| If you’re not
monitoring your agents, you’ll never really know their strengths and weaknesses.
That’s the beauty of silent monitoring. It gives you a complete picture of
their skills. There are, however, effective and ineffective ways to monitor your agents.
The benefits you receive from this tool will be determined by your approach.
Increasing Performance:
Performance that is measured, evaluated, and reported always improves.
For this reason, it is a wise idea to discuss problems with your TSRs as soon as
you identify them. If your agents have trouble handling particular objections, you should
immediately meet with them to identify the problem and train them to handle the situation
more effectively.
When monitoring, it is valuable to listen to multiple calls from a single agent. This
allows you to identify patterns and the agent’s common method of handling situations.
Negative attitudes, poor habits, incorrect answers only surface when you listen to several
calls. In addition, agents can carry a negative attitude from one call to another. You
must identify this pattern and train them to gain a positive perspective before handling
the next call.
Simulation:
Dennis Waitly, one of America’s leading trainers tells a story about Neil
Armstrong walking on the moon in July of 1969. When he stepped off the lunar rocket, he
said to the world, "One giant step for mankind. One small step for a man." Then
with his mike turned off, he said to the other astronaut in the lunar module, "Just
like a drill." He was referring to the fact that they had rehearsed their trip and
walking on the moon so many times that they were prepared for any contingency.
It is the same with good telemarketing agents. Watching and listening to tapes of agent
conversations and role playing over and over their answers, prepare them for top
performance. Monitoring ensures that you get that performance.
When do you monitor agents:
All the time. You should monitor more frequently when you start new scripts, new
campaigns, new agents, and new programs. After monitoring an agent, provide them
with a copy of your monitoring session. Tell them specific items to listen for.
Follow up within a day or two and review their tapes with them. These methods provide the
most benefit to your company from your monitoring sessions.
What to listen for:
Many service bureaus create forms, which are used when monitoring agents. The form
contains a list, in priority order, of skills and attitudes. This way the monitoring agent
does not forget to look at the whole picture. Here are some of the items you may consider
putting on the report:
Are they following the script?
How do they handle objections?
Are they enthusiastic?
Do they talk about features, advantages, or benefits?
Do they show confidence?
What is their speech rate?
Are they courteous to "hard-to-get-along" prospects?"
Features, Advantages, and Benefits:
A feature describes a product of service. For example: If your generating leads
for sales people in the insurance industry, a $100,000 death payment is a feature of the
policy, not an advantage or benefit. The benefit is the fact that the spouse can feel
secure in the event of a death. Here are some good definitions.
An Advantage describes what the feature of the product or service will do for the
buyer. In the example above, the $100,000 death benefit will pay for children’s
education. That’s one of the advantages of having a $100,000 insurance policy.
A Benefit applies the advantages to the buyers emotions. Again from the example
above, because the policy holder has the insurance, he can have peace of mind that his
children’s college education will be paid for in the event of his death.
Few telemarketing companies, let alone agents, understand the difference between
features, advantages and benefits, but those who do reap a significant improvement in
their results.
When you monitor on a regular basis and create well written scripts with
plenty of advantages and benefits, your agents have better results and greater confidence
in what they do.
This article was written by Judd Humpherys. © Copyright, 1996. Used by permission.
Making copies without the written permission of the copyright owner is prohibited by law. |
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