Call Center Sales

[Moderator]

I'm looking for information about call centers, and how a service call can be converted to a sales call. Is it done with the same person receiving the call, or does the call get transferred to another person with a different set of skills(sales vs. service)? Is anyone doing this? Thanks.

(Previously posted on the old Forum - Moderator)

[Jason Crew]

Hello:

This is normally done in direct response and called an "up-sell". If you are looking for a professional center to provide this type of service please contact me and I will provide you with a company that has a combined 100 years of exp. within the executive team. I can also provide you with a top notch media buyer...


Have a Great Day!

J. Crew- esko71@chilitech.net

[Ian Alexander]

That's a tricky one...

Turning a support call into a sales call, is really just a simple matter of effective word choice. Maintain control of the call, and "guide" them into sales by positive word choice. If they called you, that means they're already interested.

[mlehet]

Our Call Center was recently divided into two groups: Sales & Service. We also added an AVR system so that when someone calls they get the option to press 1 for sales or 2 for service.

if someone "starts" as a service call and then wants to buy something, we usually have the agents continue with the process (versus transferring them to the sales dept.) But if someone just presses 2 to go to Service and it's a Sales issue we'll transfer to the Sales Dept.

If someone "starts" as a Sales Call, we have the agent complete the call and then transfer them to the Service Dept.

The Service Dept can do things that the Sales Dept can't do and vice versa, but there are some issues that both can handle (i.e. tracking numbers, checking on orders, etc.)

The policy we've put in place is to handle the call as best seen, if you have to transfer a call and the caller is upset, finish it yourself, take all the necessary information and then forward to a manager.

We've seen a great response from this split, call times have gone down, ASA has gone down, and most importantly Abandoned Calls have gone down!

[cjw17]

We've done it both ways. Right now, service people transfer sales inquiries to sales specialists, who definitely have a different skill set than our best service people. However, our service people were selling very successfully last year. They'd satisfy the initial inquiry, then bridge into the sales opportunity. We put together a whole list of "bridging" questions. For example, a client calls to give us an address change. We process the request, & then bridge into a product or service for someone who is moving. We have decided that the focus on sales was hurting the quality of customer service our CSRs were providing. They would sometimes rush through the service inquiry to get to the sale (which they were incented for). Also, our talktime was cut in half when we stopped selling.

[global crm]

We have been servicing our clients in this type of environment. It cost too much to have a separate department to handle customer service and sales calls.

It is much more cost effective to maintain highly skilled CSR's to handle a multi task environment versus, dividing into multiple groups.

Training is very imprtant. We have a diversified training program that helps our agents handle multi task environments and incentive programs to encourage up sells as well as cross sells.