Have you ever had a conversation with the other person dominating the talk time?  How about one where the other person didn’t ask you any questions?

Contrast that with a balanced conversation, one where you and the other person talked about equally and the talk sequence was you, other person, you, other person, etc..

This is a conversation where both parties are listening and responding accordingly and often ending their response in a way that explicitly asks a question or implicitly invited a response.

Not all good conversations look this way but if it looks this way, it’s a good conversation.

Humans who might have these types of conversations naturally can seemingly get lobotomized if a phone script is put in front of them and it’s now their job to talk with others.

We have a telefundraising company, DVCalling, that makes tens of thousands of calls a month resulting in thousands of conversations.  All of these conversations ask the supporter to consider becoming a monthly donor.  About 1 in 10 (ish) end in signup occurring over the phone.   Many of those supporters who don’t donate over the phone donate online in the days and weeks after the call per our match back analysis.

In short, call success is not getting people to say “yes”, it’s fostering high quality interactions that build mental equity.  When the “yes” happens is secondary and a by-product of the real job.

The overall team is very good but there’s always room for improvement.  We’ve been using GPT (private server) to analyze the dynamics of call success by feeding it batches of call transcripts that signed up on the call vs. those that did not.

The time savings is extraordinary.  But it’s not without it’s headaches.  Mistakes are still made and it will occasionally still freeze up or get buggy.   But the analytical skill set is at least masters degree level for statistical analysis and code writing.   You’d spend a relative fortune hiring someone and the speed tradeoff is akin to a slug racing Usain Bolt.

Here is one visualization of the conversation flow based on

• Turn taking – how many turns are taking in the conversation broken out by Agent and “Customer”.  This the blue and orange alternating blocks.
• Turn ratio – how long is each turn, the length of each colored bar.

This is normalized to assume both calls are three minutes so you can see three very clear dynamics that separate successful calls from unsuccessful:

• The agent and supporter take an almost identical number of turns.  In the unsuccessful calls the agent takes more turns
• The ratio of talk time is almost identical, 50/50 split.  In the unsuccessful calls the agent talks a bit more.
• In successful calls the agent asks a question sooner (and more questions in total)

Some other noteworthy features that distinguish success from failure,

• The success calls have a slightly more positive sentiment score
• Success calls have slightly less politeness.  Yes, you read that correctly but the nuance matters.

The polite language in success calls is more natural and flows with the conversation.  Unsuccessful calls have more positive language that likely feels a bit gratuitous.  Here’s an example:

TELEFUNDRAISER: Oh my gosh, you’re so stinkin’ sweet. Perfect. Thank you so much.
SUPPORTER: Yeah, yeah, I can do that.
TELEFUNDRAISER: Oh, you’re so sweet. You actually remind me a lot of my co-worker. she has this very sweet nurturing energy
SUPPORTER: Ok.

A few other noteworthy characteristics informed by what we know about long-term success – i.e. sustainers that stick around.  If the call is pressurizing you lose.  The “you” is the charity because you probably pay for the new sustainer but they quit.  This means we are,

• Very light on objection handling.  Other phone scripts I’ve seen have a laundry list of ways to take various “no’s” and try to convert them to “yes”.
• One ask (maybe two depending on call dynamic).  This is related to objection handling but “best practice” often abides by the ideas that a “no” isn’t a “no” until you get three of them.  No means no.  In no other world would we repeat the ask in rapid fire succession other than maybe a young child pestering their parent.

Kevin