Transforming Contact Centers into High-Performing Sales Channels: Building Service that Sustains Sales
Economic, competitive and regulatory pressures have companies investigating new measures that will protect and expand customer relationships and cost-efficiently expand sales efforts. Transforming Contact Centers into High-Performing Sales Channels: Building Service that Sustains Sales will help you develop your contact center service representatives for sales excellence.
This Best Practices®, LLC report offers a unique opportunity to see how top companies such as Bank of America, Citigroup, Dell Computer, IBM, Lands’ End and Medtronic drive sales, increase customer loyalty and expand customer relationships by enabling service representatives to cross-sell and up-sell.
Customer Service > Call Centers d
Industries Profiled:
Telecommunications; Financial Services; Banking; Service; Computer Hardware; Computers; Chemical; Consumer Products; High Tech; Manufacturing; Retail; Medical Device; Electronics
Companies Profiled:
Aliant Telecom; American Express; AT&T; Bank of America; Bank One; Bell South; BT Group; Carlson Leisure; Citigroup; Dell Computer; Dow Chemical; Eastman Kodak; EDS; IBM; Lands' End; Medtronic; NCR; Royal Bank of Canada; Sprint; Texas Instruments; Travelocity; Wachovia; Wells Fargo
Study Snapshot
“Best Practices®, LLC’s research on the service-to-sales revolution is insightful and powerful. Carlson Leisure Travel Services was extremely pleased to have participated in this ground-breaking benchmarking study. We intend to use your Best Practices Benchmarking® Report as a tool to further improve our capabilities for our clients and their customers, while bolstering our own profitability at the same time.” -- Eric Burdon, Executive Vice President of Carlson Leisure Travel Services
Companies face a tremendous challenge when they seek to transform service-oriented contact centers into high-performance sales channels. Such transformation requires leaders to overhaul traditional practices for recruiting, screening, training, compensating and managing contact center agents and supervisors. Best Practices, LLC conducted an in-depth study of best-in-class contact centers that drive revenue growth to reveal insights that will help companies prepare contact center organizations to cross-sell and up-sell.
Transforming Contact Centers into High-Performing Sales Channels: Building Service that Sustains Sales will help you compare your contact center’s service and sales readiness against top companies in the financial services, travel, credit card, telecommunications, manufacturing, computer, chemical, printing and other industries. This report contains key insights and best practices gathered through a detailed benchmark survey of 57 companies as well as in-depth interviews with select contact center executives.
This report will help you identify how to:
- 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
- Create winning sales and service processes
- Manage employee performance to support sales excellence
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Key Findings
Best Practices, LLC compiled nearly 100 innovative and effective practices that boil down to five key findings. 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.
- Best-in-class call centers employ an integrated approach to call center performance excellence.
These centers continuously refine structure, process, selection, training and performance management elements that drive cross-selling effectiveness. Developing a high-performing service-to-sales operation requires a comprehensive approach to ensure that cross selling becomes a primary strategic objective for the service center. All elements of call center management must be considered and acted upon from the perspective of improving sales productivity through the customer service channel.
- Successful call centers re-engineer orientation and training systems to provide incumbent and incoming employees with the skills required to conduct sales in a service environment.
Cultivating sales skills in the call center requires extensive and ongoing employee training and coaching – regardless of whether the trainees are new hires or incumbent service reps. Leading companies also develop cross-selling excellence through training their call center supervisors in sales techniques. Successful implementation of call center sales requires hiring and training sales coaches, creating sales training programs and bringing in employee training modules that are tailored to specific site needs. Models, methods, curriculum and time devoted to service vs. sales vary according to the structure of each call center. To bring their staffs up to speed in cross-selling capability, benchmarked companies use a range of activities.
- Savvy call center managers standardize the cross-selling process to enhance productivity and make the process scalable for large call centers.
Process standardization allows management to scale up operations without introducing variables that would cloud or hinder performance. Additionally, standardization allows companies to continuously refine structure to reflect product mix and process design in a smooth evolution with a minimum of disruption or productivity loss. High-performing companies have introduced Six Sigma or other standardization excellence processes to weed out inefficiencies and establish uniform methodologies that drive overall productivity. This approach helps companies identify the productivity catalysts that spur sales effectiveness and aids executives in designing implementation roadmaps for realizing goals.
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