5 Contact Center Metrics for Successful Outbound Sales

To ensure your outbound sales campaign’s on the right track, making use of insightful metrics is a must.

Of course, every campaign is different and you should always test and measure which KPIs work best for you. However, in this article, we’ve selected a few of our favorite call-focused metrics which can be applied to pretty much any outbound sales campaign.

1. Calls per agent

Let’s kick off our list outbound sales metrics with one of the simplest KPIs out there! The number of calls your agents make over a given period of time (e.g. hour, day, week).

While it may be pretty standard measure, it’s one of the most trusted metrics for any sales-driven contact center operation because it plainly illustrates an agent’s call frequency.

Supporting agents with regular training, recognition, and breaks will all help boost their respective output, but a good dialer has become key to ensuring the maximum number of calls across all agents. Both power dialers and predictive dialers are designed to amplify call volume – but choosing the right type of dialer for you will naturally affect your results.

2. Connection Rate

Connection rate is the number of answered calls divided by the total calls made.

Connection rates are influenced by several factors including prospect availability (unavailable, avoiding calls etc.) and contact data quality. If your connection rate is low (e.g. less than 10%), it’ll take a long time to work through your contact database which will raise operational costs and significantly prolong the campaign.

Connection rates can be improved in a few ways – e.g. by verifying phone data quality or changing the time of day you make calls – but the innovation of predictive dialer software has become a standout mechanism for boosting connection rates by only handling successfully connected calls.

Before conducting any changes, ensure you first measure your connection rates to attain a benchmark for improvement, going forward.

3. Average Talk or Handling Time

Average talk time is the amount of time an agent spends on the phone with a prospect or customer. Average handling time (AHT) is similar but it also factors in prep time for the call (i.e. “pre-work”) and post-call actions such as “after call work (ACW)“.

In either case, average talk or handling time are key metrics to gauge the productivity of your agents. Both measures can be improved in a number of ways including training, script optimization, limiting pre- and post-call work, and through technologies such as predictive dialer software that can boost overall talk time up to 40 minutes per hour.

In a sales-driven business, it’s important to keep average talk and/or handling time high – but this is often influenced by an equally pivotal metric; average wait time.

4. Average Wait Time

As you probably guessed, average wait time (AWT) is an agent’s average wait time between calls. A few seconds may not seem much, but if it happens between every call across all agents, it soon adds up to a lot of inactivity.

You can help reduce wait time by conducting calls outside of working hours, dialing from more credible phone numbers, or refreshing your contact list but – in terms of pivotal technologies – combining both a good predictive dialer and answering machine detection (AMD) will significantly diminish your agents’ wait time. A voicemail detection system automatically identifies a voicemail-bound call and skips to the next call until contact is established with an actual prospect.

5. Conversion Rate

Finally, the exciting metric! What’s your agents’ daily grind actually affording you in terms of new business.

The conversion rate is the number of conversions (however you define them – e.g. sales, meetings) divided by the total number of prospects reached. A higher conversion rate equates to higher success – hence why it’s also sometimes referred to as “success rate”.

The ratio of conversions vary depend on the type of outbound sales campaign you’re running. In the case of cold calls, a 1-2% conversion rate is considered reasonable, but if you’re contacting qualified leads, a higher ratio should be targeted.

There are a few ways to improve your conversion rate, such as creating target customer profiles, crafting a versatile script with multiple scenarios, and using a clear call-to-action (CTA) at the end of the conversation.

In our cloud contact center software, we also provide a range of sales-focused features. These include features such as an omnichannel functionality to give agents the ability to instantly switch between various communication channels (phone, email, instant messaging etc.) or CRM integration (e.g. Salesforce) to sync the client’s trusted business tools with our contact center platform.

Complete control of your outbound sales metrics

Metrics are naturally a great way to measure effectiveness of any outbound sales campaign – but it’s important to continuously monitor and tweak them depending on your desired outcomes. Using a real-time KPI dashboard can really help you keep on top of things and better inform your contact center efforts.