Call Center Excellence: Managing the Cultural Shift of Converting Service Channels Into Sales Channels

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Faced with escalating market demands to produce greater returns from existing corporate assets, executives at leading Fortune 500 organizations are increasingly turning to traditional service channels and converting them into high performance sales channels. World-class companies that have successfully transformed long-established service operations, such as call centers, into service-and-sales operations can expect revenue growth rates in excess of 100% per year, even in mature markets, according to research from consulting firm Best Practices, LLC.

A complementary white paper, “Contact Centers: Managing the Service-to- Sales Cultural Transformation,” is available at http://www3.best-in-class.com/rr606.ad , and offers insights regarding how top-level companies such as Wells Fargo, Sprint, Carlson Leisure and GE Finance drive sales by empowering service representatives to cross-sell and up-sell.

Research findings — collected from executive interviews and surveys — provide a detailed blueprint of how successful organizations manage the service-to-sales shift:

1. TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP: Deliver an integrated transformation message that explicitly communicates the purpose and importance of the service-to-sales shift. Senior executives must be available to assist call center managers to communicate important messages at strategic junctures during the service-to-sales transformation process.

2. TRAINING AND CONTROL: Train customer service managers and supervisors before commencing the transition to a sales-oriented system and allocate resources to reduce the span of control in the initial phases of the service-to-sales transformation. Benchmark partners found that spans of control need to be reduced by as much as 50% for the initial implementation phases.

3. PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT AND INCENTIVES: Design a performance management system to focus on operational visibility and structure incentives to align representative selling behavior with the organization’s business goals. The most effective rewards are not always monetary incentives; in fact, public recognition of performance was found to be highly motivating for top performing sales representatives.

4. ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE: Continually refine organizational structure — approach structural changes in incremental steps and pilot new arrangements of people and functions before large-scale implementations.

For other insights, visit our website at http://www3.best-in-class.com/rr606.ad and download a white paper. To consult with our expert and assess ways your company can better integrate and implement best practice initiatives or assist with service-to-sales organizational transformation planning, contact Mark Schoeman at mschoeman@best-in-class.com or 919-767-9258.