Wednesday, August 20. 2008Call Centres And Sales CapabilitiesJohn Linton A colleague referred me to page 57 of the August 7 - 13, 2008 edition of BRW which was an article on the performance of Australian call centres providing 'sales assistance' to prospective customers. The article was headed "CALLING, NOT LISTENING" with the sub heading of "RUDE, UNHELPFUL AND FLOGGING PRODUCTS YOU DON'T WANT. THEY'RE THE CALL CENTRES FROM HELL". Now, I have no idea of the real credentials of either the writer of the article (Adam Goodvach) nor the credibility of the organisation that did the research (Global Reviews). The article describes Global Reviews as "does quarterly benchmarks of call centres .....making tens of thousands of calls in the process" - so perhap it is a credible analysis. What caught my colleague's eye was the fact that in the list of the ten worst call centres surveyed, five of the ten were ISPs: 2. Internode 4. TPG 5. Unwired 8. Soul 9. Primus In stark contrast, in the list of ten best call centres there was, at number two, Telstra BigPond - the only ISP on the top ten. Obviously this survey was on the various companies call centre capabilities when people called in with SALES enquiries - it wasn't how the call centres performed in terms of handling support calls and requests. However it seems quite odd that 50% of the worst ten sales call centres should be operated by ISPs and only one ISP was rated as being very good. My interest was not in how badly five 'competitors' were rated by an unknown organisation but how Exetel's sales answering services would fare in such a survey. For over a year Exetel offered no telephone sales enquiry answering service for a range of reasons that appeared to be valid at that time so we have some realistic statistics as to what happens between not having a telephone service avaialble for sales enquirers and having such a service. However we have no statistics on how effective, or otherwise, answering sales enquiries are within our company - other than that our sales increased after we resumed a telephone sales enquiry answering service. That may sound strange (as strange as this survey finding 5 large ISPs having really bad sales enquiry handling services) but it may come from a common set of situations. Having only thought about it for the time between reading the article over 'breakfast' this morning and now, I have no real answers but I think the reasons may be related to: 1. ISPs are technically based companies with little internal sales abilities or even interest in sales processes. 2. The ADSL market has been a boom market since the beginning and new sales have been pretty easy to acquire and few ISPs have given much thought or interest to the 'sales side' of their call centres. 3. ADSL was a difficult service to provide (and therefore buy) initially, and for quite a long time, and many ISPs had to use 'engineering background' personnel to handle 'sales' enquiries effectively. While none of the above reasons apply to today's marketing environment it is pretty hard to make changes to large call centres (or any large operation) within a commercial enterprise. There are all the obvious reasons for this being the case not least of which is that call centres produce endless call answering statistics of how well they are doing and few decision making managers within large organisations are capable of understanding what's going on in their call centres until some newspaper writes up a 'complaint article' sourced from disgruntled customer comments - but that is only going to apply to support call centres (a la Dodo's recent slagging off in the media). No media are going to write an article on how people are not getting sales information from a call centre; not least because no-one who 'suffers' is going to care about their treatment - they just buy from someone else. So what does Exetel do about this article's claimed information? Easy enough to say - "that doesn't happen here". Such a view is unlikely to be true. So what do we do? I suppose it's a 'action jogger' in that Exetel has always had engineers answer sales enquiries (because of 3. above) and we have never reviewed that situation since January 2004. Just goes to show how careless even the most involved decision making management can be. So it is a reminder that it's long past time to actually build a sales enquiry call centre service that is premised and based on being purely a sales operation rather than something a new Exetel employee has to do so they can move on to 'proper' engineering responsibilities. One more change to Exetel's operational processes to be added to the never ending list. Trackbacks
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John,
The two things I loathe about call centres (other than 20m waits which I assume will never apply to your company): 1) Too many choices! I know I want to speak to 'someone' - why must it take 2-3 minutes of frustrating options to even go into a queue! I especially can't stand when voice recognition doesn't work. 2) When the person I am speaking to cannot understand me or I cannot understand them. Unfortunately this is often related to foreign workers/call centres which leads to stereotyping. Comment (1)
I hate it when someone tries on-selling a product to you when the support call is winding up and when you press them for more information, they either don't know the answer or say they'll transfer you to someone more knowledgeable. If you're going to try selling a product on the same call as a support call... at least know the product!
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i just took 6.15 mins to get a sales ? answered.
i inadvertantly pressed a wrong key and got dropped. my fault not yours. the next connection took a lot less time that is good really. the question was answered quickly, appropriately and politely i think that so long as u employ people with good command of English, with no huge accents (think of those with hearing losses who cant understand the accents maybe) and who have no huge gaping cultural differences and who dont call the women callers mam all the time.......and answer reasonably quickly...........u are ahead of everyone..... especially Virgin you dont need engineers to sell plans i suspect the people employed at APIA might well be a model for many organizations handling calls . and i suspect that there are many more mature people in that work force. just my experience. Comment (1)
When you say APIA, do you mean Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency?
I have never called them, but their business model is brilliant. Insure people for slighlty less than the rest of the population. Restrict membership so that only people that are; a) Retired & home a majority of the time, less likely to have house break in claims. b) Drive less - Less car claims. c) Drive slower and more cautiosly - Lower claim amounts when they do bingle. d) Generally lower risk takers - thus the insuarance against these risks will be lower. Perhaps phone support is the only area where they pay 'more' than other companies, as their customers may be less inclinded towards internet assistance? Comment (1)
yes i do mean them Joel
they are not as restictive as they appear....in that part time workers can be insured by them. as i recall it i fit the age but not the profile and others i know are the same. ie i have been seriously burgled, had a car ding and made other claims for trivial stuff. but never the less it is probably statistically true that certain realities are so they wouldnt work as they do if it wasnt true!!! the underwriters would not let them i guess LOL all the companies seem to take claims over the phone. stopping that first line approach would be an error. i personally want a human being to be there when i need a human. i have initiated claims for others and that first line of an empathetic human in what is a negative situation......is critical. you want someone to tell you kindly that it is ok to chuck out all your frozen food cause the fridge motor is done. and yes u can get a cheque adn more food asap. i found the GIO were super helpful when i lodged for someone..fell over themselves to help. again......a mature aged woman i personally dont want to deal with the artifical upbeat stuff that came down the lines of Virgin (no... i wasnt their target customer but i was first in and loyal ) and neither do i like the false good manners of their overseas women operators now. liked the young aussie guys tho i think exetel has a target market and has figured it out in a manner not dissimilar to APIA. not a bad way to go but u dont need insurance assessors to answer the phone initially for sales.....same as u dont need an engineer for any ISP sales. mind you i dont think it would hurt for the tech staff to know a bit of sales but maybe that is Utopian and yes i agree about Internode and iiNet sales staff. apathetic was also my experience...even tho several family members and friends are happy customers having had the indifferent service of one ISP, the fun/helpful staff at both and Dingo Blue and ihug and been happy with those services........the cold reality is that those companies are no longer existant. (i gather ihug became iinet..... but i didnt) Comment (1)
i actually called internode to suss out what they have, i explained i was with bigpond and coming out of contract
the guy didnt offer any info other than the basics, i initiated most of the call the lack of enthusiasm the lack of promoting their product took me aback i posted this on another forum in disbelief that they seem to think they are good enough to not have to try to encourage people to join i ended the call without the guy offering more information or any sales technique at all Comment (1)
If Sales calls are too 'pushed' (in the sense that the product is being over described), then I think I would be more inclined to hang up - not that I make calls to find out about a product, the internet shows me all I need normally.
It's one thing to have someone simply 'answer' questions, another to have that same person push a product, and much different to have that same person open your mouth and force the product down! I think dedicated sales staff work well, they should know the product from taking many of the Sales enquiries about it, and be able to handle a Sales enquiry efficiently, and with a slight angle on encouraging the customer to "buy". Having support staff answering the call just puts someone who has a high level of knowledge of the technology at the point of answer, not necessarily someone who knows how to "sell" a product (There's actually "manuals" and "How-To guides" on "Sales", so I'm not convinced it is something that can be 'done by anyone'). Comment (1)
On average how many sales calls do your "call centres" get a day?
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