Using Customer Analytics to Improve Cross/Up-selling
1 Sep, 2007
By: Robin SchafferOrganizations have realized that growing a business and winning sales in a fiercely competitive environment requires proactive programs to drive revenue. With the contact center serving as a strategic focal point and hub for thousands of customer interactions that can be converted into sales, its role is undergoing a revolution. Through successful cross-selling and up-selling the contact center is helping to drive revenue. The result is that the traditional view of the contact center as a cost center is increasingly being replaced with the realization that it is a profit center.
The Challenges of Cross-selling / Up-selling
Although organizations realize that cross-selling/up-selling strategies are essential to generating new revenue, contact center managers are having a hard time introducing this concept to employees who were originally hired and trained to focus on service. Encouraging agents to recommend related products and/or upgraded services during inbound calls is no easy task.
Too often, when managers try to convert their service thinkers into sales successes, they are met with resistance. Customer support and revenue responsibilities are perceived by many agents as mutually exclusive. They don’t always see that offering the right products or better price plans to customers constitutes good service. Consequently, managers are faced with the challenge of providing their agents both with the motivation to sell and with the individualized coaching required to hone the skills that enable them to do so successfully.
Another challenge is faced by the marketing department is figuring out what offerings they need to design and how agents need to communicate them to ensure high closing rates. However, agents receive direct customer feedback on a daily basis, and with up to a million calls (or more) coming into a contact center every year, agents receive critical, indispensable feedback about the issues that matter most to customers: product features, service requirements, spending patterns and competitive offerings. Contact centers have the potential to listen to these customers and gain insight into customer intent and into what kind of offering is most likely to generate revenue and translate these insights into successful cross-selling and up-selling. Unfortunately, this information rarely gets the attention and analysis it deserves.
Analytics and Agent Cross/Up-sell Skills
For agents to be best positioned to leverage on cross/up-sell opportunities, they need to be able to handle blended service, support and sales interactions to drive revenue and profit - in addition to delivering world-class service.
First and foremost, when converting service thinkers to sales successes, the benefits to the agent should be communicated. The opportunity to engage in cross/up-selling programs provides additional function and variety to the scope of their jobs, and learning and succeeding with a new skill is a career development opportunity. This also benefits the contact center by improving agent retention, with greater job variety and skills development contributing to higher retention rates.
Next, a cross/up-selling training program should be developed to equip agents with the knowledge and skills needed to recognize and capitalize on revenue opportunities. The program will help agents who have been focused on customer service overcome apprehensions about selling.
Once these preliminary steps are accomplished, improving cross/up-sell success greatly relies on a contact center’s ability to go beyond such introductory training and provide ongoing, targeted coaching to continually improve the agent’s sales performance. Making critical information on best practices or new campaigns always accessible, and tailoring such information to the specific skill-set of an individual agent, is critical to ongoing cross/up-sell success.
When analytics-driven agent coaching is fully integrated with the contact center’s interactions capture and quality monitoring solution, agent sales performance can be maximized. With such a solution supervisors can gain a better and fuller picture of whether or not an opportunity arose and whether or not the agent handled it optimally. For example, word spotting will pick up on signifiers such as “buy again.” Furthermore, a sophisticated solution can also detect whether the phrase was mentioned by the agent or the customer. This enables the supervisor to make sure whether “buy again” signified an up-sell opportunity (customer: “I will want to buy again”) versus a routine sales pitch (agent: “would you like to buy again?”). Integration makes this possible by separately capturing the customer and agent sides of the interaction and performing independent audio processing for each. Separate capture and analysis also helps determine if the agent talked over the customer – alerting the supervisor to a coaching need.
If indeed “buy again” signified a sales opportunity, focused, as opposed to random, monitoring along with analytics can spot the call and reveal if the agent addressed all of the required issues and communicated the specific messages, words and phrases. Being able to hone-in on the specific calls enables supervisors to proactively identify which agent behaviors are leading to higher closing rates.
Since successful selling also hinges on asking relevant questions to better identify and offer products or services that meet customers’ needs, supervisors can set up a lexicon (a compilation of words and phrases) to hone-in on and flag relevant customer interactions that contain specific words or phrases. For example, “do you need” is a potential opener for the sales dialog. If a supervisor notes that an agent does not use this phrase with the required frequency, further coaching can help motivate the agent toward greater initiative. Or, if a supervisor notes that each time a customer said “upgrade” or “would you like to hear,” a particular agent closed a sale, then this agent could be rewarded for initiative. Moreover, this agent’s strategies and tactics could be presented to the rest of the team in a best practices session. Integration can take this one step further and correlate identified calls to agent screen activity along with customer feedback, providing a 360 degree view of why the customer did or did not buy.
For agents -- integrated coaching is empowering. And empowerment is vital to sales initiative and success, and more broadly – to agent retention.
Analytics and the Customer’s Intent to Buy
Gauging customer responsiveness is critical to understanding both agent effectiveness in cross/up-selling and whether the offering designed by marketing is what customers need to hear in order to buy. Multi-dimensional analytics, word spotting along with emotion detection, screen activity and agent coaching, help managers accurately gauge and qualify responsiveness, identify the conditions that stimulate the customer’s intent to buy and leverage these insights to improve agent cross/up-selling performance.
With emotion detection, even if word-spotting did not flag a call because the call did not contain any key words or phrases, a relevant call will not be missed and will be flagged to managers. What makes a call relevant is heightened emotion. Emotion detection reveals whether the caller expressed delight or disappointment and sheds light on what the agent may have said to prompt such a reaction.
Furthermore, with analytics integrated into the interactions capture and monitoring solution supervisors can correlate specific calls to a feedback IVR survey system, which incorporates post-call IVR surveys and links the results to actual call recordings. This kind of correlation enables managers to calibrate in-house quality monitoring scores with customer feedback scores. The insights gained provide a true 360-degree view of customer interactions and shed light on whether the offering has a viable buying audience and whether the agent is communicating the offering with the optimal sales pitch.
By integrating word spotting, emotion detection, agent coaching, screen activity and customer feedback organizations can extend the information available to them from transactional, structured data with insight derived from unstructured multimedia data sources. A holistic approach to analytics provides critical marketing intelligence for better-informed analysis on customer-buying trends and improved targeted sales and marketing campaigns.
Analytics and Designing Cross/Up-sell Programs
Integrated analytics is vital to supporting the marketing department in designing cross-sell/up-sell programs through insights that are extracted directly from customer interactions.
For example, the marketing department of a North American health insurance services provider wanted to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign for a new drug discount program. The company’s marketing analysts received input directly from customer interactions that were generated in the contact center, and that were flagged through word spotting as containing feedback on the new program. This feedback enabled the department to assess the campaign’s effectiveness and fine-tune the way agents communicated the sales pitch.
To improve cross/up-sell results even more, it wanted to compile as much competitive information as possible. Integrated analytics enabled it to pinpoint and listen to calls where competitor names were mentioned. Gaining insights on competitive offerings and pricing models had a direct impact the product mix. And with integrated coaching it was able to communicate directly with agents and push regular updates to their desktop.
Summary
Leveraging analytics as a means to improve cross-sell and up-sell effectiveness is emerging as a substantial competitive advantage. Integrated customer interactions analytics enables the contact center to become a cross-selling and up-selling success, and consequently a core, strategic operation that can contribute to profitability and the bottom line.
