I consult a fair bit.

I like the work because it helps my team move in and identify the problems before we knock out a proposal to either fix or take over the marketing through to sales fulfillment completely.

When you sell anything in a call center—and 90% of direct insurance is sold in a call center, with perhaps 10% sold online—the one key metric everyone overlooks, except the guys at the absolute top of their game, is Turn-Around-Time (TAT).

I am routinely blown away by how often I’ll sit in a boardroom, ask for a TAT report, and see average Turn-Around-Times on first call attempts measured in hours, let alone minutes.

Imagine for a second you are scrolling on Facebook. You are presented with a well-thought-out advertisement for motor insurance. It grabs your attention, speaks to an immediate need you have, and you input your details for a call back.

If your phone rings in less than a minute, it fills you with supreme confidence. If the phone rings after 10 minutes, it fills you with less confidence. If the phone rings a day later, it fills you with absolutely zero confidence.

Sometimes the biggest issues are the ones staring you straight in the face. Getting hold of someone as quickly as you possibly can seems simple to execute. But at scale, it’s a grueling task when you have thousands of leads piling into your call center environment.

In a traditional setup, a marketing vendor gets paid for generating the lead regardless of whether it actually closes. They don’t care if an internal sales team takes 48 hours to make the dial because their invoice is already in the mail.

When you operate on a true performance-based, “on risk” model, you simply lose that luxury. As we’ve established, stepping into the arena means backing ourselves and absorbing the upfront marketing capital—costs that quickly run into millions of Rands. If we operate a call center that lets a hot lead sit untouched for hours, we are quite literally incinerating our own money. 

Every single minute a prospect waits is a fraction of our own profit margin burning away.

That is why we treat speed as a precise science. You cannot achieve that level of elite efficiency through sheer willpower alone; you have to master your operational technology. We ensure our dialer is ruthlessly optimized and our omnichannel shared inbox instantly eliminates all siloed conversational data. 

We live in a world where attention is everything. With 70,000 thoughts running through a person’s head on a daily basis, if they take the time to ask you to call them for a quote, you owe it to your bottom line to strike immediately.

Making every effort to call as quickly as possible isn’t just a metric; it is the critical first step in the sales fulfillment process.

Do you have a lead generation funnel that needs an elite TAT? Let’s set up some time to look at the metrics that actually make sense to your bottom line. 

Until next time,

Ian Faught 

Chief Exec 

Crisp Solutions