Writing a Plan of Action

[sky_lennard]

Hello,

I am starting a project per request from my president - he wants me to submit a plan of action for transitioning our 100% customer service call center into a 50/50 customer service/sales environment. While I have a lot of experience in sales and customer service individually, this is the first time I have had an opportunity to develop a center and tranisition from one to the other. Can anyone give me some tips on writing this type of action plan, including tips on some challenges I can expect to encounter in doing this?

Thanks!!

[Martijn]

Hi,

our call center has changed in the last few years from a service to a service/sales center (first we service the client and then we try to sell him products which are in the interest of the client). I don't have the initial action plan, but the biggest challenge is: making your agents change from pure service to seeing oppurtinities for sales. This is a totally different world of calls, some might have no problem with switching others might need a lot of training.

I think the agents are the most important part. A few others to take into account:
- Your AHT might go up, because after you service the client you have to sell him something. This means you need a bigger pool of agents to get the same servicelevel.
- You need a good, reliable system in which you register the agents sales. Because if you wan't to go into sales you need to make sales a PI of the agents.

These are just a few things we encountered. Hope this helps.

[Kepe]

Some key things I think is to:

* look at individual skills and use skill based routing so customer segments with high rate of up/X-sell opportunity is routed to the best sales reps. while customers who have all products/subscriptions are routed to more service skilled reps.

* start bonus initiatives to promote sales on inbound calls

* If you have a softphone or equal. Display the number of sales made during the day in real-time. Each time an agent wrap-up a call with a sale add to the on-screen sales counter for example.

* look at the call monitoring evaluations and include several things to monitor related successful sales.

* Evaluate which customer segment is likely to buy which products and implement traning, design special offers and set-up automated rekommendations that the agents get screen-poped at call arrival.

* After a short focus period you will find that you more than doubbled the sale per incoming call volume and that the there are a huge difference between best and worst performers. When you got the statistics you want to evaluate why some agents sell better than others and try to find success factors to duplicate etc. etc.

I've seen inbound operations that gone from 1-2 percent sales in incoming calls to sales in the range 6-12 percent. Bonus, individual follow-up, segmentation, sales training, special offers, right person on the right skill etc. is all key.

There is much more to it but I hope you can use some of this to put in to your plan.