We all have either suffered from it, or know of people particularly those doing tele-fundraising who suffer from it.
These are the ones who after almost every call sit back and ponder the outcome of it and, more often than not the calls that they post mortem are those that weren’t successful.
How much productive calling time is lost as a result of this? It’s likely that the time lost would be extremely high, imagine if each ‘agent’ spent 30 minutes in each ‘shift’ doing this – now imagine if there’s 10, 20, 30 agents doing it – that’s one heck of a lot of time – lost.
Why is it that tele-fundraisers spend time pondering the outcome of the calls that weren’t successful? There could be some positive reasons for this, however, it is more likely that they were looking at this in a negative fashion, lost opportunity; and unfortunately this builds a negative frame of mind for them, with this being carried onto subsequent calls.
We can understand looking at the outcome of positive result calls, as there are often things that happened in that call that can be noted and used in future calls.
Perhaps it was their attitude, maybe they were more positive, had a clearer understanding of the outcome they wanted from the call.
Of course it could be that the person being contacted was in a better frame of mind, more receptive to the request for support.
Tele-fundraisers will have also picked up some positives from the “presentation” they gave, knowledge of the cause they were calling about, all of this helps build for a more productive, positive outcome for future calls.
On the flip-side – reflecting on the negative aspects of ‘failed’ calls only reinforces this, and this is a problem as it reinforces negative influences.
Reinforce the positives – shelve away the negatives unless there’s something that can be done next time to change the outcome.
See also:
Can Social Media Lessen the Negative Impact of Telephone Appeals
Making the Call – Tele-fundraising
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