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The leads are weak. The leads are weak? No, your contact center sales team is weak. Okay, this riff on the classic line from Glengarry Glen Ross is a little harsh, but it has become a cliche in the sales world. Sales teams blame marketing for weak leads, and marketing blames sales for not converting them. But are you doing everything in your power to convert as many phone leads that come into your contact center as possible?
Many contact centers are still relying on outdated technology to handle, route, analyze, classify, and QA calls. This makes it impossible to get to the bottom of performance issues at scale. In our recent State of the Contact Center Report, we found that only about 20% of contact centers are using AI-based solutions to analyze contact center agent performance. However, it seems they realize the importance of updating their technology and jumping in the AI wave head-first, as 85% say they plan on implementing AI conversation intelligence solutions in the next year.
If AI for the contact center is on your mind, check out these five ways that you can improve your contact center conversion rates with AI-powered conversation intelligence—and stop blaming the leads for weak performance.
Today’s consumers expect personalized service at every step of the customer journey, and many brands fall flat when it comes to personalizing the call experience. Your customers probably expect the most personalized service when they call, so it’s not a good time to let them down.
With Invoca PreSense, your contact center agents get pre-call digital journey information like the search keywords, support articles, and online ads a caller viewed, or even see what was in their online cart before they called in their screen pop before the call begins. With this context about the callers, you can enable them to provide personalized, efficient service that wows customers, reduces time-to-resolution, and increases conversion rates.
The result of providing contact center agents with more context about the call they're about to answer is remarkable. DIRECTV increased its contact center conversion rate by 110% by using Invoca to send its sales agents a screen pop with each caller’s digital journey information. This enables them to proactively understand the caller’s needs, pull up the relevant information, and tailor the conversation accordingly. This creates a seamless digital-to-call experience that makes each caller more likely to convert.
Learn more about Invoca PreSense here or watch the video below.
If you have a solid volume of qualified leads calling but your conversion rate is unusually low, there may be issues with how contact center agents are handling the calls. They may not have enough knowledge of the products they’re selling, they might not be mentioning the most compelling offers, or they could be using terminology the customer doesn’t understand. If you are manually spot-checking calls, it could be tough to track down these issues, and the longer they persist, the more revenue you lose.
Automating call QA with conversation intelligence software like Invoca enables you to analyze 100% of your sales calls so you can quickly discover and address call handling issues that are impacting your conversion rates. Better yet, it frees you from manually searching for problems so you have the time to focus on agent coaching, scripts, and strategies that can help boost your conversion rates.
MoneySolver doubled its contact center close rate by using Invoca’s automated QA to identify exactly where contact center agents are falling off the talk track and give them instant feedback on how they can improve.
Invoca also helped MoneySolver refine its sales scripts to make them easier for customers to understand. For example, they noticed some agents were asking customers, “Do you have any unfiled years?” This phrasing was unclear to customers and they often had to ask the agent to repeat the question. MoneySolver noticed this pattern and had agents say “Do you have any years where you didn’t file your taxes?” instead, which their customers understood better.
Read MoneySolver’s case study here to learn more.
A surefire way to improve your conversion rate is through improving your agent coaching. By using Invoca’s AI-powered call scoring, you can quickly identify areas where agents need improvement and provide better coaching based on real data rather than just gut feelings or anecdotal evidence. Invoca also provides you with a platform to give more personalized feedback and advice, helping agents adopt best practices quickly.
For example, you can tag an agent at a particular moment in a call transcript where they did not handle a situation properly and provide advice on how they can improve. This can be done as soon as a call ends, so you can “micro-coach” at the moment when agents are most likely to remember the call and be able to apply your advice.
Invoca can also empower agents to level up their own performance by allowing them to view call scorecards, transcripts, and recordings themselves. This means they can spot areas to improve and “self-coach” their way to better close rates. Supervisors and QA leaders can share comments and coaching tips with agents, sales management, and even other departments through the Invoca platform, so collaboration is seamless and feedback arrives quickly.
When you can objectively score all of your calls, you can also implement incentive programs and competitions that reward high-performing agents and do so fairly. When your agents know that they will be equitably recognized for providing great service, they’re more likely to put in the extra effort to make sure every call is handled perfectly.
The more a lead gets transferred and the more time they spend on hold, the less likely they are to convert. With Invoca PreSense, you can send callers to the right place, right away so they get faster, more personalized service. PreSense uses digital intent signals to optimize call routing, ensuring customers are connected to the most suitable agent based on their specific needs.
For instance, a caller who’s started configuring an earthquake insurance quote online can be routed to an agent qualified to handle these specialized policies. By getting callers to the right agent faster, you can reduce call transfers and abandonment, drive higher call conversion rates, and boost your customer satisfaction scores.
One final trick you can use to increase the number of leads you convert is by following up on missed sales calls. Let’s face it, even the smoothest-running contact centers don’t answer every call that comes in. We’ve actually found that about 26% of calls never get answered, according to Invoca customer platform data. In some industries, the unanswered call rate is over 60%.
We also found that qualified leads that come in over the phone convert at an average rate of 41%. So if you’re missing a quarter or more of your sales calls, you’re missing out on a ton of revenue.
Invoca’s Lost Sales Recovery feature enables contact center teams to see exactly how many calls are being answered by agents so they can diagnose and fix issues that cause calls to go unanswered. Having visibility into unanswered calls is the key to uncovering hidden issues like understaffing, ineffective or malfunctioning IVRs, or a phone system that’s dropping calls. Once you know why calls aren’t being answered you can address the issues, reduce the volume of unanswered calls, and follow up on any calls that are still missed.
It’s not feasible to follow up on every missed call, so Invoca provides real-time dashboards and reports that give you the ability to prioritize which calls to return based on digital intent signals and IVR key presses that indicate the call was likely a lead.
Get the Ultimate Guide to Conversation Intelligence for the Contact Center to learn more about how Invoca can help you turn more callers into customers.
