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| Home - Industry Article - May 05 Issue |
Increasing Revenue This Quarter: 4 Pragmatic Strategies
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Lessons from the Real World
RightNow Support Staff Drives Highly Qualified and Targeted Leads to Sales
In addition to providing industry-leading CRM solutions, RightNow is also a world-class CRM practitioner with deep expertise in converting contact center interactions into highly qualified and targeted sales leads. As such, RightNow has generated substantial sales of training, additional interfaces and software customizations to existing customers via service and support interactions.
Over the years, RightNow has learned many important lessons about effectively driving leads from the contact center. For one thing, it’s important to focus on having support staff spot specific types of sales opportunities, such as knowledge base administrator training or ODBC connectivity. This focus enables support staff to more effectively generate leads without distracting them from their primary mission. It’s also important to ask customers several qualifying questions, including the most important one: “Can someone call you to talk more about this?” Confirmation of the customer’s level of interest is a vital step in ensuring the value of the lead.
RightNow takes advantage of its integrated CRM environment to send sales reps the full record of the specific incident during which the customer expressed interest in the offer, ensuring the sales rep understands the full context in which the offer was originally made.
“Salespeople are most effective when they get fully qualified leads and clearly understand exactly what the customer’s real business need is,” says director of technical support Rob Irizarry. “RightNow’s contact center is highly adept at delivering both qualified leads and that clarity of understanding—which, in turn, has empowered sales to generate more incremental revenue from our installed customer base.”
Strategy 4: Contact Center Transactions
In this last strategy, your customer service representatives qualify leads and actually complete the transaction. This strategy is particularly appropriate for “impulse” buys that customers are willing to put on their credit cards without too much thought—as opposed to more considered purchases, which will more likely lend themselves to the lead referral strategies described above.
For example, an appliance manufacturer can “flag” all customers whose service contracts expire in the next 60 days. Whenever any of those customers call with a question, the customer service representative can offer them an extension of their contract.
Similarly, many cellphone companies have implemented a process by which their customer service agents will up-sell customers who have gone over their allotted monthly minutes to a higher-end calling plan. This can actually improve customer satisfaction and loyalty while it locks in higher revenue for the company.
This type of strategy requires a bit more investment by the customer service department. Service reps have to be provided with the necessary offer/qualification information on their desktops, and may even require complete sales scripts for certain types of offers. They also have to be given the tools necessary to complete transactions—including access to credit card authorization systems.
Typically, these offers will be defined by the marketing department, which will define appropriate qualifying criteria such as the customer’s past purchase history or demographics.
In addition to technically enhancing the contact center environment, you’ll have to make certain changes in the way you manage customer service. Incentives, for example, will probably have to be re-structured in some ways, so that your staff can take the time necessary to work their way through the selling process. Performance bonuses may, therefore, be based on number of sales closed or the dollar volume of those sales, in addition to typical contact center metrics such as number of calls handled and first-call resolution rates.
It’s also important to note that customer service professionals often prove to be very adept at this type of consultative selling. The same qualities that make them good at resolving service issues—patience, subject-matter expertise and problem-solving skills—translate very well into these types of transactions. Given the right offers and the right tools, they can, therefore, be very effective salespeople.
With this strategy, your customer service department will directly and independently generate quantifiable revenue, improving the company’s overall business performance and enhancing the service department’s strategic position. As service agents become more adept at selling—and as you learn what kinds of sales opportunities can most efficiently be capitalized upon during service interactions—the amount of revenue generated in this manner will continue to grow. Ultimately, this will result in customer service becoming a true profit center.
Lessons from the Real World
Government Agency Empowers Service Reps to Sell
In the past, this government agency ran a very “stovepiped” contact center for its constituents. Service reps only answered customer questions; sales staff took phone and online orders.
But now, the agency has empowered its service agents to take orders too. So when customers call to inquire about a specific document or to find out what resources are available to meet their particular needs, service agents can do more than just answer their questions. They can also take the customers’ credit card information and complete the transaction.
This benefits the agency in two ways. First, it has led to additional sales volume of at least 10 percent. Second, it has significantly reduced the cost of sales by eliminating the need to take a separate call in another area of the contact center.
The new system also improves the customer experience by making the agency more efficient and responsive, which also has a positive impact on total sales volume.
Four Steps to Revenue Generation
Many customer service departments are actively implementing one or more of the strategies outlined in this paper—enabling their companies to achieve healthy growth in the face of challenging market conditions and intense competition.
If you’d like your customer service department to make these same contributions to your company’s performance, then consider taking the following steps:
Define your strategy
The first step in creating a revenue-generating customer service organization is to determine which strategy or strategies are most applicable to your business today. Some organizations start with the simplest approaches, and build from there. Others are more aggressive, and launch major initiatives that have customer service agents taking credit card orders from the very beginning. It’s also a good idea to zero in on the types of opportunities and offers that make the most sense. Does your company have accessories and add-ons that lend themselves to service-driven sales? Are you in a competitive market where discounting is a useful tactic? Is a primary objective to increase the number of customers participating in an existing loyalty program? By answering these questions, you can make sure your revenue strategy starts off with the right focus and objectives.
Assess your technology needs
Customer service departments are most effective at generating revenue when they have the right technology. To provide the customer data necessary to fulfill an aggressive mining strategy, for example, it’s vital to have a CRM system in place that captures relevant information across all communication channels. To ensure leads generated by a real-time referral strategy are utilized to maximum effect, integration between your contact center system and your sales management system is essential.
Prepare your staff
While significant revenue opportunities can be driven by customer service departments without any staffing changes whatsoever, companies seeking to maximize top-line gains typically wind up modifying their training and hiring practices to one degree or another. Hiring practices, for example, may shift as you start looking for people who have good problem-solving skills and some evidence of sales aptitude. Supplemental training may also be required to help staff recognize lead opportunities and/or to teach them how to close transactions. Again, the extent of these changes will depend largely on the specific strategy you implement and the aggressiveness of your initiative.
Restructure your incentives
As noted earlier, revenue-producing customer service departments have to be managed differently from conventional cost centers. One common change is incentive structure. Before implementing a revenue strategy, customer service departments typically focus on metrics such as talk-times and first-call resolution rates. When revenue generation becomes part of the picture, however, you’ll probably want to add incentives based on lead generation or the dollar-volume of completed transactions. These new incentives don’t replace your old ones, since the quality and efficiency of customer care will remain a top priority. But you should restructure incentives to support whatever revenue strategy you put in place.
Because revenue generation is a new territory for many customer service departments, it may also be advisable to enlist an experienced partner to assist you with your implementation. Such a partner can help you benefit from lessons learned at other organizations that have adopted similar strategies—and avoid the mistakes that others have made. With that assistance, you can keep your revenue initiative on track and start impacting your company’s top-line performance much more quickly.
Getting Started
Your customer service department represents a tremendous untapped source of revenue opportunities for your company. Every day your customers contact you by phone, email and the web. With the right strategy, you can convert these potential opportunities into real revenue.
Customer service managers have to take concrete steps to transform their departments from pure cost centers into revenue-generating operations. These steps include the targeting of specific revenue opportunities, the implementation of supporting technologies, and the appropriate adjustment of management policies.
Once these steps are taken, your company can experience the same benefits as Skechers, British Airways, RightNow Technologies, the Government Printing Office and so many others. You too can substantially improve your company’s top-line business performance by generating more sales from your existing customers. You’ll also help to grow revenue by deepening your engagement with your customers and reducing abandonment rates for your online channels.
We encourage you to begin this process by evaluating your current contact center environment and initiating internal discussions about how your organization could implement one or more of the revenue-generation strategies outlined in this paper. We also encourage you to contact us if you’d like more insight about how other companies have succeeded with their initiatives.
Greg is CEO of RightNow Technologies . He is an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year recipient, has published two books and is a frequent speaker. Greg holds a BE in electrical engineering and an MS in computer science from Stevens Institute of Technology. He can be reached for article feedback at: grg@rightnow.com
 
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