Question for you: I've been monitoring our sales teams persformance by hour and I've noticed that the sales percentage goes down from 3PM to 4PM. I was wondering if anyone else has noticed this and if so, do you have any suggestions to help?

Thanks,
Marianne

Solution for you:

Have you spoken to the team and their manager(s)?

You might find their contact rate goes down due to non-pickup because of school runs.

However this is merely speculation without knowing whether its B2C or B2B, whether they are using predictive dialler or planning for tomorrow, what the drop is, how many in the team, any other mitigating factors its difficult to guage how significant the drop is.

I have asked the agents and they just shrug.
It's a B2B preview dialer project for newspaper subscriptions.
I was wondering if it could be due to an after lunch sugar low?
Here is the sales by hour percentages so far for this campaign:
Hour %of Total
08:00 1%
09:00 9%
10:00 12%
11:00 13%
12:00 9%
13:00 5%
14:00 14%
15:00 9%
16:00 15%
17:00 12%
18:00 1%

The 9AM, Noon and 1PM dips make sense due to less agents on the phones and less customers at work. The 3PM is what messes up the nice pattern.

(Please don't take this the wrong way, I am not saying this is the agents fault, but the agents are all I have that I can work on.)
And if sugar will help, I'm for candy on every desk, especially mine! :)

Thanks!
Marianne

Marianne, do you have a shift change-over kicking in between say 2.30pm and 4pm? If so, perhaps what you might be seeing is the effect of the 'settling into the shift'. Alternatively, can you reorganise your statistics so that you can see the performance relative to volume? I'm obviously not party to your data, but if you're comparing performances on absolute volumes you will indeed find periods where performance is down simply because the volumes are down. Maybe I'm not being clear, or missing the point.

Anyone else care to help?

John

Hi Marianne,

I found exactly the same thing happening in my blended Collections department. Combined with a natural slump in the working day my agents were mostly suffering from the shift crossover.

The early shift really started to lose motivation when the later shifts either arrived in, or come back from their lunch break, as this signalled that they were near the end of their day. For the later shift it was about the time they took to settle into their shift or after returning from lunch as they wanted to take it easy while the early shift were still there to help them!

We implemented several changes to the shifts to combat this, we changed the target campaigns to be busier or booked meetings and appraisals during these slumps. We also made changes to the lunches and breaks so that they were more staggered minimising disruptions.

If shifts are not the problem, like John I would look at your volumes and consider if you have a business issue. It may be that you need to change your target campaigns during this time to concentrate on mobile and work numbers rather than at home as Mark suggested?

There are lots of other reasons I can think of to question but without knowing your volumes it's difficult to pinpoint.

Please feel free to contact me if you want to discuss further or if you have any example volume distributions that you can post, I'm sure lots of people will have ideas for you.

Problem is, you may not get your desk candy after all :O(

J

No, there is no shift change over. The only shift start times are 8:00AM and 8:30AM.
It's outbound to businesses (work numbers).
And it's preview dialing (it only dials the number when the agent says to), so if the call volume is down during that hour, it would just mean that the agents aren't working as hard which would go with my theory.

Hmmm, I pulled the report and there is a slight difference in the number of calls during the 3PM hour:
Hour Calls Avg Talk
8:00 a.m. 2,962 00:00:30
9:00 a.m. 7,634 00:00:38
10:00 a.m. 6,222 00:00:42
11:00 a.m. 6,841 00:00:43
Noon 4,594 00:00:42
1:00 p.m. 3,367 00:00:42
2:00 p.m. 6,215 00:00:44
3:00 p.m. 5,816 00:00:43
4:00 p.m. 6,777 00:00:44
5:00 p.m. 5,157 00:00:42
6:00 p.m. 36 00:00:49

Any recommendations would be helpful... perhaps we need those energiser things?

I've used a little HTML, hopefully the formatting will
stay this time.

Hour          #Calls            Avg. Talk 

8:00 a.m.      2,962            00:00:30 

9:00 a.m.      7,634            00:00:38 

10:00 a.m.     6,222            00:00:42 

11:00 a.m.     6,841            00:00:43 

Noon           4,594            00:00:42 

1:00 p.m.      3,367            00:00:42 

2:00 p.m.      6,215            00:00:44 

3:00 p.m.      5,816            00:00:43 

4:00 p.m.      6,777            00:00:44 

5:00 p.m.      5,157            00:00:42 

6:00 p.m.      36               00:00:49 

DaveA

The obvious correlation to look at here is contact rate ie. decision maker contact, if this falls at that time then its impact on sales percentage is more significant than at time when the DM contact rate is higher.

50% sales achieved from 50 DM contacts out of a population of 100 is comparatively easier to achieve
than
50% sales from 20 DM contacts out of a population of 100

With the later example if you get through to one less contact the sales rate is much harder to achieve.

I'm struggling to explain this simply but I hope you get my point which is does the contact rate also drop?

Sorry forgot to explain to measure DM contact rate you'd need to consult call outcome codes.
Just because call volumes drop or increase it doesnt necessarily follow that agents are working less - you must take into account decision maker contacts which is fundamentally critical in the agents success in selling or not.

Hi all, it's been a while since I contributed and this one caught my eye.

I have a series of questions regarding this issue Marianne;

B2B, are they 'Local' or across time zones?
What are the target's business hours?
How many agents online per hour?
Define contact and other term code types.
Is there a calculation of effective time?
How long is the preview time and totals per hour?
Wrap time per hour?
Is there a correlation between break / team brief or training periods?

Sorry :}

Regards,

Ian

(I am not the author of this)

Dealing with Mid-afternoon sag

Mid-afternoon sag happens when participant's blood-sugar levels have dropped, a combination of digesting lunch and tiredness as the demands of your "intensive, stimulating and fun" programme. Two suggestions: (1) Diet: change the structure of the lunch: foods high in fats and carbohydrates are more likely to result in low blod-sugar levels; try more salads and fruit, and ensure that there are plenty of supplies of these for participants to "graze" on during the afternoon. Tiredness is a symptom of dehydration (also an product of an energy (and particularly sugar)-rich lunch, as the body tries to maintain an optimum bllod sugar level by flushing out excess sugars, so you can counteract this by providing plenty of water during the afternoon sessions. Tea and coffee, which contain caffeine, will produce a temporary "rush" of energy, especially when sugar is added, but this will subside fairly quickly once the effect of the caffeine wears off, resulting in still-tired participants.
(2) Programme Content: acknowledge that your agents are tired! You have worked them hard: replace intensive sessions with lighter, (left side of brain material: suggestions can include meditation period,or engaging in art work to explore more intuitive (right-side of brain material). if you ca get them moving (preferably into the open air) this will also reduce the problem.