In today's tightening economy, how do I turn my contact centre from a cost centre into a profit centre?

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by Mark Selcow, President and co-founder of Merced Systems

Many traditionally service-only operations executives have the opportunity and resources to turn their organizations into revenue-generating engines.  In the face of a constricting global economy, more and more operations leaders are taking steps to recognize this potential through introducing sales into their service environments. 

Unfortunately the efforts of many of these operations executives are impeded by outdated processes and technology making revenue generation hard, if not impossible.  Yet failing to capitalize on business advantages can have sobering consequences, while a well-executed effort can lead to significant reward.

The Path to Profit

There are many reasons for an operation to pursue sales in service interactions.  Among the most compelling are improving revenue, marketing (building awareness around new products), offsetting the cost of service, and deepening customer relationships.  To successfully blend sales into service organizations operations must have the motivation, necessary tools, and a tactical plan. 

The Merced Systems 2008 Service-to-Sales Best Practice and Benchmarking Study, in conjunction with other industry research, identified three key themes of successful service-to-sales initiatives:

• Prepare for the change
  
• Organize for success
  
• Walk before you run

Prepping for the Change

In order to achieve the culture change necessary to successfully introduce sales into traditionally service-focused environments, an organization must start by reassessing current enterprise processes, metrics, and employee skills.  Changing both employee behavior and operational processes takes resources and patience.  So what are the key questions operations should consider when planning and strategizing a service-to-sales initiative? 

• What is your agent to supervisor ratio? 
  
• How are departments and individuals coached or developed? 
  
• Will current incentive and variable pay programs flex to address upcoming organizational and role changes? 
  
• Will current IT applications and agent desktop configurations meet future needs? 
  
• Is HR correctly profiling agents based on updated skill set requirements, and recruiting new employees to meet updated hiring profiles? 
  
• Are training and on boarding practices adequately bringing agents up to speed? 
  
• Are you communicating your "success criteria" and high-level operational goals and priorities to every role efficiently and effectively? 
  
• Are your metrics and methods for agent evaluation up to date and reflective of your overarching company goals and strategy? 

All of these are relevant questions to ask when preparing for a service-to-sales transition, but perhaps none is as important as, "are our employees ready?"  At the root of these questions is whether an organization has sufficiently prepared its employees for changes to come.  It is the executive's job to ensure that each department and each role is not only made aware of the transition, but also that each individual is educated on the value of the initiative, properly trained for any new responsibilities, and then incented and motivated to perform in his or her new role.  Without organization-wide buy-in and preparation, both employee and customer satisfaction will decline.

Organize for Success

The two most valuable resources operations executives have in deploying a successful service-to-sales initiative are their people and their technology.  Accordingly, transitioning formerly service-only agents to a blended service and sales environment requires retooling agent skill sets and supporting employees with the information and tools they need to succeed.

Front Line Training and Culture Transformation

First and foremost, agents must have the skills, knowledge, and motivation to approach their new blended roles.  Whereas customer service-focused reps are solely concerned with metrics such as average handle time and first call resolution, reps with dual service and sales roles are focused on managing customer service and quality levels with offers made and close rates.  To tackle this balancing act, operations must enable their traditionally service-oriented staff in their new positions as dual service-and-sales reps.

This entails such things as updating agent profiles and providing formal sales training - skills to close sales opportunities and to talk fluently on product or service promotions, refining hiring techniques and on boarding practices, adjusting training regimens and coaching methodology to attract and retain those most suited for a blended environment, updating metrics and evaluation criteria, and aligning incentive models and performance targets with updated enterprise goals, among others. 

Inevitably, some agents will pick up certain skills more quickly and fully than others, while still others will be unable to develop these new skills at all.  As a result, voluntary and involuntary agent attrition during a service and sales integration is common, if not expected.  To prepare for this, operations must adapt broad training and development techniques to their existing agent skill base in order to maximize the proportion of employees who successfully transition.

And finally, instilling a healthy sense of competition among an operation's front line will help to ingrain the business priorities of their new roles.  For example, one leading company posts its top twenty-five incentive payouts in a prominent place in the contact centre to create a culture of positive competition, motivate mid- and top-performers, and promote best practice sharing.

Supporting Technology

To balance core service productivity with revenue generation, operations must not only provide the front line with the necessary training, but must also ensure that their technological, financial, and support infrastructure is flexible and scalable enough to meet their transition needs. 

Pertinent questions include:

• Is performance data centralized and distributed to every employee in a timely manner? 
  
• How are incentives modeled, calculated, and delivered? 
  
• How are incentive disputes handled?
  
• Do agents in purely sales and blended sales and service roles have proper desktop tools? 
  
• Is there a coaching and development system in place that will ensure a successful and smooth transition? 
  
• Do executives have a high-level view into the performance of managers and supervisors?

At the root of culture and behavior change is empowering every role in the operation with a comprehensive, accurate, and timely view into their performance and their incentive compensation.  Through personalized incentive payment reports, dashboards, workflows, and performance alerts, agents can comprehend their strengths and weaknesses and take proactive and autonomous action to improve. 

Being able to align employee performance with high level organizational sales goals through competitive incentive plans is critical to improving the effectiveness and productivity of an operation as a whole.  Additionally, by standardizing sales performance metrics and targets against which all reps are measured, operations can not only recognize both stars and poor performers, but can also better determine how to elevate and motivate the mid-performers. 

Automating key operational processes, such as coaching and incentive compensation, not only reduces administrative burdens which frees up time for supervisors to spend developing reps and reduces the amount of time staff spends shadow accounting, but also offers a holistic view of both individual and operational performance and aligns individual performance with strategic company objectives. 

Walk before you Run

Because blending service and sales groups involves more than just implementing a few new tools - it involves agent behavior change, new skill adoption, and often implementing a new business strategy - it is important for an organization to take small, incremental and strategic steps towards this transition, ensuring that none of the 'growing pains' experienced during the transition is passed on to the customer.  Tactical considerations for a smooth transition include deciding on new or updated performance metrics and a financial model that is directly tied to the initiative's goals and success criteria. 

Choosing appropriate metrics and incentives, whether new or just revised, requires an operation's strategists to make realistic, building block goals for both employees and processes.  For example, it is critical to the success of the initiative that an operation not start with end-goal metrics and thresholds.  An operation that has just recently started integrating sales into its business model shouldn't immediately measure agents on a revenue-per-call metric if agents have only just begun selling on calls. 

Starting with activity-based metrics, such as offers-per-call, tied to monetary incentives, streamlines behavior in the right direction in the early stages of an initiative. Subsequently, at manageable intervals, organizations can add more advanced end-goal sales metrics into the mix as employee sales competencies expand, and as business plans are implemented.  Taking an incremental approach to introducing new metrics and incentive programs in conjunction with evolving business priorities will ensure that agents are ready to perform against critical performance targets when the initiative is fully implemented.

Additionally, an organization's financial model plays a key role in supporting a service-to-sales transformation.  At different stages in the evolution, an operation's service vs. sales threshold is different.  As reps' sales competencies grow, so too should the weight placed on sales vs. service.  The balance of service and sales activities must drive tactical decisions - both reps, on an individual basis, and executives need to understand and continually reassess how much time they can invest in "selling" in an interaction before service and customer satisfaction levels suffer. 

Conclusion

Service-to-sales campaigns unfortunately don't have a fixed roadmap, but they do have landmarks.  For as many operations that are planning or undergoing initiatives to integrate their service and sales environments, there are as many methodologies and approaches to a transition.  Therefore, in addition to making small organizational adjustments and taking intermediate steps towards blending service and sales, it is critical for a company to take a "test and learn" approach. 

For example, one of the nation's largest credit card and financial service provider created a "rapid cycle team" consisting of roughly ten outstanding sales reps in their contact centre, who take new sales scripts or new sales strategies and test them on a small subset of customers to evaluate the offer and identify objections.  This approach allows the company to refine its sales model and more accurately gauge how a certain product or promotion will play out before it is introduced into the broader market.     

Whether a company decides to roll out certain sales promotions or strategies to a small population of customers to test their viability, or whether a company incrementally implements a new incentive plan or strategy to the entire staff, an organization's biggest asset in incorporating sales into a service environment is its ability to assess progress and maneuver accordingly.  Often the challenges faced in implementing a service to sales initiative turn out to be valuable lessons learned.

Visit Merced Systems at www.mercedsystems.com