Making a successful service-to-sales transition requires cultural and process changes — from hiring the right agents to providing effective training and offering motivating rewards.
As more and more contact centers add cross-selling and upselling to their service and support missions to generate revenue, they are finding that selling is a valuable way to learn more about their customers and to actually increase customer satisfaction.
According ICMI’s 2007 Call Center Cross-Selling Report, 59.5 percent of the 264 responding call centers that have implemented a cross-selling program reported increased revenue per contact.
Customer satisfaction rates increased, as well, according to 34.5 percent of respondents.
These results show promise for centers that are blending sales with service, but industrywide, those numbers could stand improvement — for the sake of the businesses, as well as their customers.
How can you successfully transition from cost center to profit center? CMI talked with industry experts and executives who have made the shift in their companies’ contact centers.
There are a good many practices that every call center with a cross-selling or upselling element can put in place to succeed in generating profits without alienating customers. Hiring practices should be revised to include selling skills; coaching and training must take into account new selling mindsets and technologies; incentives need to carefully selected and executed to motivate agents; and everybody — everybody — needs to communicate.
Defining Cross-selling and Upselling
One reason why contact centers that sell do not realize their revenue potential is a misunderstanding of what selling means, says Tom Stanfill, founding partner and CEO of Aslan Training and Development.
“Everybody — from executives to managers to reps — has to understand that the customer drives your ability to cross-sell or upsell,” he says. “It’s not simply a case of, ‘Do you want fries with that?’”
Sure, you’ll be able to sell a few extra orders of fries just on timing, adds Marc Lamson, who joined Aslan after Stanfill helped him to guide the service center at his former employer, American Power Conversion, into a sales environment. But are those really the kinds of numbers you can depend on?
Successful blended centers go beyond hawking a product or service just because they have the customer on the line. Their agents are hired for their ability — and trained — to help the customer discover needs — both stated and unstated.
“Where you’re really going to see reps improving the customer experience and cross-selling and upselling very successfully is when they ask several questions to determine if there’s a need for a product that they potentially could sell,” says Stanfill.
The realization that sales can actually enhance the service experience is a necessary cultural shift for companies seeking to turn cost centers into profit centers, says Angie Fyfe, senior vice president and chief growth officer for LifeMasters, and a former contact center executive at Deluxe Corporation (where operations were rated world class by The Brady Group).
“We really believed [at Deluxe] that sales was a byproduct of doing the right kinds of things with the client: active listening, effective discovery and engagement, finding their respective needs and targeting our relevant offerings to those needs — not trying to just be canned and pitchy, and hoping that something would stick,” Fyfe says.
Profiling Agents Who Can Service and Sell
Bringing a sales mission into the service center can be disruptive, to say the least. How do you preserve service levels while achieving sales goals? This is where hiring is key, so it was surprising that only 16.9 percent of respondents to the ICMI survey added prehire testing to determine agent skill-sets for cross-selling and upselling.
Recruiting also needs to be considered, says Tara Reynolds, vice president of Customer Marketing and Acquisition for Prudential’s Individual Life Insurance business.
Prudential has a very small direct sales program, as it relies heavily on getting leads out to its face-to-face sales channels. Among its hundreds of service agents, only 30 actually handle sales—and then only with customers who choose to work over the phone rather than with a local agent.
“Recruiting might be a bigger challenge for us if the sales activity were to grow,” says Reynolds. “While we offer a very competitive package, we’d have to consider our ability to source aggressive representatives who are more comfortable with a sales versus a service culture.”
It’s true that a great service rep doesn’t necessarily make a great sales rep. But it’s not that service reps can’t be trained for sales, says Stanfill. A good many of them can, but the transition isn’t always easy.
A common mistake that managers make is to give perfectly good, bright service reps sales scripts, rather than training them to serve by selling.
Take Stanfill’s “fries with that” example. If a customer orders a salad, it’s not likely that a rep will be be able to sell him fries — but asking if he’d like apple slices or a yogurt with his order is more likely to appeal to the customer.
To recruit agents who can service and sell, you need to screen candidates for the Four Cs: cultural fit, character fit, career fit and competency. The latter takes special care to identify because it involves talent, skill and knowledge.
“Skills and knowledge can be taught,” says Stanfill, “but talent has to be there.” A candidate may have the skills for persuasive delivery, and even the skills and knowledge for persuasive content (not how you say something, but being able to change what you say). But if the candidate lacks the talent for conceptual delivery — picking up on cues from the customer and/or customer information to make the more targeted offer — he or she will likely never be a pro at both sales and service.
To determine which agent candidates are capable of conceptualizing the customer’s needs and preferences, Stanfill recommends the TOP (telephone, onsite, prove it) process for screening.
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Telephone: You need to see how a candidate communicates over the phone. Have them leave a message.
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Onsite: If the telephone round is good, bring them into the office for an interview.
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Prove it: Have the candidate sell you something. Create simulations — give them the “fries with that“ example, even throw in the health-minded customer, and see how they come across. Do they sound scripted or natural?
Training and Coaching
Only 8.1 percent of participants in the ICMI survey said that implementing selling in the service center had a major negative impact on agent retention, but that doesn’t mean that the agents who stayed were able to perform their best. Solid training and coaching strategies are key to retaining and enriching agents who can serve through sales.
Reynolds says agent attrition has not been significant in the contact center that handles sales, but she expects that it may grow as the company increases sales goals.
“Out of a team of about 30, we’ll probably lose 3-4 this year. In our first year, while we were creating the process and protocol, our goals were on the lighter side so we could ramp up and build the team. Few reps self-selected out, which was important as we built the system and the expectations.”
Reynolds tapped into the training and learning network that Prudential established for its face-to-face agents, but some of that training doesn’t apply to the service center and doesn’t work. So she brought in some outside help.
“We brought on someone who built a similar sales culture at a direct telesales firm. Coupled with a strong operations leader from our retention team, they focused on training and created the right pay-for-performance environment without shocking the system.”
Agents who cross-sell and upsell are often left dangling by companies that don’t invest in training, says Stanfill. Or, at least, the right kind of training for sales. While 68 percent of the respondents to the ICMI survey said they added cross-selling-specific training, he questions whether they’re really being taught to sell to customers while serving them.
“Most managers just give reps performance evaluations as coaching,” he says. “That’s not coaching.” A better understanding of the best training practices will lead to better coaching, he says — and better performance.
“Many operations try to drive efficiency into the process by asking the customer 10 questions at the beginning of the call to try to route the customer down a specific road — before the customer has even said why they’re calling. Your people can help to make the transition by understanding how to lead the customer. For instance, instead of asking, ‘How may I help you?’ they might say: ‘In order for me to do [what you’re asking], I’m going to ask you some questions and get some information, then I’ll be able to…’
“Once the customer knows the rep is leading and why, they’re onboard. We call that the ‘other-centered roadmap,’ and it works.”
Teaching reps to lead the customer builds and enhances the relationship, and it increases the rep’s influence with the customer. Stanfill says that it takes about two days to teach this in training sessions with managers and reps.
In addition to training, technology can help reps to be more knowledgeable about customers and products, says Lamson, as well as what selling efforts have already been made with a customer.
CRM systems can range from the simple — such as the pop-up prompts that Prudential uses at its service desktops — to the more complex, such as multilayer customer, marketing and product information screens.
Rewarding Results
Contact centers practically wrote the book on incentives and rewards. A hand-written note of praise or public recognition can go a long way to boosting morale and performance. You never want to lose that personal touch when it comes to showing appreciation, but once sales is in the mix — with new cultures and pressures — standard methods may not be as effective.
In the service-and-sales environment, suggested incentive programs run the gamut from small, fixed rewards to sales commissions.
“We found that, in a sales-oriented culture, there is an expectation of variable pay,” says Fyfe. At Deluxe, Fyfe led two call center operations for two different business units — one that focused on small-business customers, and which used a consultative approach; the other handled direct consumers for financial institutions. “We had a more robust incentive on the small-business side because it was much more complex to understand,” she says.
Some experts and executives recommend incentive caps, but others say that it limits potential sales.
According to Mary Murcott, business transformation executive and author of Driving Peak Sales Performance in Call Centers, caps are an anathema. “Don’t cap the incentive program, unless you want to cap revenues,” she writes.
To be effective, rewards need to be meaningful for your reps. If your contact center doesn’t have the resources to offer meaningful monetary rewards, Lamson suggests figuring out an alternate reward system.
“If I’m a rep making $20,000 to $30,000 a year, and my sales incentives pay $200 a month more, well, after taxes, that’s only $80 — I don’t really notice that,” he says.
Lamson recommends finding more creative ways for reps to rack up those small amounts so that they can see a bigger reward later, such as a points program that offers big-ticket items to choose from.
It’s also important to figure out what your operation can afford, says Fyfe. LifeMasters, which provides programs and services that create health partnerships among individuals, their physicians and payors, performed extensive compensation studies and worked with its human resources department and consultants to ensure that its call center compensation was competitively priced for its market.
Contact center executives have a unique opportunity with sales, says Fyfe. They can make a solid business case, based on the bottomline contribution, for larger budgets for incentives and rewards.
“To the extent that you can self-fund, it’s a lot easier for executives to say yes. Call centers are typically caught in the position of service versus cost and are always pressured to do more with less. If you can show that the interactions you’re handling are driving additional value for the business — growing sales and generating revenue — you’ll have more opportunity because you’re creating value in multiple dimensions.”
Talk to Each Other
No amount of planning and strategizing will make your service-to-sales transition successful if there is a lack of communication — among contact center executives, managers and agents, and between the contact center and other enterprise departments, such as marketing and sales.
Communication was listed by 63 percent of survey participants as “very critical” to the successful implementation of a cross-selling initiative.
“I was very interested to see that,” says Stanfill. “One thing we commonly see is that leadership does not communicate a proper motive to the organization as to what is driving the shift from service to sales. They need to put the message out: We are not serving our customers at the highest level possible if we’re not meeting their stated and unstated needs.”
According to the survey, the top primary business driver for cross-selling in their companies was to increase revenue (stated by 42 percent of respondents). Only 13 percent said it was to build customer relationships, and just 11.5 percent said the goal was to increase customer retention.
Fyfe, who has worked with Stanfill on sales rollouts, says everybody, from top to bottom, has to believe that sales can be service-oriented.
“For us, this was a cultural component — that service was really an underpinning to how we sell,” explains Fyfe. “The numbers mattered, but during coaching, we always linked it back to our approach — doing the right things within the service process that lead to sales. Our clients saw that we recognized their needs and that we had products and services to offer that could help them.”
Lamson says being able to spread that message relies heavily on everybody’s buyin.
“Managers can’t espouse the view that sales is only for the company’s bottom line. They must philosophically believe in its importance to the customer.”
One survey respondent says that the key is this: “Have a passionate leader who understands sales, embraces the opportunity and can share that passion with key individuals within the team to lead the entire team to embrace the opportunity.”
Finding What Works for You
Every call center operation, to some degree, is discrete, with its own goals, resources and limitations. That’s why it is so important to get to the bare bones when it comes to rolling out a sales program in the call center — how executives make their decisions about what does and does not fit in their operations.
For Prudential Financial’s Individual Life Insurance business, it is especially critical that any cross-sell or up-sell activity doesn’t interfere with the company’s face-to-face selling channels or disrupt service, says Reynolds.
“The comment at the end of [ICMI’s 2007 Call Center Cross-Selling Survey Report] about starting small really resonated with me,” says Reynolds. “Add to that the idea of trying to isolate new sales activity. I can't imagine rolling out a sales pilot by just adding it onto the responsibilities of a service representative who likely has very different expectations, skills and goals for success. If a handoff is not ideal, find some other way to dedicate a small team so you truly can gauge the requirements and the whole system — people, process, marketing and technology — you need to put in place. Once you give yourself a chance to work out the kinks and understand what your programs require, and what your reps can do with the leads you give them, you will have a higher degree of confidence for your business case and will better predict your value to the firm and to your employees.”
Fyfe agrees. She’s a staunch believer in pilot programs and incubators.
“At Deluxe and LifeMasters and other organizations, we’ve used multivariable testing with process improvement firm QualPro,” she says. “You can roll out various factors that you can test to see if it will improve your sales effectiveness, specific client offers, team incentives, conversation flows. We did a lot of testing to help decide whether we should move forward.
The Four Agent Barriers to Cross-Selling and Upselling
There are four barriers that prevent service reps from becoming sales reps in the service center, says Tom Stanfill, founding partner and CEO of Aslan Training & Development. But there is a way around each.
1. Selling does not align with the rep’s value system and/or selling does not fit with his or her personal goals. Service reps went into the business to help customers, not to serve company profit.
Solution: Communicate to the reps that selling can enhance service if you can offer someone something that they need.
2. The rep lacks the skills or the talent to sell.
Solution: Train reps in the skills they need. Screen reps and rep candidates for selling talent.
3. The rep views selling as not worth the effort: They are paid to do more/do a different job for the same compensation.
Solution: Put in place carefully constructed, consistent and fair incentive programs.
4. Selling is simply not possible given job constraints. (For example: Service level requirements are demanding and seemingly impossible to meet — how can they have time to sell?)
Solution: Don’t worry so much about such requirements as call times — answer the question the customer called about, then take charge of the call to discover stated and unstated needs that sales can fulfill. Most companies using this method find that call times don’t run amok.
The Top 20 Strategies for Stellar Sales Performance
Although many best-of-breed companies do not use the same processes or strategies to attain peak performance, there are more commonalities than differences among top-performing companies, according to Mary Murcott in Driving Peak Sales Performance in Call Centers. Here are the top strategies she identified:
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Determine your center’s minimum peak sales potential using macro-gap analysis.
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Focus on fewer performance measures. Set one business outcome KPI per function.
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Validate supporting KPI performance drivers using correlation and regression analysis.
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Use micro-gap analysis to show individual sales reps the way to their “personal best.”
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Hire top-performing sales reps by using validated assessment tools.
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Develop a detailed and rigorously followed sales training and coaching process.
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Explore structural and systemic revenue opportunities, reducing the number of times the rep must say “no” to a sale.
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Do not tightly script top sales performers.
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Utilize skills-based routing to drive sales calls to the best sales reps.
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Rethink channel profitability. Selectively move IVR calls back to sales reps.
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Deselect the bottom performers through minimum sales standards and higher risk/reward compensation programs.
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Reinforce the reps’ faith in the company’s product value and delivery systems.
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Build a dynamic performance database.
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Allow the reps access to as much customer information as possible.
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Construct incentive systems that can change lifestyles.
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Remove environmental irritants (such as marketing and advertising surprises and poor communication).
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Design a CRM strategy and implement selective customer- and call-type tools that enhance sales reps’ ability to cross-sell and upsell.
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“Connect the dots” between reps’ performance and the company’s success.
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Tighten the bond between the sales reps and supervisors using recognition and advanced leadership training.
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Drive changes through a series of prioritized and well-orchestrated projects using project management methodology.
SOURCE: Driving Peak Sales Performance in Call Centers
