The SSPA Research Topic of the Month for November is offer management, an increasingly hot topic as revenue generation becomes a goal for more inbound contact and technical support centers.  When asked in last month’s News what information you would most like in this area, more than half of voters selected “best practices to increase offer accept rates for inbound agents.”  In this SSPA News article, I will highlight what I have learned researching successful selling for inbound support in the consumer world, and make some recommendations for how this can apply to the B2B world.

Why is Revenue Generation Suddenly a Goal for Inbound Centers?

Making a shift from servicing customers to selling to them is certainly a philosophical change, and one that typically meets with resistance from senior support professionals.  The idea found little support when first introduced into consumer contact centers 3-5 years ago, though it is now common in retail, consumer electronics, financial services and communications.  Attention now turns to enterprise support. There are three primary reasons why this shift is occurring:

• Focus on retention, not acquisition. In the consumer world, industries like communications and financial services are finding that new customers are in short supply due to high adoption of products and services, so emphasis moves toward making existing customers happy to reduce churn, and revenue goals require more upsell and cross-sell to the customer base.  In the enterprise world, similar concerns are being voiced as Open Source, Web services, and SaaS offerings reduce cost and risk of changing technology providers.
• Customers increasingly immune to marketing and sales. Response rates to outbound telemarketing, online ads and mailers are all trending down as customers face a marketing overload.  Privacy and Do Not Call legislation makes reaching out to customers even more difficult than in the past.  When customers contact you for service, or visit your self-service Web site, they are fully engaged in the interaction and are more likely to see the value of additional products or services in context of the reason for the call.
• Leverage each interaction for revenue generation.  With companies becoming more aware of the end to end customer experience, every interaction is important to reinforce the desired brand image and increase customer wallet share.  Remember that extending offers isn’t necessarily about selling things—an offer can be a free gift, an upgrade to a new version, an invitation to a Beta program, etc.

Overcoming Barriers to Inbound Selling
The point of this article is not to convince inbound technical support centers to begin selling, but rather to help those tasked with extending offers to do it more effectively.  Based on interviews with consumer companies who successfully introduced selling to inbound agents, there are three main barriers to overcome:

• Philosophical view of service as separate from sales. Particularly with more senior agents, there is significant pushback to introducing selling into the technical support process.  While you may not win over long time agents, focus on incorporating offer extensions into core agent training.  As an agent is trained on each common customer problem, also provide the appropriate offers for the interaction.  When offers are in context of the customer issue, customers may view the offer as part of service.  As one inbound contact center manager said, “When agents hear ‘yes’ often enough, they feel like they are providing a service.”
• Conflicting performance metrics. For inbound centers historically ruled by talk times and service levels, adding goals for offer extensions or revenue creates concerns about impact to productivity.  Studies have shown that average talk time only increases by the time it takes to extend an offer, typically less than 15 seconds.  And, keep in mind that extending an offer is a good way to transition the call toward an end—helpful for customers who are difficult to get off the phone.  The most important thing is to understand how the qualitative and quantitative metrics interrelate, as a US airline failed to do when they began incenting agents to limit average talk time to 3 minutes, so agents reaching that threshold would end the call before a reservation was made, severely impacting revenues.
• Agents refuse to sell or are unsuccessful at selling. There is a very different set of skills required for selling than for servicing.  Teaching agents the soft sales skills required to successfully extend an offer, overcome objections, etc., is important.  For companies using quality monitoring software to record agent interactions for quality reviews, sending out copies of successful offer extensions is helpful so other agents can learn by example.

Selling as Part of Balanced Performance
Being that support metrics programs are oriented toward productivity goals, factoring in tracking for offer extensions to identify high performing agents, as well as those needing additional soft skills training or coaching, is important.  In Figure 1, average performance for three metrics is compared.

Figure 1:  Balancing Quality, Productivity and Revenue

Using the sample information in Figure 1, the following conclusions may be drawn:

• Madge.  With very high average talk time but low satisfaction and revenue, Madge likely needs additional training on products and diagnostic skills.  The first order of business is solving customer problems, and Madge seems to be struggling.  Get Madge back on track and then begin additional coaching on successfully extending offers.
• Lee.  When selling becomes more important than sales, which can occur when there are no caps on incentives received for selling, agents may short change solving customer problems.  Lee’s numbers, with high revenue per call coupled with very short talk time and low customer satisfaction, seem to indicate he is ‘slamming’ customers, pushing them to accept an offer and then disconnecting as soon as possible.
• Sue.  Sue has high average talk time, but her customer satisfaction numbers seem to indicate that she is effective.  However, her revenue per call numbers are very low, making Sue a candidate for additional training on transitioning from service to sales and successful extension of offers.

Challenges to Selling in B2B Environments
In enterprise support environments there are a number of challenges to selling in the inbound tech support center not faced by consumer companies.  These include:

• Account based selling. Typically customers in B2B companies have a dedicated account representative who handles sales issues.  Deals are big, sales cycles are long, and tech support agents do not know enough about the politics of the account to successfully extend offers. 
• Authorized buyers.  The system administrator or end user calling for support likely is not authorized to make additional purchases, and may have little influence on future business.
• Limited selling options.  For enterprise hardware and software companies, there may be no obvious companion product to push, and each additional product has a very large price tag, making selling via the phone channel unlikely.

In these environments, remember that extending offers is about increasing the long term customer experience as well as wallet share, so while agents may not be selling additional products, they can use offer management software to extend contextual offers related to a customer interaction.  

• Advanced service options. For upsell and cross-sell opportunities, consider advanced service options.  The technician or system administrator calling for support is likely to understand the benefits of a higher level of service more than the account owner.  Explaining to the customer what the next level of service includes and how this interaction may have been handled differently if the account upgraded to the premium offering is a good way to create support for the upgrade within the account.
• Invitations to events.  Using offer management software, technicians can let customers know about any upcoming events, even local or regional user groups that the system identifies as being in their area.
• Special programs.  Inviting customers to participate in Beta programs, case studies, focus group interviews, usability or use case labs, etc., is another way to further forge a bond with the customer, and offer management software can identify upcoming programs for which each customer is eligible.

The SSPA Recommends
Balancing quantitative and qualitative metrics will likely mean tracking new data and training supervisors to identify low performers as well as how to coach agents in soft sales skills. Agent performance goals may also need updating to reflect goals or incentives for offer extensions or revenue generated. When deciding which metrics to track and how to handle agent incentives and/or goals, think carefully about what behavior is being encouraged, and what information makes sense for your environment.

• Incentives, not goals.  Setting hard goals for revenue generation can backfire, as high performing agents may hit the goal early for a day/week/month, and stop selling.  A better approach is to recognize high performers for a period, or provide some cash incentives for offers accepted.
• Don’t encourage slamming.  If an agent is pushing customers to accept offers, the customer will call back to complain or refuse payment for the order.  Any incentives provided for successful selling should not be given to the agent until the customer has accepted delivery of the product or begins using a new service.  Carefully monitor agents with high sales performance to be sure they are adequately addressing customer problems and not over emphasizing sales.
• Pick the right metric.  If offers are being extended for non-revenue items, such as invitations to events or programd, obviously tracking average revenue per call is not the right metric for you.  Tracking the number of offers extended and percentage of offers accepted may be a better indicator of who is trying to sell, and who may need additional training in order to raise their accept rate.

About John Ragsdale…………………………………………………………

John Ragsdale is Vice President of Research for the SSPA.  Ragsdale spent 10 years managing tech support operations before moving to Silicon Valley where he held product management and marketing positions at eService and CRM vendors. He spent 5 years at Forrester Research as VP and Research Director before joining the SSPA.