Contact Centre Actively Promoting Sales

Sales instead of costs: Would it not be beneficial if you could improve both your sales and contribution margins in the service centre while maintaining your good service level at the same time? Read here how this can be implemented fast and simple.

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Contact centre actively promoting sales

Contact centre actively promoting sales: How do I turn my customer service from a cost factor into a sales generator?

Your service centre has been a cost factor for many years? And it is becoming larger from year to year? Besides, the service levels can hardly be maintained with the present staffing? And the management would like it best if the hotline extended its business hours? It’s high time to finally generate sales with your customer service!

FROM MISS

TO LAY-UP

How do I turn my service centre into a profit centre?

Service centres are the central interface between your company and the customer where all customer experiences come together each day. The majority of inbound call centres today are still being run as cost centres. The faster a customer problem is resolved the lower are the costs. The criteria underlying this business model are:

„First-time solution rate“
Average call length
Availability
Rate of response
Number of accepted calls

Thus, questions are concerned such as: Which portion of the queries can be answered directly without forwarding them to the “2nd level support” or the technical field force? How quickly could the customer be helped?

The result from this perspective: each customer contact is a “bother” instead of an opportunity to generate sales. The service centre meanwhile can contribute quite a bit to sales growth and customer loyalty when it is run as a profit centre. For example, by means of active cross and upselling, in the traditional service talk with the customer.

How can I recognise cross and upselling potentials?

You can roughly systematise the starting points for cross and upselling when speaking with the customer:

Business case of the contact centre actively promoting sales: How does this become worthwhile?

We have the following assumptions for this business case and respectively work with the following experience values from our practice:

The average processing time of an inbound call in the contact centre is 5 minutes.
80% of the calls should be answered within 20 seconds.
For productivity, we assume 60%.
We receive 32 inbound calls per employee and day and estimate that in these 32 calls, up or cross-selling offers can be made in only 10% of the cases. We also assume that of these offers, in turn, 25% will lead to a closing.
With an average sales revenue of EUR 1,000, each employee of the office staff actively promoting sales would therefore earn EUR 800 in sales per day in this example.

32 calls x 10% offers (=3.2) x 25% closings = 0.8 orders. These x EUR 1000 = EUR 800 per day per agent
Projected over a month, in which we expect about 560 inbound calls on average, this would be EUR 14,000 up or cross-selling sales per employee.

Depending on the contribution margin, a significant portion of the personnel costs is therefore earned from the generated sales. With high contribution margins above 40%, even a profit can be earned with this.

How do I integrate the contact centre actively promoting sales into my sales process?

The business model that is oriented on generating sales and fostering customer loyalty of the sales-oriented contact centre directly leads to a different perspective: Here, the calling customer is no longer a “bother.” He does not cause costs. Instead, almost every time a customer gets in touch, a new opportunity arises to generate sales and contribute to the company’s success. The more customers call, the more possibilities are offered to recognise and satisfy new need.

The “sales gene” is required.

Employees in traditional inbound centres are typically specialists in their area. The organisation of an actively selling contact centre, in contrast, requires employees who have such a “sales gene”, thus an affinity for sales. This means that these employees still always have to have technical competence but they also need to be oriented on generating sales and have a talent for sales.

SWEAT IT OUT YOURSELF?

OR HAVE OTHERS DO THAT?

Contact centre actively promoting sales: Operate it yourself or outsource it?

The central factors in organising a sales-oriented contact centre are the selection of the right employees and the change of targets or key performance indicators toward the new sales tasks. If these factors are implemented correctly, it is possible to organise a contact centre for B2B sales, which does not cause any costs. This can be organised as an internal or external solution.

Internal

Companies that have managed their call centre internally so far can remodel it into a call centre actively promoting sales. As decision-maker, you foremost need the necessary feel here for which of the existing employees have the “sales gene” and how you then reorganise your process world to get the right spirit and achieve process reliability.

External

It is often easier for companies, which have external call centres handle their inbound calls, to take the step and become a sales-oriented contact centre while they can frequently realise the additional sales quicker with proactive up and cross-selling.

But also the step from a presently purely internal solution to an external solution can be well planned and realised. When engaging an external service provider, you will have its process and solution competence available right away. Moreover, you have access at any time through your sales service provider to the “right” kind of employees, as the service provider leads them through the various stages of its recruitment process on a daily basis. The service provider will normally implement the set targets more effectively than an internal service provider does, because the internal service provider is often used additionally for other “services,” which have little to do with the actual task on hand.

Would you like to find out more about the possibilities of an external implementation of a contact centre actively promoting sales?

We have the right contact partners for you:

Christian Soller

Sales Consultant
Vertrieb

Tel.: +49 911 6602 147
E-mail: christian.soller@suxxeed.de

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