Agents not going the final mile

Advantage Travel Centres Conference 2004 Special: Agents in the UK are failing to do the “hard sell” to customers over the phone, a mystery shopper survey has revealed.

“Agents in the US ask for business but in the UK people do the hard work, then get the typical British reserve and don’t like to ask for business”, this is according to BPA corporate facilitation manager, Rob Sleeman.

BPA commissioned a mystery shopper survey of Advantage members to gauge their performance over the phone. The survey found that 88% of agents fell in the ‘good’ bracket, 3% ‘excellent’ and 9% ‘bad’. Mr Sleeman announced the results of the survey at this year’s Advantage conference in Kuala Lumpur.

Earlier in the day Advantage president Roger Smith advised delegates to attend. He said: “I know some of you don’t like mystery shoppers, but you should go along because you might learn something.”

According to Mr Sleeman, the way agents greet a customer when answering a call needs work. Of the 162 calls made, 50% didn’t achieve the required standard for their ‘call opening’. Mr Sleeman said agents need to consider a number of points including smile, punctuation, pace and variation in tone.

The second area that agents were marked on was how they project the image of the company. While 91% of agents reached the standard for presenting an up-beat tone, only 39% were scored for ‘actively listening’ and only 29.5% offered additional information. “One of the things we find is that agents can have a tendency to become order takers, especially if they are screen-driven – they concentrate on the screen too much”, said Mr Sleeman.

The sales process is the final area examined by BPA. According to the mystery shopper survey results, only 3.5% of agents asked customers if they wanted to make a booking. Commenting on this statistic, Mr Sleeman said: “I know we were only asking for a quote, but why not ask for a booking?”

Agents also scored poorly on presenting availability – 11% offered this information to the required standard, and 21.5% asked the caller the purpose of their visit or class of travel. Finally, 0% of agents reached the standard for closing a call politely. Mr Sleeman advises that agents use information gained during the call to show they have listened and make the customer feel valued.

BPA made 162 calls to Advantage agents during April 2004. The same request was made to all agents, for a holiday in Spain for a family of four. The agent that performed best overall was Meon Valley. Fred Olsen and Galaxy Travel were joint second and Keith Bailey Travel and Mainline Travel joint third.

Report by Ginny McGrath

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