Laser eye surgery chain sees their conversion rate increase by 108% after telephone sales training

Background

A UK laser eye surgery chain with clinics across the country hired us to increase their telephone sales.

Problem

Operating for nearly two decades, this chain of high street clinics was converting 13% of callers at their call centre. Fielding over 7000 calls at the time, this represented a substantial amount of consultations booked. Still, management felt that it could improve this number with effective training of telephone staff that had extremely variable levels of capability and performance.

Solution

After reviewing recorded call data, we noticed that the call centre team was not engaging with callers by asking them questions about themselves. The high performers tended to be more naturally persuasive, whilst the lower performers simply provided answers to questions asked of them by prospects.

We trained both their inbound and outbound call centre team over a period of 4 days. The main focus of this training was to provide a structure to the team, who had not followed a sales process before.

Result

Monitoring progress for 3 months post training, conversion rates climbed to 27% with some operators reaching levels as high as 35%. Importantly, these results were calculated on the basis of real lead counts (sales conversations). Assuming everything else being equal, the sales team improved their conversion rates by 108% and the client realised a return on investment of 137. We estimated their incremental gain from training was £2,205,000 over three months.