The only thing you need to crank up those call center sales is speed.
And it’s not just us saying this: 90% of customers agree quick responses are very important to them.
The reason? It’s pretty simple: people hate waiting.
If a customer is left waiting, and they have other options to choose from, they’re going to take one of those other options. Nothing kills a deal like wasted time.
This makes the relationship between fast customer service and sales clear—in order to boost sales, you need to take care of your customers not just accurately but quickly.
How to Align Your Sales Strategy Toward Speed
Customer satisfaction isn’t just about giving accurate responses and providing a pleasant call experience. These days, people are used to quick answers and instant gratification. There’s a ton of competition out there, and in order to stand out and win customers, you have to be both good and fast.
With that said, let’s not waste any time (pun intended) and get started with how to improve your call center sales strategy to increase speed.
1. Improve Call Center Workforce Management
This is pretty straightforward. Poor workforce management leads to sluggish processes and burnt-out employees. On the other hand, effective call center management breeds customer satisfaction and higher sales.
Call centers can only provide high-quality customer experiences when their management has a well-integrated system and properly trained agents.
This means you can’t simply hire new agents and expect them to perform well right off the bat.
Instead, aim to provide in-depth training and regular coaching sessions to ensure agents know how to handle unexpected situations.
You’ll also want to create a readily available internal knowledge base and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). This provides your agents with the resources they need so they’re not continually pausing calls to ask questions.
You can also ensure successful workforce management by:
- Using an automated system to route queries to agents that can best handle them.
- Providing agents with the resources and tools they need to improve work processes and streamline workflow.
- Integrating a Customer Relation Management (CRM) system so that agents have customers’ purchase and call history right at their fingertips.
By optimizing your workforce management, you can better equip your sales reps with the knowledge and resources they need to be productive, helpful, and fast.
And that can only have a positive impact on not just sales but overall customer retention.
2. Maintain Call Center Service Levels
A call center’s service level is its measurable service standard.
For instance, most companies follow the industrial norm of having a 80-20 service level. This means they aim to answer 80% of customer calls or respond to 80% of chats within 20 seconds.
The problem? Call centers may lag behind their own set service levels when:
- The company is understaffed
- Agents aren’t properly trained
- Call center management is poor
Unless you address these concerns early on, they’ll eventually lead to longer wait times and lower resolution rates.
This is also why it’s crucial you assess your call volume—because accurate call volume forecasting lets you hire the right number of agents to handle calls when you’re at your busiest.
This, in turn, reduces the workload on employees, shortens call holding queues, and decreases churn rate.
Even when you get your call forecasting dialed in, continue to monitor call volumes in real time. The number of calls you receive can fluctuate significantly due to seasonal spikes, weather changes, political situations, and other factors.
3. Collect and Use Data Effectively
You don’t have to guess when it comes to figuring out what’s working and what’s not—it all comes down to numbers.
Using data to keep an eye on customer behavior and agent performance is crucial for the success of a call center.
More than 60% of businesses struggle to capture and make sense of data, which prevents them from improving their customer service. At the same time, 69% of customers stop doing business with brands that they have negative customer experiences with.
With the right software, companies can measure key analytics such as:
- Predictive analytics to forecast call volumes
- Voice analytics to monitor customer sentiments and agent performance
- Customer satisfaction data to gauge how customers feel about the products and services of the business
- Omnichannel analytics to learn how agents are handling customers across various customer service channels
While your call center can collect most analytics through the built-in software capabilities of your VoIP and CRM systems, you may need to invest in additional tools for capturing data.
Additionally, monitoring metrics like customer satisfaction scores require manual surveys or interviews.
Now, capturing the data is just the first part. You also need to make sure you’re using the data to make smart decisions when it comes to improving your call center’s customer service.
Again, this all comes back to speed. Look for ways you can help customers faster. For instance, if the data shows there’s a particular customer issue that keeps coming up, you might want to route them to a specific department or person who specializes in that problem and can provide quick solutions.
4. Focus on the KPIs That Matter
There’s a lot of different metrics out there. In order to improve speed and overall customer service so you can start to see boosts in sales, you need to find out what’s lacking in your current service structure. So look for the key metrics that can actually give you a clear answer.
To do this, focus on a few key call center metrics:
- Average Handle Time: The time it takes your agents to resolve customer queries
- Call Abandonment Rate: The number of calls canceled before an agent could get to them
- Average Time in Queue: The time customers have to wait before an agent responds to them
- First Contact Resolution rate: The percentage of calls in which agents resolved customer issues in the first call.
- Customer Satisfaction or CSAT score: The score from surveys that collect customers’ ratings on a scale of 1 to 10 to learn how happy they were with the service.
Measuring these performance indicators can help you see which areas of the customer service experience need improvement.
Look at these areas of improvement as opportunities to not just get better, but faster.
5. Automate Processes Wherever Possible
Automation in a call center brings several benefits, from increased agent productivity to higher customer satisfaction.
Essentially, automation involves using software to streamline your processes by taking over repetitive tasks.
For instance, many call centers these days use IVR systems for intelligent call routing and answering frequently asked questions automatically.
Similarly, automation also helps you set up self-service that empowers customers to speak to chatbots or virtual assistants. This means your customers are getting swift responses, and your agents are freed up to take care of more complex calls.
Apart from this, you can also use automation for:
- Collecting feedback by sending out surveys to both customers and agents
- Integrating auto-attendants that can handle a large number of customers with common queries
- Completing simple data-entry tasks, such as creating reports or processing payments in an error-free way
- Using Artificial Intelligence to analyze data, track trends, and suggest improvements to improve overall performance
5 Best Practices that Can Also Help Your Call Center Sales Team
Speed is the most important factor when it comes to boosting sales, but it’s not the only one. There are other key ways you can improve the customer experience and, in turn, increase your overall sales.
1. Offer Personalization
Personalization can increase customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and boost revenue.
In fact, 71% of customers look forward to personalized experiences, and 76% feel annoyed when they don’t get them.
Here are some ways you can personalize interactions with your customers:
- Listen actively and with a customer-centric mindset
- Offer tailored recommendations based on customers’ interests
- Address customers by their names and refer to past orders as well as past conversations that you or another sales rep have had with them
A great CRM platform is really going to be your friend here. Some VoIP platforms integrate with CRM software to pull up the customer’s history when they call. This way, you can see their name, order history, support tickets, and more right in front of you.
Not only does this look good to the customer, but it also provides your sales reps better opportunities for upselling, as they’ll be able to easily see what the customer has ordered in the past and suggest products or services that might actually appeal to them.
2. Provide Omnichannel Support
Omnichannel support is increasingly becoming a must.
In fact, businesses with omnichannel service strategies retain 89% of their customers. This is in stark contrast to those that don’t offer such support and retain only 33% of customers.
Customers want the ease of being able to connect with businesses wherever they’re at. If they’re browsing through your brand’s social media feed, they may want to contact you through the app they’re using. If they’re on your website, they may want to use the site’s contact form.
Essentially, wherever they are is where they’re going to look first to reach you with questions.
In addition to phone support, your call center can offer support lines through email, live chat, social media, text messaging, and more.
3. Collect and Adapt to Feedback
Not only does customer feedback shape agent training sessions and work processes, but it also tells customers you value their opinions.
When customers are able to inform a business how their experience was, support teams get a chance to make amends. So it may actually give you the chance to turn around a bad customer experience and retain a customer who otherwise would’ve left for a competitor.
Feedback also plays a role in understanding customers’ preferences, which allows you to offer more personalized experiences and potentially close more deals.
An overwhelming majority of buyers believe that businesses should be active in asking for feedback—85% say it is important for them to be able to share feedback when they buy products or services from a company.
To encourage customers to give feedback, make it convenient for them to share their views. For this, you can:
- Give options to provide feedback through various mediums such as surveys, chats, phone calls, or social media
- Ask specific questions (but make sure your surveys aren’t too long)
- Offer discounts and freebies as a token of gratitude for your customers’ time
4. Follow-Up With Customers
This is a simple tactic that too many call center reps don’t do—follow up with customers.
In fact, 48% of sales agents never follow up, even though 75% of buyers don’t mind two to four follow-up calls.
It often even takes a couple follow-up calls before a customer makes a purchase. And there are ways you can do it without coming across as pushy. If you personalize each call and show the customer that you actually care about them as a person, not just a potential sale, you have a far better chance of not just getting their sale but keeping them as a long-term customer.
Moreover, a follow-up strategy keeps the window open for you to:
- Offer customers new products and services based on their interests to generate more sales
- Build customer trust as you help them find the best solution tailored to their unique needs
- Address customer concerns so that you can overcome any obstacles that are preventing them from making a purchase
- Provide customers with additional information on how they can make the most of their purchase so that they can see value in your product
5. Upsell and Cross-sell
Upselling and cross-selling are two different strategies that call center agents can use to make more sales.
Upselling refers to encouraging customers to purchase a higher-end version of the product or service they’re intending to purchase. Cross-selling, on the other hand, refers to suggesting other products and services that complement their original product.
In order to upsell or cross-sell successfully, you need to show customers the value this upgraded or additional service or product can provide for them.
According to a HubSpot survey, sales agents who upsell and cross-sell experience higher revenue by up to 30%.
So, how can you effectively upsell and cross-sell? Here are some tips:
- Tailor your sales offer to meet individual customers’ requirements
- Offer bundled discounts to make the purchase more attractive
Emphasize the value of the upgraded or additional product—how will it makes the buyer’s life better or easier?