It has been a common mantra in the customer contact industry for years: “Turn your cost center into a profit center.” But only recently has it become a common practice among call centers.
Recent economic and competitive pressures have induced numerous customer service and technical support centers not only to start thinking revenue but to start effectively generating it. Top companies have transformed centers—operations that, historically, had been focused solely on service and support—into high-performing entities where cross-selling occurs naturally and effectively, without alienating or aggravating customers.
“Sales is really a natural extension of the service interaction,” says Gary Forsgren, senior partner with Canadian-based performance consulting firm Forsgren & Associates. “Once the customer’s expressed reason for calling is resolved, it makes sense to use the opportunity to get to know the customer and his or her needs, and to educate him or her about other products and services that would meet those needs. The most effective sales strategy is one that is customer-centric rather than product-centric.”
Of course, moving from a pure service environment to a blended service-sales one typically brings with it new challenges and necessary changes to such critical areas as agent recruiting/hiring, training, incentives and performance measurement. Eager to experience the potential benefits of a cross-selling strategy, many service and tech support call centers leap without looking—attempting to quickly transform their operations into a revenue-generating force to be reckoned with without first carefully planning their strategy and the impact on callers and staff. The common result: lost customers, agents and revenues. Other centers, however, have made such a move with great success, and currently enjoy high customer satisfaction rates, enviable agent morale/retention, and many pats on the back from executives and shareholders.
To find out how today’s organizations have made/are making the transition from a reactive service/support center to a proactive profit center, ICMI, along with consulting firm Strategic Contact, surveyed call centers that have implemented a formal cross-selling strategy. In all, 264 centers—representing a highly diverse array of industries and call center sizes—responded to the survey. Following are some of the findings:
- Most of the centers surveyed (71.2%) have had a cross-selling program in place for three years or less: 40.5% have been cross-selling for 1-3 years; 30.7% have been doing so for less than a year. Another 15.5% of centers have had a cross-selling program in place for 3-5 years; 7.6% for 5-10 years; and 5.7% for more than 10 years.
- The primary business driver for implementing their cross-selling strategy was to “increase revenue from current products,” as indicated by 42% of survey respondents.
- While many centers (45.8%) have agents attempt to cross-sell on every contact, just over half of respondents (52.3%) are more discerning in determining when to offer a cross-sell—using business rules to determine the product fit for each specific customer and/or customer segment.
- Three in four centers (74.8%) involve all their agents in the cross-selling initiative. The remaining centers use either a select group of specially trained agents in a specific cross-selling work group (16.8%), or a group of trained agents in each applicable work group (8.4%).
- According to respondents, the most critical investment their center made to enable cross-selling was training, with 68% describing the investment in special training for agents as “very important,” and another 20% saying it was “moderately important.” Other key investments that have helped pave the way for an effective cross-selling initiative include additional compensation/incentives, increased supervisor/coaching time, and new and/or enhanced technology.
- To ensure that staff was capable of cross-training when implementing the program, most centers relied solely on their existing agents rather than hire new staff with existing cross-selling skills: 61% of respondents indicated that they provided their existing agents with cross-selling training; 37.8% used a balanced approach of training existing reps and hiring new ones.
- Somewhat surprising is that more than a third (37.2%) of respondents indicated that they have yet to make any changes to their hiring practices to enhance cross-selling success in the center. This is a concern, considering the fact that these centers have gone from needing service-only agents to needing agents with a mix of service and sales skills, yet they haven’t added any hiring tactics nor assessments to help with this endeavor.
- 48.3% indicated that they now profile prospective agents differently than they did prior to introducing the cross-selling program, 32% reported that they now hire for different skills, and 19.2% have broadened the hiring pool.
- Only 16.9% have added pre-hire testing to help determine which agent candidates have the right skill-set for cross-selling.
- Supervisor coaching time has increased due to the cross-selling program in 57% of the centers surveyed. Most of the remaining centers reported that supervisor coaching time has not changed, and a few (3.5%) indicated that supervisory coaching time actually decreased due to the cross-selling venture.
- Where coaching time has increased due to cross-selling endeavors in many centers, supervisory span of control has not—83.1% of respondents reported that the latter has remained the same since launching the cross-selling program.
- The most common way that centers compensate/reward agents to motivate them to cross-sell is by offering individual financial incentives tied to outcomes (62.8%). Another 40.1% offer individual non-monetary incentives tied to outcomes. And a little more than half strive for a balance of individual and group rewards—offering either team financial (30.2%) or non-monetary (25%) incentives tied to outcomes.
- Surprisingly, the impact that cross-selling had on processes/workflows in most respondents’ centers’ was either minimal (57.8%) or unclear (25.3%). In some centers (16.9%), however, cross-selling had a major impact—as would be expected during such a critical transition from service to sales/service—on processes/workflows, requiring significant redesign.
- The top three performance metric goals that centers wanted to achieve as part of their cross-selling program were to:
1. Increase revenue per contact or customer (cited by 58.2% of respondents)
2. Increase customer satisfaction (47.7%)
3. Increase products per customer (41.4%)
- According to respondents, the three biggest challenges associated with implementing a cross-selling program are:
1. Helping staff with the transition (40% said “very challenging”; 39% said “moderately challenging”)
2. Defining appropriate measures of success (24% very challenging; 42% moderately challenging)
3. Finding/training staff (21% very challenging; 35% moderately challenging
- The most critical cross-selling “success factors” cited in the survey were:
1. Communication (63% very critical; 26% moderately critical)
2. Managing change (57% very critical; 29% moderately critical)
3. Hiring, training and coaching staff (55% very critical; 30% moderately critical)
