Laser eye surgery clinic in London increases telephone conversion rate by 17%

Background:

A laser eye surgery clinic in London hired us to increase their conversion rates on the phone.

Problem:

Our client felt that their sales team had become accustomed to converting enquiries that were already committed, as opposed to converting enquiries that were undecided.  Our client also felt they had problems with objection handling.

Before training, the salespersons converted 48% of the calls they received at their call centre. To help increase this ratio, we started by conducting mystery calls to evaluate how they were dealing with enquiries over the phone.

Scoring the calls on our standardised evaluation tool, we found that operators often didn’t gather useful information from callers and were not able to give convincing answers to questions callers had. We also noted that they sometimes failed to ask for an appointment, when buying signals were presented. When presented with objections to the appointment, they didn’t handle them appropriately. This suggested routine training in these areas might improve conversion rates.

Solution:

We carried out on day of customized telephone training to address the salespeople’s telephone selling weaknesses. We conducted mystery calls following training, which demonstrated that new skills were being applied and provided feedback based on these calls.

Result:

Monitoring progress for 3 months post training, conversion rates climbed to 56.04% with some operators reaching levels as high as 59%. Importantly, these results were calculated on the basis of real lead counts (sales conversations). Assuming everything else being equal, the sales team improved by their conversion rates by 17% and the client realised a return on investment of 52:1.