Mystery Calling as a Means to Evaluate Interpersonal Skills Training

We conduct about 500 mystery calls a month across professional services markets in the UK (and abroad) to evaluate both individual company and industry aggregate call handling ability. We specifically track how well companies are able to convert telephone calls into a booking for an initial consultation. After conducting a call, our mystery callers grade the call against 27 Telephone Sales Best Practices.

We then evaluate your call handling team’s ability against the Best Practices for call handling. These Best Practices correlate highly with an increased number of initial consultation bookings (the first appointment in your selling process where you have the ability to show your potential customer your services.)

These Best Practices include things like answering the phone within a certain number of rings, providing a proper greeting, inviting callers to make an appointment, asking generic opening questions, providing generic product information, overcoming objections and correct tone of voice.

We’ve further grouped the 27 Best Practices into the 3 Acts of a Telephone Call. The 3 Acts of an effective initial telephone call are called the: Greeting, Opening, and Closing.

The Greeting is the act of welcoming the caller to the conversation by providing some general information and asking for some basic information to begin the call.

The Opening is the act of discovering the caller’s needs, perspectives, buying criteria and fit. It is the most important act in the process, and often the most poorly performed. We are assessing your team’s ability to get the caller’s explanation of the problem they want to fix, how the problem has adversely affected their life in the past, the motivations for why they want the product or service on offer, the solution they imagine to be seeking, how the solution might positively impact their lives, the priorities they have in a provider, the criteria they have for selection, information about how they’ve attempted to solve the problem in the past, information about decision-makers, and ideas regarding their intended timing to fix their problem and enjoy the benefits of your solution.

Closing is the act of making a recommendation, inviting the caller to attend an appointment, or offering them follow up calls if they do not book an appointment.

Product knowledge is based on the respondent’s degree of competence (graded as incompetent, competent, convincing) when answering questions about

• Price
• Quality
• Experience
• Expertise or Specialism
• Unique points of difference
• Knowledge of service basics

Objection handling is scored on the basis of performing all distinctions when overcoming an objection including clarifying objections, empathising with objections, listing, overcoming, trial closing and going back to close. All distinctions need to be implemented in order to achieve a score.

Below is the average from the list of over four hundred untrained companies in our database.

(NOTE: Trained companies produce significantly higher scores, and higher conversion rates)

After completing our interpersonal skills training, the mystery calls are repeated and progress is recorded.

Not everyone can improve their score, but we find that depending on where you are starting from most companies see their conversion rates increase from a small increment of 1% to higher than even 100%+ improvements. For most of our clients just seeing a very tiny increase in conversion (between 1% to 10%) can mean thousands of pounds/euros/dollars in additional monthly revenue.

Improving your scores involves first identifying the best practices, followed by instruction in their use (training) and practice in their application (roleplay). Finally, you must verify that the best practices are being applied through observation (auditing recorded calls).