Time to Call: When and Where to Call, to Have Successful Sale of Banking Products

Abstract This work aims to find out what of the following has influence on the call result, using the example of calls that are made from the call-centers of one of the biggest Russian bank: the region where the call center is situated, time of calls made, product that the call was concerned with, region where the client is, the sex of the calling call center employee, number of reschedules before the phone call. Calls are made to existing, new, who expressed desire to become, or former clients of the bank, information about which is available in the internal systems of the bank. These calls are different from direct dialing of non-bank customers, which aims to attract as many customers as possible to the bank. The importance of research is motivated by the fact that if the relationship between time of call and result is significant, then this fact will allow to achieve greater efficiency by adjusting time of the tasks for the client managers for the corresponding regions with necessary time zones. The approach of the resesearch is to clean the data and apply the probit model estimating limited choice dependent variable of the success of the call. Results of this paper, show that time of the call affects the probability of the successful sale over the phone to the client of the bank in the inverse U-shaped manner. At the same time female client managers are performing better than their male colleagues. The conclusions of the paper are as follows: the probability increases, reaches its peak and then falls with the flow of the time during the day, keeping all other variables constant