How to Know when You're on a Winner
The catchword today for business is flexibility.
With changes in suppliers, customers, and the processes
connecting them altering almost daily (or so it seems) the
future clearly belongs to the organisations which can adjust to
change quickly and effectively.
The good news for Call Centres is that, unlike more traditional
sales organisations, the modern Call Centre has the equipment in
place to measure this easily.
Instead of doing a sales training course and then waiting some
weeks or months before you can reasonably evaluate the
effectiveness of the course, the Call Centre can institute any
change regarding CRMs and measure its effect on sales on a
frequent, regular basis.
In the traditional face-to-face small-scale operation, the
manager can make the change but not be sure of its effectiveness
or whether the change is due to the changes instituted as things
change anyway.
How do you know the improvement in sales is due to the new
processes or due to something else? Or what if it is successful
- how long does it last?
And what does this mean in practice?
At CustomCall (http://www.customcall.com.au) in line with its
company Core Value of Continuous Innovation, this issue was
dealt with in the following way: 6 CRMs from 4 different teams
were brought together for 2 hrs for a workshop to improve their
sales.
Then the sales conversion rates were measured over a one month,
two month and three month period.
These results were compared with their results for one two and
three months preceding the workshop.
This produced an improvement of
one month + 11.43% two months +22.04% three months +22.66%
Looks good but maybe everyone else changed too without any
training.
So the same comparison was done with the whole campaign.
Comparing Campaign After-workshop-date to Before-workshop-date
sales gave the figures:
one month -1.37% two months +05.80% three months +05.71%
Removing the changes which happened anyway for the whole
Campaign, the final difference for the effect of the workshop on
the training group was:
one month +12.80% two months +16.24% three months +16.95%
Over three months the workshop produced a 16.95% increase in
sales conversion rates.
Then the workshop was repeated for another 6 CRMs and after only
one month the change (minus Campaign change) was 16.30%
improvement in sales conversion rates.
Getting CRMs from different teams means the change is not due to
one Team Leader for some reason bringing about a special
improvement. Comparing the test group with the whole Campaign
means they're not undergoing an improvement which is happening
anyway, as the full Campaign serves as a control group for the
test group.
This makes measurement a no-brainer.
Interestingly when I told one of the CRMs his sales had gone up
45% over the three months he said "Oh I didn't realise". So even
those who benefit from change are not necessarily the best judge
of the value of that change, Luckily with mechanisms in place to
keep track we can make an informed objective judgment.
That was just one example but since all modern Call Centres have
the equipment in place to do the same, it's a waste of resources
if they're not doing some research like this at this very
moment. Maybe giving a group of CRMs an apple a day would result
in increased sales. Maybe giving them an extra 10 min break
would do that too. Maybe oranges would be better. Who knows?
The key is to try something and then measure it.
More about the CRuMpet self-training program at
http://www.gettablegoals.com/CRuMpet/index.html