Home | Customer Perspectives | Technology Perspectives | Best Practices | News   NICE Tips: Using Customer Analytics to Improve Cross-selling/Upselling Excerpts from article originally published in November 2005 issue of Customer Inter@ctions Solutions Magazine The Evolving Role of the Contact Center Organizations 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 upselling 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 - with the contact center becoming a core, strategic operation that can contribute to enterprise goals for profitability and the bottom line. The Challenges of Cross-selling/Upselling Although organizations realize that cross-selling/upselling 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. Rather, many perceive upselling or cross-selling as requiring a total behavior change -- a change that does not correlate with the perception of their jobs. Furthermore, with selling skills perceived as far removed from supporting capabilities, agents may fear failure with this new task. This results in a reluctance to learn selling strategies and tactics and engage in the cross/upselling programs. 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, in figuring out what offerings they need to design and how agents need to communicate them to ensure high closing rates. Many organizations will conduct surveys and hold focus groups to estimate the optimal mix. But they rarely receive enough direct customer feedback to be certain that the services and products that are being offered are the right ones at the right time for the right customers. The agent, however, does receive direct customer feedback on a daily basis. 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 upselling. But unfortunately, this information rarely gets the attention and analysis it deserves. Analytics and Agent Cross/Upsell Skills When converting service thinkers to sales successes, the benefits to the agent should be communicated. The opportunity to engage in cross/upselling programs provides additional function and variety to the scope of their job, 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/upselling 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. 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 an opportunity arose and whether 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 make sure whether "buy again" signified an up-sell opportunity (customer: "I will want to buy again") vs. 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. If indeed "buy again" signified a sales opportunity, focused, as opposed to random, monitoring along with analytics can spot the call and reveal whether the agent addressed all of the required issues and communicated the specific messages, words and phrases. Analytics and Designing Cross/Upsell Programs Integrated analytics is vital to supporting the marketing department in designing cross-sell/upsell 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. Summary Leveraging analytics as a means to improve cross-sell and upsell effectiveness is emerging as a substantial competitive advantage in motivating agents and empowering marketing departments with critical customer insights. Integrated customer interactions analytics enables the contact center to become a cross-selling and upselling success, and consequently a core, strategic operation that can contribute to profitability and the bottom line.     Leveraging analytics as a means to improve cross-sell and upsell effectiveness is emerging as a substantial competitive advantage in motivating agents and empowering marketing departments with critical customer insights.
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