Selling is Service

SELLING IS SERVICE: How Leading Call Centers Simultaneously Drive Revenue and Elevate the Customer Experience

Many people in the call center world cringe a bit when they hear the term “sales” or “selling”. Mention such terms to most inbound agents, supervisors or managers, and up pops an image in their mind of the stereotypically aggressive used car salesman or some similar negative cliché.

I used to be among these people (the cringers, not the aggressive used car salesmen). But then a funny thing happened: I realized that many of the exemplary call centers I had been writing about for years – centers renowned for their strong culture and customer focus – were, indeed, moderately to heavily involved in inbound sales.

You may have heard of some of these companies: Zappos, Capital One, Hilton, USAA, Verizon, The Hartford, JetBlue, Eddie Bauer…

Not exactly “aggressive used car salesmen” types of organizations. In fact, all have won multiple major awards for their outstanding customer service and satisfaction. And they’ve won these awards not because their customer service performance outshines their sales performance; rather because they recognize that the two go hand in hand.

“Selling IS service,” says Tom Stanfill, an expert on service-oriented sales and CEO of renowned sales training/development firm Aslan (www.aslantraining.com). “It’s all about understanding customer’s stated and unstated needs – and helping customers satisfy those needs to solve their problems. When done right, sales is really a higher form of service. If you’re an effective customer service organization, you should be good at selling.”

Stanfill has helped hundreds of organizations add a sales component to their service/support center or improve existing sales center processes – empowering managers, supervisors and agents to embrace a customer-centric rather than a product- or revenue-centric approach to sales in the call center. And he has seen first-hand the big improvements to the bottom line AND to customer satisfaction/loyalty that these centers have experienced after adopting such an approach.

“Selling should enhance the customer experience and help the customer, not just generate revenue. Selling doesn’t supersede service.”

Seven Key Traits of Customer-Centric Sales Call Centers

All this customer-centric sales stuff sounds great in theory, but what do the Zappos and the Capital Ones and the USAAs of the world actually DO to consistently and simultaneously achieve sales success and customer loyalty? What specific traits and practices do top organizations have in common that make them as good at up-selling and cross-selling as they are at delighting and growing their customer base?

Read on to find out.

1) Their new-hire recruiting & assessment practices ensure that the frontline is forever filled with true sales talent. Call centers that regularly meet or exceed ambitious revenue objectives view agent recruiting/hiring not as a rushed process to get butts in seats, but rather as a critical investment in long-term sales success. These centers take the time to target candidates who possess strong customer-centric sales potential, and to carefully assess them to ensure they do indeed have the ability to succeed in an inbound sales (or hybrid service-sales) environment.

It’s more about spotting real talent than it is about experience level or personality type, says Stanfill.

“You can teach knowledge and you can teach skills, but you can’t really teach talent. The most successful sales centers understand that there are specific characteristics of a rep who will succeed in a contact center sales environment.”

To help identify who has what it takes, adds Stanfill, the best sales organizations strategically craft situations during interviews that help to reveal if the candidate has the particular talents that are key to the sales role, “such as the ability to be proactive and to take the lead.” He points out that many organizations, rather than creating such situations during interviews, instead rely too heavily on behavioral-based questions related to common customer situations, which he says only helps to show if candidates know the best way to respond – not whether they naturally possess and are able to use the desired traits at appropriate times.

This is not to suggest that raw talent alone guarantees a successful sales hire. A candidate who may be a natural at uncovering unstated needs might also be a chronic late-sleeper who carries a concealed weapon and doesn’t know how to type. That’s why leading organizations, after assuring that a sales agent candidate has the necessary talent for the job, gauge things like personality, skills/knowledge, career fit and cultural fit – often using such tools as character assessments, job simulation software and behavioral-based interviews to do so.

Check in: How do you compare to the best sales call centers?

Have you identified and differentiated the key characteristics required to thrive in the sales and service role -- categorized by skills, knowledge, and talent (the sales “DNA” that cannot be taught)?
Does your interview process center around discovering talent vs. the “correct” answers to your pre-determined questions?
Do you utilize the phone and email (the main forms of communication used on the job) as a way to interview and screen potential candidates?

2) Their training and development practices, while sales-oriented, are highly customer-focused and agent-attentive. Setting agents up to succeed in sales doesn’t center around pumping them full of product info and benefits, nor does it entail teaching them tricks to manipulate customers to maximize purchases across all product lines. In leading sales contact centers, agents are trained to ask questions and listen carefully to customers to help identify their problems and needs, and then to engage customers in conversations about specific products and services that could simplify their lives and solve their issues.

The end result is that products/services are sold, but they are never “pushed” or “pedaled”. Agents are simply helping the customer make the best decision – focusing primarily on satisfying customer needs vs. meeting rigid sales quotas.

Sales training in the most successful organizations doesn’t happen in a silo – it’s all a part of customer service training paradigm. That’s why after customers complete a transaction with an agent at companies like Zappos and Verizon, they hang up the phone (or close the chat session) feeling not up-sold or swindled but cared for and satisfied. And it’s why they remain valuable customers for a long time.

Unfortunately, not all inbound sales call centers have adopted such a customer-focused training approach, says Stanfill. “Most organizations have tried to fit their old, traditional field sales tactics and concepts into the contact center, and typically that’s not very successful. Just like in most of the books on sales, they talk about sales as a separate entity rather than about the unique role of selling and serving over the phone.”

Stanfill points out that, while communicating and practicing the unique skills and knowledge sales agents need during initial training/orientation is important, what’s more critical is having managers and supervisors who can truly transform agent behaviors.

“The most successful organizations invest in people who can continually develop reps and drive sales and service improvement post-orientation and post new-hire training. A big part of that is making sure you have a supervisor-to-rep or manager-to-rep ratio that is conducive to daily or weekly coaching for all reps.”

Customized training reference tools for agents are also critical in ensuring the “stickiness” of essential skills learned, says Stanfill. Remembering everything learned via coaching and training – and learning to effortlessly apply those skills and concepts – is difficult without a tool that agents can frequently and easily access. “I’m not talking about a script here – I’m talking about a tool that provides things like transitioning from the service to the consulting part of the call and a way of recognizing the top four or five up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

Check in: How do you compare to the best sales call centers?

Have you built your training/coaching programs around the unique competencies of customer-centric selling and serving via the phone?
Do your managers and supervisors coach to and model those key competencies?
Have you built reference tools that ensure the concepts taught during coaching/training can be translated to the real world?

3) They arm agents with desktop tools that open and optimize sales opportunities. Training reference tools aren’t the only desktop devices that top call centers equip agents with to enhance sales performance. Leading centers also invest in potent applications that place invaluable product information and customer data right at agents’ finger tips.

With today’s desktop solutions, agents gain full visibility into customer accounts and histories, with important notes from previous contacts (across channels) highlighted. Having instant access to such unified information improves agents’ ability to make product offers that match each customer’s profile – or to at least ask highly relevant “primer” questions to smoothly pave the way to a sales opportunity. Many applications feature intelligent screen pops that alert agents of prime up-selling and cross-selling opportunities based on the customer’s profile, and often even provide recommended scripting to help agents “get there”.

Giving agents instant access to a content-rich knowledge base is also key to customer-centric sales. Embedding such tools in the desktop enables agents to quickly find answers to customer’s questions and provide more detailed information on specific products and services – all of which strengthen the customer-agent relationship and opens the door to effective selling.

While there’s no doubt that the aforementioned solutions and tools are very useful, it’s important to remember that they can’t actually make a sale. If a call center’s investment in such applications comes at the expense of agent hiring and training, the center will never drive the level of revenue that the solutions providers always promise. Regardless of technology, agents need the talent, skills and confidence to seal the deal.

As Stanfill says. “Sales tools never change agents’ behavior.”

Check in: How do you compare to the best sales call centers?

Does your current CRM solution leverage existing customer data to highlight the customer’s needs for additional products/services?
If so, do the agents believe the tool is accurate, intuitive and user-friendly?

4) Their IVR system and routing tactics are designed to embrace rather than infuriate customers. It’s very difficult to drive revenue up when your IVR system is driving callers crazy – or to the wrong agent. Top call centers realize this, and thus work hard to ensure that their front-end applications don’t take the wind out the center’s “sales” before customers even reach an agent.

Many leading sales call centers have ditched traditional touchtone IVR in favor of one powered by advanced speech recognition. The latter enables customers to quickly get where they want to go using natural language commands, rather than having to sit through static and often confusing menu options before hopefully pressing the right number on their phone.

Also critical is investing in computer-telephone integration (CTI) tools that ensure that any customer information provided to the IVR (e.g., account number, reason for calling, etc.) is captured and transferred to the desktop of the agent who ends up handling the call. How smoothly and seamlessly such transfers occur can spell the difference between a customer primed for a cross-sell conversation and a customer angry enough to use a crossbow.

To further enhance their chances of sales success, the best call centers master the art of skills-based routing. This involves the use of specialized tools to capture why (or from where) each customer is calling and to then send them to the specific agent/group best-equipped to handle their needs based on that information.

“Matching customers to agents who are known to be successful at handling those call types can be very effective in influencing sales,” says Stanfill. “I really like skills-based routing, if that can happen.”

But when it doesn’t happen, and a customer arrives highly aggravated by how they were routed or how they were handled in the IVR, agents can still save the day – and make a sale, Stanfill points out. “The truth is, the more negative a customer’s experience before reaching a rep is, the more opportunity the rep has to give them a ‘wow’ experience and enhance the relationship – not that we want to advocate bad IVR design!”

Check in: How do you compare to the best sales call centers?

Have you invested in proven IVR design to ensure that you aren’t alienating and aggravating callers before a sale can even happen?
Are you routing each call to the agent who has the greatest ability to respond to the customer’s need/challenge?
Are your agents equipped to “win” customers back after a negative front-end system experience? Do agents understand the impact that doing so has on customer satisfaction (and potential sales)?

5) They track and manage the right metrics for driving peak sales performance and customer loyalty. Since “selling is service” (when done right), it should come as no real surprise that the key metrics in successful sales call centers focus more on captivating customers than on moving product. Sure, many of these centers track measures like Sales Conversion Rate and Average Revenue per Call, but such metrics don’t supplant more customer-centric ones like Service Level, First-Call Resolution (FCR), Customer Satisfaction (C-Sat), and Contact Quality.

After all, it’s difficult to drive high sales performance if callers aren’t able to easily access an agent and get their needs met efficiently and with quality. Centers that fall short on Service Level are essentially robbing customers of time (by making them hold for lengthy periods), and one isn’t likely to get money from people one has already stolen from. And in blended service-sales centers – which typically must handle customer inquiries/issues effectively before even thinking about up-selling or cross-selling – tracking FCR (and resolution in general) and striving to continuously improve it is critical.

Successful sales-oriented call centers, while highly focused on the customer as well as on generating revenue, certainly don’t ignore traditional productivity metrics. All call centers, regardless of type, must aim to keep costs in check as well as understand incoming workload parameters for scheduling purposes. Thus, keeping an eye on (but not obsessing over) such metrics as Average Handle Time (AHT) is important.

Some people may think that measuring AHT in a call center where agents are expected to meet customer needs and sell smacks of conflicting objectives. Not so, says Stanfill.

“Having agents be more consultative and having them ask customers questions to uncover needs does not necessarily drive AHT up. As a trainer, I often listen to 14- or 15-minute ‘successful’ sales calls where the agent could easily have had the same result in a 3- or 4-minute call – if the agent had led the call.”

When the customer leads the call, Stanfill explains, the agent assumes a passive role – often stuck providing explanations about every product the customer asks about rather than focusing the customer on what specific product would likely work best for them. That’s when talk times and handle times can get out of hand. The result: long calls that cost the company money and often detract from the overall customer experience. “In our experience,” says Stanfill, “C-Sat scores go up when the agent has the expertise to consult with the customer and lead them to the best solution.”

Check in: How do you compare to the best sales call centers?

Are your key performance indicators designed to drive positive customer experiences or merely straight productivity and profit?
Does your quality monitoring form enable the quality team to measure the key “consultative” competencies (such as uncovering and satisfying customers’ stated and unstated needs) that foster desired outcomes?
Do your coaches focus on ways agents can improve efficiency while simultaneously enhancing sales opportunities and customer satisfaction?

6) They inspire agents to achieve customer-centric sales excellence via compelling incentives and meaningful recognition. Having talented agents and strategic performance objectives in place to drive sales success won’t mean much if those agents don’t feel motivated to meet those objectives. Recognizing this, top sales call centers regularly reward and recognize staff in ways that foster high levels of engagement and commitment.

These centers create contests, games and campaigns that are intended not only to drive high performance but also to entertain, enhance teamwork and show agents how valuable they are to the organization and customers. Whenever agents in such centers achieve key objectives (for both sales-based metrics as well as customer-centric metrics that drive revenue), they receive a healthy (and affordable) mix of material rewards and meaningful recognition. Prizes – like cash, gift certificates, event tickets, and points that can be redeemed for merchandise – go hand-in-hand with public praise, which may include:

“agent (and team) of the week/month” awards;
posting deserving agents names, photos and notable accomplishment(s) on a “wall of fame” or “wall of distinction”;
announcements in company newsletters or during meetings or celebrations. (Zappos, for instance, hosts quarterly happy hours during which awards are handed out to agents who have performed at a high level and who have embraced their role as “culture advocates”.)

In addition, many call centers reward top-performers with opportunities to work on special off-phone projects or task forces, or to serve as mentors and subject matter experts. This can be extremely motivating for agents, who typically embrace the chance to diversify their role and use their expertise to help better the center and their peers’ performance.

Call centers that are strapped for budget (read: MOST call centers) needn’t fret when it comes to agent incentives, says Stanfill. He points out that it’s the non-monetary types of rewards and recognition mentioned above that truly inspire service-oriented sales agents.

“A lot of successful centers are able to keep agents engaged and performing at a high level without relying on monetary sales incentives. What really keeps agents engaged is that they have meaning in what they do, and feel recognized. Sales commissions are the easiest incentive to offer, but often the least effective.”

Check in: How do you compare to the best sales call centers?

Are agents regularly recognized and rewarded for customer-centric sales performance? Do existing incentives truly drive agent improvement and engagement?
Do you share agent success stories with peers to promote and reinforce ideal service-based sales behaviors center-wide?
Do all agents in the call center feel like they have a chance of being rewarded/recognized, or only your top performers?

7) They share insight and cultivate strong relationships with other key departments. No call center is an island, though far too many companies treat theirs as one – and far too many call centers accept that role. As a result, the abundant and invaluable customer data and feedback that is captured by the call center every day – information that could enable continuous product, service and marketing enhancements – is seldom shared across the enterprise to the extent that it should be.

“In most of the organizations we work with, we don’t see a strong relationship or collaboration between the blended service-sales call center and other departments,” Stanfill says. “The problem is that often the company views the call center as merely ‘operations’ or a manufacturing facility, and the thinking is, ‘Why would manufacturing speak to Sales or Marketing?’”

This is not the mindset in the most successful organizations, where call center leaders take an active role in creating cross-functional teams and regularly meet with key department heads. This is not only to ensure that the company as a whole understands and is able to act on key customer insights and expectations, but also to gather critical information and updates from other areas in order to optimize service and sales in the call center.

Deluxe Corporation is a prime example, according to Stanfill. He explains that the Marketing department and other key areas at Deluxe collaborate with the company’s service-sales call center at a high level. In fact, says Stanfill, every member of Marketing has gone through the call center sales training program.

The result of this strong interdepartmental relationship?

“Deluxe has seen a tremendous surge in revenue and customer satisfaction,” Stanfill reports. They’ve done a great job of ‘connecting it’ organizationally.”

So has APC (American Power Conversion). Their customer service sales team, inside sales team, and VP of Sales all work together in the same area, with the Marketing department located right around the corner. “The customer service Sales people actually report up to the VP of Marketing,” Stanfill says. “This is one of the few service-sales organizations I’ve worked with that is truly integrated. They all work together, learn from each other, and have the mentality that, ‘We’re all moving toward the customer.’”

Such organizational alignment and cohesiveness – along with the fact that APC has adopted most of the other best practices described in this article – helps to explain why the company recently saw its Average Revenue per Call shoot up 30% over six months.

Check in: How do you compare to the best sales call centers?

How often does your call center share key data/insight with Sales and other relevant departments, and vice versa?
Do key leaders in Marketing monitor calls on a regular basis?
Do you empower agents to work with IT to enhance reference tools, or work with Marketing to help sharpen promotional content/materials?

Management Must Serve as Catalyst for Service-to-Sales Success

In looking back over the best practices for driving customer-centric sales, one can see the instrumental role that managers and their supporting staff in the call center play. While it may be the agents who interact with the customers and facilitate the actual sales, it’s how those agents are selected, trained, coached, equipped and incentivized that truly determines success.

Management’s role is particularly critical in call centers that are just starting to make the transition from a traditional service-only environment to a blended service-sales operation, says Stanfill. Unfortunately, many such centers fail because managerial and supervisory staff are ill-prepared for the change.

“Often, these people started off in the call center as a service rep, were good on the phones, and got promoted,” Stanfill explains. “Suddenly, the organization wants the centers to shift to a more sales-oriented environment, and these managers and supervisors are supposed to teach something that they didn’t have to do back when they were on the phones. They are the ones who are responsible for delivering the message to the team as to why the center is making the shift [to sales], and they are the ones responsible for coaching and motivating the team. This can be a big challenge.”

To help overcome that challenge, forward-thinking service organizations – prior to transitioning to a more blended service-sales environment – ensure that the call center’s managerial/supervisory staff receive the specialized training and education they need to make such a move.

“The managers have to be equipped to drive this change, to be catalysts,” says Stanfill. “The good news is that the tools and resources to help them do so are out there. They have been built, tested and effectively used in hundreds and hundreds of organizations that have successfully made the transition from service to sales.”