As contact centre and customer experience operations become increasingly multi-faceted, there’s a real call for multi-skilled agents to perform a variety of duties. Whether that’s handling multiple customer or prospect enquiries, or identifying opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell. Here are our top 5 tips to help turn your customer service agents into more effective sales people.
1. Get recruitment right from the outset
To turn customer service agents into truly effective sales people, it is important to consider the bigger picture. Recruitment lies at the heart of this. Spend some time thinking about the type of people who will fit culturally both into your desired team and the overall company structure. Craft a job description and character specification that accurately meets the demands of your role. Ideally, they should have some previous account management or telemarketing experience. Interviews will play a crucial part in establishing if they are the right candidate for you. Include some role-play activities to explore how each candidate approaches and develops relationship-building. This will help you to assess in a real-time situation how effective they could be at selling. Don’t just trust what their CV says!
2. use gamification to incentivise the team
Targets and pipeline reviews are a key function of any good sales team, so consider making it par for the course with your customer service team too. Incentivise staff to hit targets and drive growth for your organisation by using gamification. This encourages healthy and fun competition amongst agents and teams and keeps the mood positive and optimistic rather than overwhelming. Continue to mix things up so it’s not a repetitive or sedentary methodology. Gamification can make even the most mundane or challenging tasks more interesting, so even if you’re working to a tight budget, it’s well worth getting hold of a whiteboard and getting some chocolate digestives in!
3. ditch emails and encourage chat
Emails are great, but it’s hard to develop quality, long-lasting relationships via an exchange of faceless emails. Good sales rely on great relationships, so one path to success is to ensure that your team aren’t scared to pick up the phone and hold a meaningful conversation with a customer or prospect (something to establish at recruitment stage). Multiple telephone or face-to-face conversations will proffer more insights than a volley of emails which will help your agents identify further opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling - and vastly outweigh the value of a day’s worth of emails.
4. Ask for referrals
Seeking referrals from existing customers is a great way to sell more of your product or service. This is another benefit that comes from developing great relationships, so it could be worth considering incentivising this behaviour amongst your team. There’s always somebody who knows someone else who was after your product or service and word of mouth is the most powerful recommendation.
5. Turn complaints into opportunities
This is the holy grail of customer service complaint resolution - converting an unhappy or negative call into a cross-sell or up-sell opportunity. If something goes wrong and a customer has cause for complaint, train your team to really listen and thoroughly investigate the cause of that complaint with a sense of compassion and humility. Once the error has been (hopefully) rectified, it’s time to start looking at ways in which you can improve the overall service to that customer. Hang on to team members who can do this, and commend them for their great work.