When agents are talking to customers all day, every day, there’s plenty of opportunity to cross-sell new products and services – but these opportunities often aren’t taken full advantage of.
To find out how to kick-start cross-selling in your contact centre, our Editor Megan Jones spoke to Alex McConville, Contact Centre Consultant, Helen Beaumont Manahan, Head of Training and Development at BPA Quality UK, Jeremy Watkin, Director of Customer Experience and Support at NumberBarn, and Jacqui Turner of Turner Corner Learning Solutions for their best tips and advice.
Top Training Tips and Agent Incentives
Effective cross-selling is not as simple as blindly offering related products or services to every customer! It requires proper scope, training, and incentives to get it right in the long term.
Here are some tried-and-tested tips to consider when training contact centre agents in effective cross-selling:
Pizza and Extra Money Can Be Great Motivators
As food and money are quick-win motivation tactics in any contact centre, they have their place in kick-starting cross-selling campaigns too, as Jeremy Watkin explains:
“When I’ve run cross-selling campaigns in the contact centre, I’ve always added incentives such as getting an extra $5 on your pay cheque for every successful cross-sell, or maybe we’ll have a pizza party if the full team meets their cross-selling targets. These really appeal to naturally competitive people.”
Incorporating creative and motivational incentives can make a significant difference. For ideas, read our article: 100 Great Staff Incentives to Motivate Your Team
But… Agents Still Need to Know HOW to Cross-Sell
However, these quick-win incentives only go so far, as leadership teams still need to give agents proper time, training and resources to enable them to successfully cross-sell new products, as Jeremy Watkin continues:
“It’s not enough to simply say “go and sell this product and the winner gets pizza”.
“You need to invest time in providing agents with resources such as one-pagers (for example) that can help customers make informed decisions.
“It’s also important to practise that skill. Agents aren’t just going to do it because you told them to. They’re going to have to actually know how to cross sell first!”
Explain How It Helps Customers
It also helps to explain to agents how and where these new products will help customers, as Alex McConville shares:
“Where I have seen cross-sell campaigns really work is where leaders have taken their agents on a journey to incorporate these new products into their job role and explain where and when it will make a difference to the customers they’re speaking to.
“This shifts the focus away from just tacking an extra question on at the end of each call. Not only this, but when agents are comfortable with the products and understand the value of doing the cross-sell, it becomes part of their culture – delivering a better, more consistent experience all round.”
It’s about recognizing individual customer needs and looking at the situation from a First Contact Resolution (FCR) standpoint too. It comes down to offering the customer a complete solution as, culturally, if you’re focusing on these metrics and behaviours, cross-selling ties in nicely.
Train Agents to Use Open Questions to Cross-Sell
Agents also need support in how to broach the conversation with customers and, again, avoid blindly tacking the cross-selling question onto the end of every call.
One way to do this is to provide them with a list of tried-and-tested open questions to help them steer the conversation in the right direction, as seen in these great examples from Jacqui Turner:
Here are some open questions tailored for cross-selling:
- “How do you see your needs evolving over the next year?”
- “What challenges are you currently facing that our additional services might address?”
- “How would having access to [specific feature/service] be of benefit to you?”
- “What would make upgrading to our advanced package worthwhile for you?”
- “What benefits would you expect from an upgraded service?”
- “How important is [feature of the product] to you and your business?”
- “What concerns do you have about upgrading your current package?”
“When cross-selling or upselling to a customer, open questions can help agents understand their needs, identify opportunities, and present solutions effectively.
“These questions help agents gather information about the customer’s needs, pain points, and aspirations. This information allows them to tailor their cross-selling approach, focusing on the specific benefits that would be most valuable to the customer, based on their responses.”
For more information and examples of open questions, read our article: Open Questions to Use in Customer Service
Schedule Time for Agents to Shadow the Sales Team
In quieter periods, it can also help to schedule time for your customer service agents to shadow the sales team. This can help to improve their sales skills and ability to upsell new products to customers, as we heard at on our visit to Fasthosts HQ in Gloucester.
Offer Fair Incentives to All Departments Involved in the Campaign
If something is incentivized within a company, you have to make sure that it’s incentivized for all of the departments doing it.
Don’t overlook the need for fairness! The customer service team will be well aware if other departments (for example, sales) are getting paid more for selling the same products.
This can quickly breed bitterness if they don’t feel they are being fairly rewarded for selling too.
Remember, you don’t have to incentivize everything, but if something is incentivized within a company, you have to make sure that it’s incentivized for all of the departments doing it.
Selling Is a Scary Thing to Some People
When planning your cross-selling campaign, it’s also worth keeping in mind that there are lots of different personality types in a contact centre and, quite simply, for some people, selling is just a scary thing!
So just saying to everyone “oh just add this question to the end of the call” is setting everyone up for failure or, at the very best, mixed results.
Building advisor confidence can be a challenge. For practical methods contact centre leaders can use to build advisor confidence, read our article: How to Build Advisor Confidence
Proactively Recruit People With a Retention or Sales Team Background
When looking to deeply embed a cross-selling focus into your team culture, you should also revisit your recruitment strategy and look for new recruits from customer retention or sales backgrounds, as Jeremy Watkin reflects:
“One of the agents that we have that always wins cross-sell competitions came from a retention department at a cable company, so she’s very used to having sales targets. If anything, we’ve had to try to slow her down a bit to be more customer-centric.”
Recruitment is tough and competitive right now, but there are changes you can make to your job adverts to help your roles stand out and attract more applicants. For advice, read our article: Are Your Job Ads Holding Back Your Contact Centre Recruitment?
Getting Cross-Selling Right for Customers
It’s equally important that a cross-selling campaign complements and even enhances the customer experience – instead of compromising it.
Here are some top tips and ideas for getting cross-selling right for customers:
Train Agents Up as Trusted Advisors
When agents are willing to actively build a relationship with each customer, cross-sales can be a natural outcome, as Helen Beaumont Manahan explains:
“Training in this area should serve as inspiration to our team members to assume the role of ‘Trusted Advisor,’ there to guide our customers through use of relevant questioning and attentive listening, to enable us to give tailored selling advice on purchases that are more likely to be the right fit.
“We owe it to our team members to provide regular training and timely product information cascade too, so they stay up-to-date with the full range of products and services on offer, and fully looped in to any promotions available.
“What we NEVER want is for our agents to have to find out from customers about new marketing initiatives, new products, or special offers – sadly, we see this all too often.”
Make Sure Agents Know When It’s NOT the Right Time to Cross-Sell
When excited and incentivized, agents can really lean into a cross-selling campaign, but sometimes they’re so eager to beat everybody that they’re selling to every customer – even when it’s not appropriate to do so.
When driven by an incentive for the most sales, some agents stop thinking about “is this the right thing to do?”, they just end up spamming customers to the detriment of the overall customer experience.
The onus is on the leadership team to make sure agents understand when NOT to upsell, but also to remove situations and perceived punishments where agents may feel pressured to cross-sell after handling a difficult conversation (for example).
This behaviour can also be driven by QA checklists driving the wrong behaviour, as inevitably agents will be faced with some tough customer conversations and complaints across their shift.
This can put them in an awkward situation if they know they might get in trouble they don’t then ask their cross-sell question. It can be really cringy when agents get this wrong – especially when these calls are played back in the boardroom.
To overcome this, the onus is on the leadership team to make sure agents understand when NOT to upsell, but also to remove situations and perceived punishments where agents may feel pressured to cross-sell after handling a difficult conversation (for example).
Ask Agents for Their Thoughts in a Focus Group
Another great way to make sure any cross-sell campaign hits the right note with customers is to ask your agents.
Cross-selling campaigns can be a great success when given the time and attention they deserve. One way to do this is to run an agent focus group, asking questions such as “If we introduced this cross-selling campaign, how would this impact your conversations with customers?”
You have to include agents on the journey and show them that it’s not going to get in the way or make their conversations worse, as well as give them the opportunity to make tweaks that will improve the overall customer and employee experience.
For top tips and strategies on how best to gather customer feedback from your frontline agents, read our article: Want Your Frontline Staff to Share More Customer Feedback? Try This!
Take a Personalized Approach
Personalization should also be factored in too. The very best agents take a consultative approach to cross-selling, being sure to build a relationship that centres around asking relevant questions to uncover the customer’s unique needs, wants and preferences – this sets us up to make tailored suggestions that are much more likely to fit the customer’s circumstances, and that they are more likely to love and say yes to.
Cross-Selling Works Best When Agents Are Truly Acting in Customers’ Best Interests
Unfortunately, too often, a cross-selling campaign is seen as a quick win in the boardroom, and it filters down to agents without being given proper consideration, as Alex McConville explains:
“From my personal experience, it’s very easy for the senior leadership team to say “the customer service team speaks to thousands of customers every week, we need them to ask a quick question at the end of every call to cross-sell this new product and generate revenue.
It’s agreed and then this action gets cascaded down to the managers and team leaders, only for the problems to start…”
This is because cross-selling works best when agents are truly in service to customers and acting in their best interests.
For more advice on sales techniques in the contact centre, read these articles next:
- 25 Tips to Make Your Telesales People More Productive
- Top Tips for Selling Over the Phone
- The Right Words and Phrases to Use on a Sales Call
Author: Megan Jones
Reviewed by: Xander Freeman
Published On: 16th Oct 2024
Read more about - Skills, Alex McConville, Call Handling, Coaching, Helen Beaumont Manahan, Jacqui Turner, Jeremy Watkin, Telesales, Top Story, Training
