By Angela Garfinkel, President
One of my hobbies is organizing. I get sheer joy from taking disorganized stuff and organizing it. I also love to read books about organizing. Many of you have probably read that bestseller, “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up”, by Marie Kondo. If you haven’t read it, please pick it up, but promise me that after you’ve read it you will gift it to someone else or donate it. We all need less “stuff” hanging around in our homes. Unless that book gives you ongoing joy, let it go to someone else to learn from and enjoy.
Staying organized in outsourced telemarketing management is not an easy task. Each week I start off with a list of important objectives and tasks that need to be tended to. The challenge is to leave room for unexpected challenges and opportunities. The challenges will always pop up and left unattended for any period of time, the problem will grow into a bigger problem. The opportunities often appear out of nowhere and if we’re overwhelmed then we may not recognize them and seize them.
Here are my 5 top tips for staying organized in outbound telemarketing and inbound call center management:
1) Create one comprehensive “objectives and task list” on one piece of paper. I prefer to keep mine in Word and then after I print it, I write in new ideas and new items over a few days to a week. On the task list, identify what can be delegated and what items your team is waiting for you to complete. Generally, the more quickly you complete a task, you are freeing up your team to take the next step. If they are waiting for you, you’re hurting your team’s productivity.
2) Once per week, clean up that list, removing items that are completed, assessing the necessity of tasks that haven’t been completed and identifying items that need to be delegated.
3) Give yourself a chance to focus on larger projects and priorities by blocking time on your calendar as an appointment with yourself. Don’t check email and don’t answer phone calls during those time spans. You’ll be surprised by how much more you accomplish and how good you feel when you’re able to dig in without interruption.
4) Make sure that you’re spending adequate time investing in yourself to learn something new and to share your industry knowledge with your team. If everyone is getting better, in theory you’ll have less emergencies and fires to put out.
5) The last item that I’ll mention is that checklists are a great way to stay organized. In particular, I love telemarketing management checklists.
- startup checklist
- training checklist
- scripting checklist
- client meeting checklist
- program evaluation checklist
- call monitoring checklist
- what to do if a program isn’t at goal checklist
It can be nearly impossible to remember all the details and a checklist is a great way to free your brain up for deeper thinking about the problems you’re having and the potential solutions you should consider.
As a bonus, I’ll share one of my checklists here. This is for evaluating an outbound telemarketing program that isn’t at goal.
Checklist of Questions to Ask When an Outbound Telemarketing Program Isn’t at Goal:
Are contacts per hour lower than expected?
- If Yes, look at dials per hour to see if dials per hour are lower than expected.
- If dials per hour are okay, is the connect rate lower than expected?
- Are you calling at the right time of day?
Is the conversion rate lower than expected?
- If yes, it is a universal problem for all telemarketing agents assigned to the program, or just a subset of the team?
- If just a subset of the team, is it a supervisor or team leader issue?
- Look at the conversion rate for different segments of your list (by geography, by list code, etc.)
- Is it a motivation issue with the team?
Is it a sales revenue issue?
- Is the upsell rate lower than expected?
- Is the cross-sell rate lower than expected?
- Do you have a problem with the lead offer?
General:
- Is the script and messaging working? What areas are not working?
- Are the rebuttals and objections/responses working?
- Are you generating enough interest in the first 20 seconds of the call? Are you buying the opportunity to take another minute of the customer/prospect’s time?
While this list may seem easy, when you’re stressed because you’re not hitting yours goals, it can be easy to overlook something as simple as looking at what time of day you’re dialing and if you change the dialing window, what does that do to performance?
Want to learn more about how we ensure top outsourced telemarketing services performance for each of our clients consistently? Send me an email at angela@qualitycontactsolutions.com or give me a call at 516-656-5118. I’d love to connect with you.
Angela Garfinkel is the President and Founder of Quality Contact Solutions, a leading outsourced telemarketing services organization. Angela has the pleasure of leading a talented team that runs thousands of outbound telemarketing program hours on a daily basis. Angela is also a certified Self-Regulatory Organization (SRO) auditor with the Professional Association for Customer Engagement and she is a designated Customer Engagement Compliance Professional (CECP). Angela can be reached at angela.garfinkel@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516.656.5118.
