Number of Times to Call a Client

I just wanted to ask peoples opinion on how many times a client should be called from an outbound perspective.

We have around 3000 ‘prime’ leads imported per day and currently the re-dial rules are set to call back answer machines ect every hour, with a maximum of 15 attempts.

I am torn between the customer satisfaction side and being pushed to work the data as hard as possible (I have pointed out that conversion rate is more weighted towards calling people at the right times rather than the sheer number of dials made to the customer).

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated

Question asked by Hannah

Calling at the right time Rather than just Volume

15 Times….I presume this is sales? No matter how good your product, If I came home to 15 missed calls I’d never buy anything from you!!

in all seriousness though, your point about calling at the right times rather than just volume is absolutely right. If somebody is not at home (presume it’s home numbers) at 10am, chances are they won’t be home at 12 or 2 or any other time until they get home from work.

Without knowing your product and staffing, I’d say 3 attempts max. one in the morning, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. Personally though I’d restrict it to one attempt during the day which will catch those who are at home and one attempt in the evening.

Can you segment your data in any way? Women and older people are more likely to be at home during the day, so dial them first.

Can you organise shifts so that more people are working later? even part timers just for evenings?

Can I also check your dialler settings? If you have 3000 leads a day, but set callbacks for no replies in an hour, then you must just be calling the same numbers over and over, but never getting to the end of your list and just choking your dialler with callbacks. How long would it take you to get through 3000 numbers assuming you just called once?

At a dial rate of 50 calls per agent hour, you’d need 60 hours worth of dialling just to get through your list once, that’s pretty much 10 FTE. Assuming a 10% RPC and an allowance for bad numbers, etc, you’d probably need about another 8FTE for attempt 2 and so on (rough figs)

With thanks to Scott

Author: Jonty Pearce