Click Image to Enlarge | Drivers of Sales Performance

Many SEC members have been asking us how to get their contact center staff to up-sell and cross-sell customers while they’re on the phone with them.  For the most part, this interest is driven by a desire to allow the field sales organization to focus on more complex selling activities by getting other, lower-cost, channels focused on the transactional sales.  

But a huge majority of these same members report that they struggle to make headway and that these efforts to turn the contact center into a sales channel end up stalling out.  

SEC’s sister program, the Customer Contact Council, recently looked at the best levers for getting service reps to up-sell and cross-sell.  Their study of 1300+ contact center reps across more than 50 companies helps explain why most companies stumble in their efforts to drive sales through the contact center. 

The two big reasons are:

1) Sales productivity is driven by a different set of levers in the contact center: Senior leaders tend to think that the two most important levers to pull in building sales capabilities are to build a sales culture/environment in the contact center and to increase the organization’s emphasis on monetary rewards. 

The CCC’s research, however, shows that the “sales culture” effect is nominal, at best.  Meanwhile, an over-emphasis on monetary incentives can actually harm sales performance for customer service reps.   Read More »