Managing Service to Sales Cultural Transformation
Across all industries, businesses are increasingly being forced to maximize return on their assets; this phenomenon is no more visible than in customer service call centers. These operations, originally designed as service channels, are increasingly under pressure to transform into both service and revenue channels. Managing Service-to-Sales Cultural Transformation will help you train, organize and deploy your service representatives for sales excellence.
This Best Practices®, LLC report offers a unique opportunity to see how top companies such as Sprint, Intuit, G.E. Consumer Finance, Wells Fargo and Carlson Leisure have changed their call center representatives from being solely focused on customer service by providing tools and skills that enable service representatives to cross-sell and up-sell.
Customer Service > Call Centers d
Industries Profiled:
Service; Banking; Financial Services; Telecommunications; Computer Software
Companies Profiled:
Carlson Leisure; Wells Fargo; Sprint; Intuit; GE Consumer Finance
Study Snapshot
Managing Service to Sales Cultural Transformation will help you discover how well your company compares to top corporations in the financial services, travel, service, credit card and computer software that have begun moving their contact center from solely a service component to a mixture of service and sales. This report contains key insights and best practices gathered through detailed interviews with five contact center executives from elite companies as well as data compiled from a previous benchmark survey of 57 companies.
This report will help you identify how to:
- Develop and Refine a Transformation Message
- Structure the Organization for Top-Flight Performance
- Maintain high quality service during sales transition
- Recruit, cultivate and retain sales talent
- Structure winning employee incentive plans
- Drive revenues by effectively structuring contact centers for cross-selling and up-selling
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Key Findings
Best Practices, LLC analysts have distilled six critical findings from the collective insights, lessons learned, and best practices uncovered in research with the benchmark class participants and from prior research. These key findings, while critical to optimizing call center operations, also have a significant impact on driving cultural change in organizations. They represent elements of an operational blueprint for transforming service call centers to high-performing service and sales units.
Below are three short versions of high-level findings from the report's executive summary. More granular practices with specific examples are contained within the report itself.
- LEADERSHIP: Deliver an integrated transformation message that explicitly communicates the purpose and importance of the service-to-sales shift.
Successful service-to-sales transformation begins with a carefully thought-out message that is communicated to employees at the earliest stages. Some companies communicate the broad strategic importance of the shift, while others focus on the challenge and payoff of the change at the employee level. Either way, these efforts help establish common goals and clarify the purpose of the shift for all employees.
Virtually all benchmark partners agree that successful service-to-sales transitions require overt endorsement from senior leadership that is visible throughout the organization. This means that senior executives must be available to assist call center managers to communicate important messages at strategic junctures during the service-to-sales transformation process.
- ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE: Continually refine organizational structure — approach structural changes in incremental steps and pilot new arrangements of people and functions before large-scale implementations.
Developing a definitive strategy for arranging people and functions is a critical part of any service-to-sales transformation. However, tactical changes are best tested prior to implementation. The more your organizational structure needs to change to support a sales functionality, the more prudent it is to test arrangements of people and functions before making large-scale changes.
One of the common themes that emerged is that successful call centers operations have a large degree of “structural flexibility.”
- MANAGEMENT ACTIVITIES: Recognize the pivotal role that managers and supervisors play in facilitating the service-to-sales transition and work to secure their buy-in.
A key ingredient of any successful service-to-sales initiative is ensuring that managers and supervisors are involved in the implementation efforts from the start, and that they drive the change process on a daily basis by both words and actions.
Many call center leaders who have embarked on a service-to-sales transition acknowledged that they failed to adequately engage and prepare managers and supervisors for their roles in the conversion process. If they had a second chance, these organizations would focus more energy on their managers and supervisors.
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