How Do Contact Centers Increase Sales?

Transcript

Hi there, this is Blair from BravaTrak.

I've been thinking further about how contact centres can increase revenue and achieve their sales growth targets.

The Drivers Of Sales In Inbound Contact Centers

For inbound service centres, cross-selling and lead generation are the key drivers of sales revenue. While for inbound sales and retention centres, the drivers are conversion rate and customer save rate.

The performance potential you have available to you in these metrics is likely to be dramatic. For example, the average difference in sales conversion rate between agents in the bottom 25% of performance, and those in the top 25% - in the very same contact centre - can be as high as 230%. And it can be much, much higher for cross-sales and lead generation.

How To Calculate The Sales Potential Of Your Contact Centers

But, how much of this potential can you tap? The easy way to calculate the potential available to you, is to identify 2 numbers for each of the metrics which drive revenue. Those numbers are

  1. The average performance across your agents, and;

  2. The performance at the 75th percentile, which is the level of performance being achieved or exceeded by your top 25% of agents.

Let's say, by way of example, that for a particular product or service, the average conversion rate across all your agents is 33%. While at the 75th percentile, it is 41%. An achievable growth target would be to increase average performance to 41%, which would be 24% increase in sales conversion.

Sales Leadership: The Way To Increase Sales

To achieve that, you're going to have to identify what your high-performing agents are doing differently from the rest. And then you'll need to ensure you have a robust sales leadership system in place to encourage the consistent use of those behaviours by all your team members.

Now, of course, you can apply this approach to any of your performance measures, including non-sales measures. The key is understanding what your best people do, and then having a system in place to drive the use of those behaviours across all of your frontline teams.

Once you do, you'll tap the full potential available to you within a few short months.

That's my take. What do you think?