UPSELLING IN SERVICE CALL CENTERS

By: Art Hall, NetBank

How to implementing UPSELLING IN SERVICE CALL CENTERS??

This is a very difficult question to answer, but a question that must be addressed. In my experience in transforming a service-oriented call center to a sales and service oriented call center, I was under tremendous pressure to produce results quickly. Senior executives underestimated the level of change management that is involved in taking an entire operation from pure service to an operation that was cross-selling/up-selling to customers where it made sense.

Here are some things that I have learn and done in the process:

1. Develop an overarching strategy for service and sales and communicate that strategy constantly to your team and the customer service agents. The way I had to break upselling down to my team was to ask them if they ever have been asked to super size a combo at a drive through restaurant. That is essentially what they are doing: determining if the customer is in a "super size mood" today. If not, move on, if so, give them the bigger fries and coke!

2. Develop a visual sales process - Everyone in the call center must get a visual picture of the sales process end to end.If you have Microsoft Visio or Excel you can map that out pretty easily.

3. Listen, Listen, Listen. You will find out that there are some customer service agents that are not fit for sales, and that is okay. You have some decisions to face if it is required for the entire call center operation to sell. But you will be surprised what agents will say/not say that impedes their ability for sales.

4. Start slow and establish quick wins. You may want to start with a simple tag line at the end of every call or start with an easy product/service in order to start momentum.

5. Make it fun. In our environment, the Operations Manager created a literal mountain that hung on the wall and superimposed his face on a person that is hiking up the mountain, representing our maturity in the transition.

6. You Need QA (Quality Asurance) and You Need Sales Coaches. This is a "both and" type of deal and not an "either or." QA should listen for the opportunities capitalized as well as missed; sales coaches should be on the floor shadowing the reps and giving them pointers. You may want to take one or two of your best sales agents and make them the coaches if you don't have the budget to hire additional coaches.

7. Need to establish KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) at a strategic and tactical level. A good strategic KPI is cost of service - it is an efficiency measure that will let you know how efficient each rep is in asking for the sale. Another good one is number of cross sells per 100 calls handled. There is a benchmark in financial services of 3 products/services sold per 100 calls. I am not sure if there is a benchmark in your vertical. At a tactical level, measure the agents on number of units sold - it's easy and they can control it.

8. Re-think your incentive compensation - if you are a B2C (Business-to-Consumer) shop, I would extract learnings from B2B (Business-to-Business) companies that have a mature and defined incentive compensation plan and use that to develop your compensation plans and incentives (both monetary and non-monetary).

9. Set up recurring sales meetings with senior execs so that they can understand how well your organization is adapting to the change and the challenges you are facing. This helps level set expectations and establishes your credibility BIG time!

 

An Underestimated Principle In The Call Center

As a call center manager or supervisor, you may pride yourself on your fairness. You understand that treating agents with an evenhanded and equal approach is important. However, it's not your perception that matters: it's your agents' ideas about what is fair that matters. If your call center agent pool is comprised of mature adults with long careers behind them, thick skins and a high degree of tolerance for criticism, then you are fortunate. However, chances are, you employ a lot of young people who may be new to a workplace environment, particularly one where a workforce is almost literally elbow-to-elbow, as in the call center.

The causes of high turnover in the call center are not always clear-cut to company management. Sure, you understand why an employee quits if he complains that he's not getting the shifts he wants or is offered more money by another company. But more often than not, it is soft, intangible things that cause friction in the call center. Agents feel their goals are poorly communicated and measured. That another agent was trained better than him or her. That supervisors always choose to monitor on the agent's "bad" days while ignoring the good conversations. That supervisors are keeping a closer watch on him or her than other agents. That company management is stressing training on issues the employee feels he or she has already mastered, while skimping on areas the agent would truly like help in (but is unwilling to ask).

Today's call center technologies go a long way toward creating and maintaining fairness in agents' jobs. Workforce optimization solutions allow for schedule and vacation swapping that is done automatically based on seniority, coverage needs and who asked first rather than supervisors picking and choosing who gets the good schedules and who doesn't, which tends to bring about accusations of "favoritism."

Quality surveys of customers can be done randomly, helping catch a more representative range of opinions. It's well known that in the contact center, if you leave it up to customers to decide when they want to offer feedback, they are generally going to take time to offer it only when they've had a negative experience. And if you allow agents to "push" surveys to customers, they are, of course, only going to "push" when a call has gone well.

Speech analytics, too, can help supervisors become aware of where agents really need help, and where they are strong. Supervisors can take steps to correct errors - or areas where training may be thin for certain agents -automatically by pushing the appropriate e-learning modules to call center agents, allowing diem to learn at their desks during their downtime with no judgmental manager standing over them. In this way, a supervisor need not either publicly single out an agent for a problem; i.e., "Suzanne, you really need to improve your close rate," or take the time out to pull the agent aside for private, individualized learning, which carries its own stigma.

Call recording allows you to record and store all of your agents' calls, if necessary, and access them easily. Not only do many industries today require 100 percent recording of customer interactions, it can be a good idea to avoid agent/customer "he said, she said" scenarios. You can use the recordings to find out where agents are weak, but on the flip side, you can use the recording to let agents know what they are doing well.

Improving the perception (and the reality) of fairness in the call center can go a long way toward reducing agent attrition and nipping the "disgrunded agent snowball effect" in the bud before it blooms into resentment of company management. Because when a group of people is working is working elbow-to-elbow in a call center environment, disharmony is the very last thing that's needed.

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions

Call Center Culture

By Mary Beth Ingram, Phone Pro Founder / June 2002

 

Victoria’s Secret Is Out. Dress Barn Is Safe at Home!

Call Centers are mainstream. You see call centers in TV commercials and on the cartoon pages of your daily newspaper. Both are great indicators that the call center is a “household word.”

Ten years ago if you told someone you worked in a call center, they responded by asking, “A call what? What’s that?” No more. In fact, I’m waiting for the TV sitcom to come out because the life in a call center is such “real life” and full of story after story. So it’s no surprise that call centers make the news as did Victoria’s Secret recently, and it’s no surprise that in a letter to its credit card holders, Dress Barn alerted its customers to a change in the location of their call center operations.

On August 23rd in the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch the closing of Victoria Secret’s call center, located in the greater Columbus area, was reported. (The newspaper story can be accessed at www.dispatch.com.)

The fact that they ceased operations makes it a newsworthy story. How they did it makes it a noteworthy story for the call center community. I am well aware that this story most certainly has layers I am not privy to that would shed light on the circumstances that caused the company to cease operations. The story’s headline was, “Victoria’s Secret Sends 470 Packing.” Staff was in the call center, on the phones with customers and the phones went dead. Staff was then called into a meeting and told the call center had been closed. Every person was offered a transfer to one of two other call centers, one in Kettering Ohio, about 70-80 miles west of Columbus, or to the state of New Mexico. Here is a quote from one of the staff: “I started working there in November of 1992 and I just cracked $10 an hour. So you can just imagine how hard it would be to try to move or commute to Kettering”.

The company was quick to point out that they were not like “other American retailers” who were cutting jobs. No, they were transferring jobs. Pay no attention to the fact that the new locations were 70 miles and 1,470 miles away so you could choose between a little over an hour’s commute or a day’s!

A remarkable attempt to appear pure and caring. In all fairness, it’s important to report that they did offer 60 days’ severance pay to anyone who could not accept the transfer. Somehow it would not surprise me to find out that offer had holes in it, but I’ll never know and don’t want to know.

If you taste or smell something foul, it’s the company’s culture. No one denies a corporation’s need to make tough, difficult business decisions. We accept that no decision is good for everyone and in fact, people are often hurt even in the best of decisions that come down from on high.

Now, take a look at a different view of life in a call center. In a letter I received in August from an American retailer, The Dress Barn, was this statement: “We have expanded our telemarketing, website and fulfillment operations and moved them in-house. At Dress Barn we are committed to offering you superior customer service.”

What is remarkable about this letter is the notification of the move “in-house” of their operations. Yes, the call center is mainstream!

The letter goes on to explain that past customer experiences have fallen short of expectations both for the customer and for the company. Now neither you nor I know if the letter is purely a marketing effort or a demonstration of the real essence of caring. What we do know is that Dress Barn didn’t need to inform cardholders of the change. What we can hope for is that this is a real demonstration of exactly who they are and want to be.

We can hope that when the tough and difficult decision was made to bring operations back in-house, they didn’t pull the plug in the middle of the phone call. We can hope that if they face a new tough and difficult decision to close or downsize, they will not pull the plug in the middle of the phone call.

If something tastes or smells fresher, it’s the company’s culture.

It’s gotten very popular to talk about “culture” and apply it to business settings and strategies. While references to good ol’ Webster can be trite and space filling when an author has little to say, I find this one remarkable enough to insert. Pause for a moment and think about your definition of “culture” and then return for Webster’s (On line Merriam-Webster to be exact).

Culture: 1) The act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education. 2) Expert care and training (beauty culture). 3) Enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training as in the acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills. 4) a) the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. b) the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group c) the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation

What I take as the most common meaning of the word, i.e., the references to customs, beliefs, and all other things sociological, was down in the 4th spot. It didn’t surprise me that “4c” referred to the use of the word in the business world. That indeed speaks to the pervasiveness of its use.

Notice the distinction made in the third definition saying that this is not about vocational or technical skills but about enlightenment and excellence through acquisition of intellectual and aesthetic training. It’s as if the third definition defines both the first and second while the 4th applies it.

Good Call Center Training Creates a Positive Atmosphere

By STEFANIA VISCUSI
TMCnet Assistant Editor for Channels

In the call center, agents are the touch point between customers and the company. Ensuring they receive proper call center training to handle stressful situations, answer caller requests accurately and portray the image of the company, is critical.

Achieving successful call center training isn’t as easy as saying, "Ok here's a list of what you need to do, do it." For years, call centers have relied on agents who just answered phones and did as they were asked, but this is the same reason why call center training has failed.

Call center training needs to be in place not only from the minute an agent decides to join the operation, but call center training must be a continuous effort to improve and maintain success throughout the entire operation.

Training call center agents on how to talk to customers, what to say and when to say it, and reinforcing all of their decisions with the right mix of feedback and coaching are all elements of good call center training.

One of the best ways to achieve a successful call center operation is by giving agents time to practice. Just simply telling agents what to do and sending them off hoping they will do it right, is not good enough. Showing them and giving them a safe environment to practice what you have told them will yield great results.

Call center jobs can be extremely stressful, especially when callers want answers, or may be upset or emotional. Good call center training provides agents with the skills and tools needed to eliminate the stress of these situations.

If training takes place in an environment that is comfortable and allows mistakes to be made, without sacrificing those mistakes on actual customers, it becomes beneficial to agents and gives them a chance to better develop their skills.

An important thing to remember about call center training is that it is ongoing. It does not end on the first day of the job.

When good, continual call center training is in place, management and supervisors can rest assured that their job and the entire operation will run smoother, customers will be more satisfied with the service they receive, and a positive environment will surface.

Stefania Viscusi is an established writer and avid reader. To see more of her articles, please visit Stefania Viscusi’s columnist page.

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