Outbound calls play a critical role in many companies’ success. When done well, they can lead to a steady influx of new clients, better customer service outcomes, and more informed business decisions. But it can be difficult to excel with outbound calls – especially if you have an outsourced sales team that you can’t oversee directly. That’s where data analytics comes into play. You can use them to track your outbound call success rate across key performance indicators, then adapt your strategies over time. The net result could be much more impactful outbound calls and a more profitable business because of it.

But how do you leverage the power of data analytics to improve your outbound calls? We created this guide to answer that question. Read on to learn more.

The Importance of Data Analytics in the Call Center Industry

Before we cover the best strategies for using data analytics to improve your outbound calls, it’s worth first considering why they matter in the call center industry specifically. Here are a few key reasons.

Make More Informed Decisions

First, data analytics helps you make more informed decisions about how you run your call center. The data you track will give you a more accurate picture of the strengths and weaknesses of your team. That way, you can be confident that the decisions you make are based on real information rather than gut feel.

Track Performance Over Time

Data analytics also give you the ability to assess your outbound call performance over time. They don’t just give you a one-time snapshot of your results. They give you the ability to assess how your results change as you make different management decisions.

Adapt and Thrive

Finally, call centers can use the information that they get out of data analytics to change the way they do business. When you’re armed with more accurate performance data and have the ability to monitor it over time, it becomes much easier to prepare your business for long-term success.

How to Leverage Data Analytics to Improve Outbound Calls

So – now that we know why data analytics are worth paying attention to, let’s look at some strategies for using them to improve your outbound call success rate. Here are seven best practices you can use to unlock the full power of data analytics for your business.

Track Individual Agent Performance

The first thing you can do is use data analytics to track the performance of individual agents on your call center team. Doing this can give you a very good sense of who your top performers are and who may need further training to reach your targets.

There are many different performance indicators you can track on an individual agent basis. This includes:

• Number of sales
• Revenue per agent
• Average talk time
• Abandoned call rate
• Average hold time
• Dropped call rate
• And any other metrics you feel matter to an agent’s performance

Assess Your Lead Success Rates

Another worthwhile strategy is using data analytics to assess the success rate of outbound calls to pre-existing leads. The advantage of this style of performance tracking is it lets you know how effective your agents are at closing people or companies who have already shown an interest in your company. This can give you a more granular look at your team’s performance so you can more easily identify its strengths and weaknesses within the sales process.

Some of the best metrics for tracking lead success rates through data analytics include:

• Lead conversion rate
• Cost per acquisition
• Revenue per lead
• Lead connection rate (the percentage of leads that pick up when agents call)

Compare the Performance of Different Call Lists

Agents at outbound call centers typically use call lists when dialing leads. But these can come from different sources. For example, you might buy some of your call lists from a lead generation company but make others yourself through leads generated by your website.

The point is that you can use data analytics to assess the relative performance of these call lists. This can tell you which types of call lists and sources give you the best results.

For instance, you might find out that one company you buy call lists from gets you more conversions than another. Or you might discover that leads generated by your website are more effective than ones created through your social media profiles. You can then use that information to make more informed decisions about the call lists you give your agents to work from moving forward.

Use Speech Analytics to Identify Optimal Phrasing

One data analytics strategy that’s unique to the call center industry is speech analytics. This is the practice of recording your agents’ calls and using software to analyze the conversations they have with leads.

There are many unique pieces of information that you can learn by doing this. For example, you can figure out phrases that customers use in different scenarios so you can assess their needs, wants, and expectations faster the next time they call. You can also discover the relative performance of different sales scripts, learn which voice tones and emotions are most effective in the sales process, and more.

The information that you gain from speech analytics in outbound calls can help you run a more effective business. It can help you identify new ways to appeal to customers, create more effective training plans, and discover hidden operational issues in your call center, among other benefits.

Compile and Share Your Findings

We’ve covered a variety of ways you can use data analytics to improve your outbound call success rate. These next three tips will focus on what to do with that data once you have it.

First, it’s important to compile your findings and share them with people across your organization. You don’t want to keep the data siloed – especially if you have an outsourced outbound call center. The more you share your findings, the greater the opportunity for overall organizational improvement.

Create More Impactful Training Plans

Perhaps the most important thing to do with your data analytics findings is to use them to help your team become more effective at outbound calls. That begins with a better training process. The key here is taking what you learn from your data analytics and building it into an ongoing training strategy for your agents.

For example, your analytics practice may help you identify your most effective agents. You could then analyze their practices to see what they do better than everyone else and teach those strategies to the rest of the team.

The bottom line is that you want your analytics to inform your training. As you continue discovering new opportunities for improvement, those should be packaged into your training plans moving forward to make sure the right people know about them.

Continue Tracking and Adapt

Finally, data analytics is an ongoing process. You might discover a ton of new opportunities when you first implement the practice. But it would be a mistake to assume that you know everything after the first round of results comes in.

The best call centers track their data on an ongoing basis. If your data changes, you want to know about it before it can impact performance. That’s why it’s essential to continue using data analytics and adapting your approach on the basis of those results moving forward.

Working with the Right Team Can Make All the Difference

It’s one thing to understand what data analytics is and some of the different ways you can use it to improve your outbound calls. But it’s another to actually set up the technology, strategy, and teamwide habits necessary to fully benefit from the advantages of this practice.

That’s why it could be worth working with an expert. They can help you understand and implement data analytics with hands-on support, training guidance, and other forms of assistance so you can begin using the strategy to improve your outbound call success rate.

This is exactly what we can help you with at The Cattalyst. We have decades of call center industry experience and regularly help organizations implement new strategies like this with customized training plans and ongoing support. We’d love to do the same for your team.

So why wait? Get in touch with us today to schedule a free consultation and we’ll tell you more about how we can help your team unlock the full power of data analytics in the call center setting.