case study:  Call Centre Sales Improvement

The General Manager had been focused on stabilising the performance of the sales call centres over the previous 12 months and believed the businesses were now in a position to build performance capabilities, specifically;

• Increase sales strike rates to 60%
• Maintain agreed Grade of Service (GOS) targets with 10% less staff
• Decrease absenteeism and staff turnover
• Remove silos between call centre operations
• Measuring and improving individual and team productivity

Our approach was to implement our Workforce Improvement program which enables operational leaders to drive improvement by:

• Introducing Operational Management Practices and disciplines
• Better leveraging investment time to improve training, people development, performance feedback and coaching with a goal of developing consultant capability
• Introduce granular standards and measures (moving away from averages) to better manage performance and provide transparency
• Achieve cost benefits by maintaining staffing whilst increasing work output (cost avoidance), reducing staffing, or a combination of both
• Improving overall unit cost to provide a business service outcome (fulfillment of sale or lodgment of claim

Impressive quantitative and qualitative results were achieved, specifically;

• Payback on program implementation costs achieved within 10 weeks
• Weekly sales revenue per consultant increased by 42% to $18,200
• FTE decrease of 9% and further cost avoidance of 15 FTE through increased volume of calls managed per consultant
• Unit cost for delivering a business outcome decreased by 16%
• Productivity improved by 22%
• Team leaders delivering fact based coaching and performance feedback
• Introduced new planning and management activities to better manage business performance
• Improved knowledge sharing between Team Leaders
• Improved communication of business targets and performance through the introduction of daily production meetings and use of visual controls