One of the key factors to calculating your profits is calculating your cost per sale. Unless you know what it’s costing you to make a sale, you can’t adequately get a grip on what kind of profit you are making. A number of factors go into calculating that cost. At the baseline you have your facilities costs such as rent and utilities. Above that you have your payroll costs, including costs for bookkeepers and payroll service. Finally you have your telco charges and the costs that you are paying to obtain leads for your agents to call. All of these factor in to the cost per call, and are multiplied over the number of agents, and measured against the number of sales that result.

With all the bright and shiny ads touting predictive dialer software, you would think it could be the answer to all your problems – instead it might become a bigger problem than you can imagine. There are some hidden costs to using dialers, no matter which one you elect to use. In today’s blog we are going to take a look at one of the biggest hidden costs - your leads. One of the reasons your leads costing you money – instead of helping you rake it in – is the failure to scrub your call lists or to secure high quality leads.

Establishing remote call centers is increasingly a necessity. As operations expand, space may be limited in your primary location due to several factors.

Anyone who has done it never wants to do it again. First, you get new hardware, then you migrate your current software to the new hardware, then you update, upgrade, tweak, and patch until you’re longing for the days of simple communication by something uncomplicated – like carrier pigeons. Setting up and maintaining your call center should not be an experience that drives you up the wall. If you have a Windows machine, or 10, or 100, we can help you set up a world class call center that is a custom fit for the size of your operation and your industry.

The principle behind outbound sales calling is very simple; you call at the right time to reach your customer and make a sale. In practice it can be frustrating, demoralizing, and create exasperation when staff feels that the bar has been set too high with regard to closing sales or even reaching prospects on the phone. Let’s face it, caller ID is in wide use on land lines and cell phones. Anyone looking at their caller ID before picking up a call is actively screening for calls that they don’t want. In fact, a 2011 study by Baylor University showed that less than one percent of cold calls resulted in a closing – whether that was a sale or an appointment.

Here’s a dirty little secret; buying leads for your call center may not be giving you everything that you need. There are any number of companies that claim to sell the best telemarketing leads, but to a large extent you are buying a used car without looking under the hood or taking it out for a test drive. Pretty much every lead company is mining exactly the same data while selling themselves as something new and different.

Attrition among call-center workers is a given in the industry. Inbound, outbound, or blended and across a variety of industries, high worker turnover is something of an accepted hazard. The reasons for this are varied, but have you considered how much this turnover is costing your operation? The Society for Human Resource Management pegged the average cost per hire at $4, 129, this is without factoring in interview costs, training costs, and the amount of time that the call station sits open and unattended. If you have a 10 person per year turnover, you are looking at a baseline cost of $41,290.

Workforce management is both an art and a science. The science is creating consistent and appropriate staffing levels over a variety of of shifts. The art is the part where you have to manage actual human beings, often with schedules and complications of their own. This is true in every aspect of service industry jobs, but can end up making or breaking your call center.

Working B2B and B2C leads requires different approaches, and also different approaches based upon the origin of your leads. A number of companies are very slow to pick up on organically generated leads, in other words leads generated by their website, digital advertising, and email campaigns, or even by direct mail campaigns. There is a period where these leads are going to be freshest, and therefore the most effective, and you have a better chance of getting the sale. Certain states are also starting to implement timeframes for callbacks, so there is a further argument for striking while the iron is hot to contact leads.

You’d be amazed how many call centers don’t understand how much benefit they could realize from modernization and making call center improvements. Yes, working off a PBX system is very inexpensive, often costing just dollars a day to operate. However, if you are looking at efficiency, you could be losing a lot more than you ever realized. Everyone understands the conversion, and the more people you get in the top of the funnel the more closings you will have the bottom. Getting those prospects into the top of the funnel requires an investment, but it also promises a return.