Contact Centers Have Great Profit-Making Potential
August 06, 2008
By conducting sales, contact centers boost revenue
By Jonathan Tannenbaum
How do you transform your contact center into a profit-making machine? There's a clear answer: Have your customer service representatives (CSRs) conduct sales functions. After all, they interact with customers all the time, so why not capitalize on this fact? In fact, many of today's top companies possess contact centers that excel both in selling accessories and upgrades, and it's a big reason these organizations stand above everyone else.
Aberdeen Group, a Massachusetts-based technology company, recently released research that sheds light on how these best-in-class firms realize the potential of their contact centers, implementing solutions and policies usually unfound at inferior businesses. Conducted in April and May of 2008, Aberdeen's study draws on answers from over 140 companies and describes how leading organizations are maintaining their competitive advantage by utilizing technology, and providing training and knowledge-support so their CSRs can handle high-level sales responsibilities.
Aberdeen employed three measurements to evaluate company performance. For each business, Aberdeen analyzed the number of sales made after the initial one and the percent of customers retained, as well as the cost of contacting customers. Using these benchmarks, Aberdeen found that most best-in-class companies (those in the top 20% of performers) do well in all these areas. Additionally, it was found that:
• 86% have additional sales greater than $20,
• 84% have customer retention greater than 50%
• 59% see their costs with contacts at less than $10.
In sharp contrast, middle and lower-tier companies never have additional sales greater than $20 and generally pay more for interactions with customers. In fact, companies in the bottom 30% of the performance scale never have a cost-per-contact less than $10.
Top organizations achieve these superior results largely because they make better use of technology. Premier firms use analytics solutions, knowledge management and e-learning more often than other businesses.
Discussing the importance of these devices, Aberdeen's research associate, Steven Lawrence, says that "There's no doubt these solutions help companies sell. Best-in-class companies use analytics, e-learning, and knowledge management so they can float to the top. In our benchmarks, we find that 57% of those best-in-class who have not adopted it yet, will adopt e-learning.'
Noting the particular usefulness of e-learning, Lawrence says that the solution "offers a cost-effective process that helps contact centers achieve standardization with their processes and practices."
To go along with making better use of technology, best-in-class companies outperform their rivals because they more frequently give CSRs the knowledge and power they need to effectively carry out sales, with 57% providing CSRs access to sales experts for informal training and 57% providing CSRs the authority to decide when to make a sale.
That said, however, Lawrence notes that firms across the spectrum often fail to implement one of the most important areas when developing their capacity to deliver sales: "providing CSRs 24/7 access to data."
He says that such access "helps to resolve the issue of data access inequality that occurs when agents are dispersed across different locations and work different shifts. With around the clock access all agents will have the right data to resolve customer issues or take advantage of cross-sell or up-sell opportunities.”
For more information or to obtain a copy of the report, visit www.aberdeen.com.
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