”. Sales textbooks say that people love to hear their name. In fact, this is not true at all. Many people perceive such a question as an invasion of personal space. “Why do you need to know my name? You tell me how much the apartment is worth!”.
Harmful scripts
A comparison of the speech behavior of the operators yielded a seemingly paradoxical result. Weak operators followed the script verbatim. Strong ones, on the contrary, simply talked to customers. And achieved much better results.
In literary studies there are concepts of fabula and plot of a work. Fabula is the chronology of events, in the order in which they happened. And plot is how these events are narrated by the author. The plot of a novel may begin in the middle, or even at the end of the fabula[1]. It was the same here. Weak operators outlined the plot of the script step by step, without paying attention to the reactions of their interlocutors. And the strong ones built the plot of the conversation, along which they skillfully led the client, not forgetting to get everything necessary to fulfill the KPI. Sometimes the client’s name and the source of information about the company were revealed at the end of the conversation.
Nothing surprising really – it’s the basis of the psychology of communication. People don’t like to talk to robots, which were diligently portrayed by weak operators. And they like to get what they want, in this case, answers to their questions.
The questions are a separate issue. Of course, marketers knew what the callers are usually interested in, and for each question they wrote verbatim scripts, which were gibbered by weak operators. The strong ones spoke differently.
The most telling story is the question about the location of the residential complex. A long and flowery script was written for it, about what a wonderful old-town, beautiful and ecologically clean place it is located in. Which was recited by weak operators. One lady, having politely listened to all this, at the end remarked: “And I still don’t understand where it is located?”
The fact is that not all customers can clearly articulate what they are interested in. The location question actually meant: “How do I get there?”. Weak operators, hearing the key words in the question, automatically responded with a billet. The strong ones would instead use counter-questions to find out what the customer needed and give them the information they wanted. This helped to dispose them, so much so that the client would willingly give their name and everything else required by the KPI.
The same story is with the notorious work with objections. Hearing “And the company “XXX” is cheaper”, weak operators rushed to explain why such money. And the strong ones either ignored this, in general, not talking about anything, the client’s remark, or planted other, favorable information, or asked a question. For example: “Are you looking for an apartment for yourself?”. On what the client willingly switched to the details of his own biography, along the way throwing important information for further conversation. “Oh, so you have grandchildren! Great, we’ll just have a kindergarten with a swimming pool.”
Strong and weak operators differed in strategy and tactics of conversation. The former engaged in dialog. The second ones practiced the established scripts. The former first established contact with the client. The latter immediately put barriers between themselves and the client in the form of annoying questions about name and source of information. Of course, the strong operators took more time per conversation. They handled fewer calls, compensating for this with results.
Call center reorganization
First of all, we revised the purpose and objectives of the call center. Previously, they consisted of collecting customer contacts for the sales department. The new goal is to sell apartments.
The previous version of training consisted of memorizing scripts and passing an exam. Instead, we began to practice the skills of behavior in specific situations on the material of previously recorded negotiations, with the analysis of successful and unsuccessful options. We simulated negotiations with clients. And scripts turned from an end in themselves into a recommended auxiliary tool.
Of course, we had to work on the pitch. Some of the operators turned out to have incorrigible mush in their mouths. We switched them to chat. Someone’s rate of speech was too high. We had to slow them down. All this was perceived with enthusiasm, because it was interesting and brought results.
On the basis of this training we made a training movie and wrote a manual. Both of these things came in handy later, as the business expanded and the staff of telephone sales operators had to be increased.
We had to change many other things. The call center used to be a thing in itself. It was located in an office in the city center. We integrated it into a single sales chain. We took operators to under-construction and completed projects that they had only heard of before. We organized a link with the guys from the sales department. Previously they knew each other only by name and voices on the phone, but now they got to know each other personally and even became friends. Working pairs were formed: an operator and a manager.
Of course, the wage system was changed. It may seem strange, but in the operator’s income structure, the share of the fixed part was increased. And the variable part was directly linked to the conversion of calls, which in the new system was expressed not in the number of contacts collected, but in invitations of clients to the objects to meet with sales managers. A lot more was done: a career ladder was created, shift supervisor positions were introduced, with the task of managing and assisting operators, with remuneration linked to collective results.
It turned out that all the operators’ weapons were only scripts and personal communication skills. For example, they could not answer the most important questions of clients about availability and cost of apartments, because the situation changed daily, and they did not have up-to-date information. We organized online access to CRM for them.
Conclusion
If you are not satisfied with the work of the call center, it is unlikely that you can achieve serious results with half measures. You cannot repair an apartment with one hammer. The reasons usually lie not only and not so much in poor training of operators, but in the whole complex of reasons that need to be sorted out.
There are many myths about how to sell, how to talk to the client phone. But society and people are changing very quickly, and recipes that worked yesterday may be useless today.
Teaching communication skills “in general” doesn’t work. Except for the most common ones. For example, the ability to hear the interlocutor and lucidly express their thoughts. Each company has specifics of both the goods and services sold and consumer behavior. We should be guided by them.
Call center operators should be trained in very specific things, specific to the company and its business. Their main task is to give the customer the impression of people who are competent and ready to help. They need to be taught with concrete, live examples. Scripts in themselves are a useful thing, but only as a tool. If you make a fetish out of them, and especially if you tie their execution to the pay of operators, it will not end well.
Call centers usually employ people with higher education. It is useless to train them like Pavlov’s dogs. It only demotivates them. They are customer service managers like everyone else. They should be treated with dignity, and in addition to the carrot and stick in the form of wiretaps and KPIs, they should use the whole range of managerial tools and motivators that modern management has at its disposal.
And then you will get a real economic effect.