Callbacks can be a great way to give that last push to get your sale. Callbacks can also drain the performance (and profitability) of your call center. For such an important tool, they can be woefully misunderstood. Your call center software likely has a number of settings surrounding callbacks. Make sure you understand what your agents are doing with their callbacks.
There are two primary types of scheduled callbacks:
- Unowned callbacks: The agent sets the contact to be dialed again at a certain time. The call will be sent to the next agent requesting a contact from that campaign at the scheduled time.
- Agent Owned callbacks: The agent sets the contact to be dialed at a certain time. That agent is presented with the call at the scheduled time.
Unowned callbacks are a very simple case. Because a larger pool of agents can get the call, and the original caller doesn’t matter, they skip a lot of the complications of owned callbacks. They’re also not used very often. Normally when you’re doing callbacks you want to keep the benefits of the relationship with the original agent. A familiar voice. Also, agents can get upset when they set up the callback, but somebody else gets the sale.
Agent owned callbacks are the most common case. Your agent talks to someone. They need more time to think about it, or want their spouse on the call or something. Of course it’s better if you can close on the first call, but a callback gives you another chance. So what things can go wrong?
- Lead Hoarding is probably the worst case. This happens when agents set every call they’ve handled as a callback. Busy, no answer, answering machine, doesn’t matter. They had it on the screen once, so they feel they own it. There are a couple of problems with this:
- Your agents will increasingly be spending their time working leads where the call recipient doesn’t answer the phone. If the lead is no answer or answering machine more than a couple of times, they may just be screening their calls.
- You’re not in control of what leads your agents are dialing. If you have a new list that you want to dial, your hoarding agents are still dialing leads from last month.
- Legitimate callbacks that get scheduled for a particular time may get missed by a wide margin because there are so many other leads that were scheduled to be called earlier.
- Setting too many callbacks is a subset of lead hoarding. Sometimes an agent is so worried about getting a rejection that they work harder at getting a callback than a sale. Or maybe they’re really good at avoiding rejection and getting another shot at it. However it works, if the agent has 5 calls scheduled for 3pm, only one of those callbacks is going to be on time. So this can be a temporary thing (ie. 5 people wanted to be called at 3pm on Thursday) or a chronic problem (the agent has so many callbacks they’re still spending most of their time on callbacks).
- Setting the callback to a bad time. Whether it’s setting the callback to a time when the agent isn’t actually working, to setting the callback outside of legal calling times, your agents need to put a little thought into when the callback should happen. Sometimes this happens accidentally, but your agent screen interface should be doing the time zone conversions in the background. Your agents shouldn’t be trying to figure out whether it’ll be midnight in Topeka.
It’s important that if you allow agent owned callbacks that you have procedures in place to monitor and manage them. Your contact center software should have the features allowing this. For example, on Q-Suite, you can reassign callbacks, reschedule missed callbacks, or have agents who can receive another agent’s callbacks if they aren’t logged in when the callback is scheduled. Reviewing the number of callbacks overall, each agents callbacks, and the list of missed callbacks are all important. This allows you to keep callback problems from stealing productivity from your agents. Make sure your callbacks are being used properly, and watch productivity soar.