The Common Problems With Cross-Selling In Contact Centers, And What To Do About Them

Transcript

Hi there, this is Blair from BravaTrak.

I've been thinking further about the challenges you face with increasing revenue from your contact centers. For inbound service centers, the best revenue generation opportunity you have is cross-selling.

Agents think poorly of cross-selling

But as I've previously mentioned, the perception your agents hold of this activity has been tainted by their everyday experiences.

They buy a hamburger, and they're asked if they'd like fries with it. It feels like a hard sell. As a result, most agents are uncomfortable with cross-selling, because they don't like how it's done to them. There's a knock on effect, of course.

Most of your Team Leaders have been recruited internally. They used to be CSRs who were uncomfortable with cross-selling, and now you're asking them to coach their team members in the very same activity. Good luck with that.

So what's to be done?

Cognitive dissonance is stopping your agents from cross-selling

Well, we know from experience that when we behave in ways that are inconsistent with our beliefs, we feel uncomfortable. This is called 'cognitive dissonance'. So generally, people behave in accordance with their attitudes and beliefs.

If your frontline team members are uncomfortable with cross-selling, they're unlikely to attempt it unless forced to do so. What's not given enough attention though, is that if we can motivate people to behave in a certain way for a period of time, their attitudes and beliefs will change to align with their new behaviour.

How do you do that with cross-selling?

How do you motivate a customer to buy a product they do not know that they need?

Well, there are actually three things you can do. Number one is to reframe cross-selling from a hard sell to good service. The overlooked reality is that good selling is good service. It should be about fulfilling customer needs, rather than trying to persuade them to purchase something.

Number two is to provide new information. Your people are uncomfortable with cross-selling because they don't like how it's done to them. They remember their bad experiences. What they don't remember are the good experiences when it was done well. So, you need to let them know how to cross-sell correctly.

Number three is to ensure your team leaders are effective sales leaders, and are positively motivating their team members to take the right actions with their customers. They need to know, firstly, how to do this. And then secondly, they need to do it consistently.

These three simple actions can turn everything around. Of course, there's a bit of work to do. But, given you can readily double or even triple cross-sell revenue, it's well worth the effort.

That's my take. What do you think?