3 Challenges Holding Back Revenue In Your Inbound Service Centers

Transcript

Hi there, this is Blair from BravaTrak.

There’s Untapped Revenue Potential In Your Inbound Service Center

I've been thinking about what inbound service centres can do to increase revenue and achieve their sales growth targets. In my experience, inbound service centres have significant cross-selling opportunities, which mostly go untapped. Yet, with the right approach, it's possible to turn them from cost centres into revenue generators. Or even in some case, into profit centres.

To do so, there are 3 challenges to overcome.

Inbound Service: Not A Sales Environment In The Eyes Of Agents

The first is that agents in inbound service centres often don't consider themselves to be salespeople. After all, if they wanted a job in sales, they would have gone to work somewhere else. As a result, they're typically uncomfortable with selling, and regard it as pushy. I believe that this mindset is driven from personal experiences, in which they've experienced bad selling.

In my opinion, good selling is good service. Its purpose is to address a customer's need in an ethical manner, in order to provide the right outcome for the customer.

What's needed is an approach to cross-selling that CSRs can be comfortable with, because it approaches the issue from a service delivery and customer experience perspective, rather than a pushy sales perspective.

Team Leaders Have More Experience In Service, Not Sales

The second challenge is that most Team Leaders in inbound service centres have been promoted internally. So their mindset around selling is the same as their team members. And this presents 2 problems.

Firstly, as a rule, they are much more comfortable with coaching service delivery behaviours than they are coaching sales behaviours.

Secondly, they frequently don't know how to cross-sell well. Which means they don't have the sales competence to coach their team members.

Sales Leadership Is Lacking In Inbound Service

The third and final challenge to overcome is a lack of Team Leader competence in sales leadership. Which is hardly surprising if someone's career has been primarily in service rather than in sales.

The good news is that these challenges can be overcome, but it does take some effort and discipline to do so. Nevertheless, that effort is worthwhile, both for ensuring you are proactively meeting all of your customer's needs, and for increasing revenue generation for your business.

That's my take. What do you think?