Calling donors at the prime time is critical. Calling when they are sleeping, making dinner, or working will frustrate them as well as your tele-recruiters. It will also lower productivity rates and waste precious resources. Put simply, if a donor answers but cannot schedule because he or she is at work or sitting down for dinner, your efforts were not timed correctly.
Your database needs to record the times when prior conversations with donors have taken place. This allows your dialer to call donors only at appropriate times. It also allows you to determine your area’s “prime time” for staffing purposes.
Overall “prime time” will be different for each blood center and can vary based on demographics. Donors in heavily-populated cities may not arrive home until after 7PM throughout the week, while donors in rural settings may be more likely to answer their phones earlier in the evening.
How many donors you dial or even speak to during a particular hour doesn’t tell you whether you are calling at the right times. How many calls were required to generate the conversations you had does. You’ll need to conduct a thorough database analysis to determine prime times for your market.
This involves understanding two critical indicators:
- On average, how many calls do your tele-recruiters make before having a conversation with a donor (during different hours of the day and different days of the week)?
- How many of those conversations resulted in scheduled appointments?
In order to utilize these measurements to decide your prime times, analyze these two rates by time of day and day of week. Your sweet spot will be the times when your contacts and conversions are highest each day.
Try it, and watch your results increase!