contacts v.non-contacts HELP!!!!!

[tyler_hildebrand@hot]

There has been some debate within my organization with regard to the defintion of these two terms as metrics for performance and success of our agents within various campaigns. It is my understanding that the standard definition of a contact is either a yes or a no, a 'sale' or a 'not interested'. Here is where the debate lies - because the campaign we are trying to measure typically takes more than discussion between agent and prospect, there are typically several calls between intial contact with a DM, and a final decision or contact. As it stands we are measuring the events or attempts by the number of non contacts per record, and have assigned a sales cycle steps to track the progress through the sales process leading up to the final decision. Some individuals feel that a 'In Limbo' code should be added to the contact field, and should be taken into account when calculating conversion. I have argued numerous times that conversion is 'Sales' divided by 'Contacts', as defined above. Is this typically industry standard? Any feedback or best practice suggestions would be extremely valuable.

Regards, TH

[earhart]

The bottom line is revenue.

Typically a campaign will have a set start and finish date. While it can be standard to "test" the conversion during the campaign, final numbers should be rolled up upon completion. (With a week to ten days for those in process to close)

Depending upon your sales cycle, it seems that an "in limbo" disposition may lead to false conclusions about what may or may not ultimateley close.

Marketing will want to know the final impact of the campaign.

[drickwalder]

Tyler:

Our organization has the same mindset you do-that sale/contacts equals conversions. Our challenge is to identify a legitimate prospect call from a follow up call. I have been searching extensively to find anyone who can measure conversion rate on a multi-step process and have not been successful. I have found two concepts for measuring conversion: 1. using a systemic definition of a prospect and 2. using an agent disposition as the definition. The systemic definition calls for a series of systematic events to define a new prospect (things like choice in IVR, Source entry in CRM software etc.). The agent disposition definition relies on agent's assigning a status to each call in a CRM system. In either case there are many weaknesses.

The challenge with systemic definitions in multi-step sales processes is that every systemic definition has its loopholes. For example, we use IVR choice to identify a prospect. However, in times of high volume, our service clients will use that routing just to get to an agent. These kinds of issues mean that you may have a statistically relevant metric (accepting the x% of the time you know it will fail) for high level analysis but the metric does not work well at the agent level on a daily basis.

Agent dispositions are problematic as well because agent assignation of a prospect depends on them not getting "dinged" for poor conversion performance. This means you can't use this approach to measure at the agent level.

The best solution I have found so far is borrowed from outbound telesales: Sales per log in hour. This takes into account sales conversion, time management (with schedule adherence), and process management (effective follow up or administrative tasks).

I'm intersted to hear if you have discovered anything else since you posted this...