Unlocking the hidden sales potential of your Customer Service Representatives

With the right tools, customer-facing organisations can now benefit from the untapped sales potential of their Customer Service Representatives, says Guy Tweedale, SVP of EMEA Operations at Jacada, leading to higher revenues, greater staff productivity, and increased customer loyalty.

For years now, the call centre has largely been viewed as a necessary evil, an inescapable cost centre that needs to be more and more efficient, with the ultimate aim being the shortest possible calls being handled by the fewest number of staff. As a result, modern call centres are often more famous for providing customers with frustration rather than efficient service, and for evoking feelings of anger and resentment in place of customer satisfaction.

Most companies are trying to achieve the same goals when it comes to managing customers:  they want to improve the quality of customer service, reducing 'churn' of both customers and agents, whilst maximising contribution to the organisation's bottom line. Traditionally, however, the focus has been on the latter, primarily managed through cost reductions within the call centres. This is not a sustainable model for the majority of companies in today's competitive environment.

Moving customer service from a cost centre to a profit centre

Things, are changing. Many organisations are now starting to realise that the customer service representatives (CSRs) who are taking inbound calls are in the perfect position to sell more - more comprehensive contracts, extra insurance, extended warranties, etc - to happy customers.

At the same time, CSRs can also play a key role in turning things around for unhappy customers by solving their problems and answering their questions efficiently and effectively, therefore increasing customer retention. And, ultimately, making it possible to sell to these customers in the future.

Superior customer service becomes even more critical to an organisation's success. But the right technology, processes, systems and targets must be in place in order to achieve it.

Simplification of the CSR desktop as a facilitator of sales growth

With the latest unified desktop technology, CSRs can now benefit from an intelligent, contextual view of customer and organisation data. This gives them a complete view of their customers' needs and the relevant company information required to solve problems, answer questions, and sell services effectively and quickly.

Nowhere is this need for an 'intelligent view' of customer data more evident than within the insurance industry. Customers tend to call their insurance provider for only a few reasons: they are applying for a new policy or renewing an existing policy; they need to make a change to an existing policy (ie, add an additional person to a car insurance policy); or they are filing a claim.

All of these calls will require the CSR to access customer information that is relevant to that customer's specific query. If that information is not easily accessible - and the CSR therefore has to go hunting for it while the customer waits impatiently on the phone - the chances of selling additional products and services diminish greatly.

Across all industries a large obstacle continues to hamper CSRs' ability to offer a better quality of interaction with their customers: the chaotic maze of applications and tools that reside on today's contact centre desktops. Anecdotal evidence points to many CSRs having between 20 and 30 open applications on the desktop at any one time. This can be both distracting and confusing for CSRs who are trying to provide efficient customer support, let alone the impact on their ability to maximise any cross or up-sell opportunities that may exist.

This problem of complexity extends beyond the number of the applications being used; agents in many companies are confused by a single application with cumbersome screens, where getting in and around the application to get the data they need is akin to brain surgery.

Without doubt, businesses can increase customer loyalty and boost sales by changing the quality of customer interaction, which is made possible when agents are able to focus on the customer, rather than on the systems they use. After all, one bad interaction with a contact centre agent can destroy all the customer loyalty that a company has worked so hard to earn.

Getting the measurement and rewards structure right

The customer service problems are being made worse by companies who have chosen to place too much focus on pure efficiency measurements such as Average Handle Time (AHT) - incentivising their agents using these measures. This pressures the CSRs to spend less time on the phone, and/or to reduce or eliminate "wrap-up time" in order to complete certain administrative tasks. Thus reducing the opportunity and inclination of the CSR to spend time on cross-selling or up-selling. The overall reduction in operational costs gained from this reduced call length is almost certainly outweighed by the opportunity cost of the lost sales, not to mention the cost of losing a dissatisfied customer who feels that his problem has not been solved or that he had been rushed and unappreciated by the organisation.

Instead of focusing on AHT, companies would be better able to integrate revenue generation activities into a call if they thought in terms of Average Interaction Time (AIT). This new way of looking at CSRs' efficiency will allow call centre management to consider the actual dynamics within each call. Average Interaction Time can be defined as Average Process Time + Average Nurture Time + Average Wrap-Up Time.

Average process time and wrap-up time are self explanatory. Nurture time is the process of chatting with the customer. It is the time that the CSR actually spends understanding what the customer really needs, recommending additional services, building a relationship, being empathetic - whatever is needed to improve satisfaction and retention, and now can dramatically improve  the bottom-line too!

To access the results of new surveys into the perceptions and experience of customer service in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands go to jacada.com.

Other whitepapers that may be of interest:

The Top Three Strategies for Improving First Call Resolution

Why Average Handle Time No Longer Matters

The Top Five Reasons to Simplify Your Customer Service Desktop