Every company has two primary ways to increase revenue. The most apparent method is to cultivate more customers. Yet there is consistently a cost per acquisition you must consider. Another approach to improve revenue requires a lower upfront cost. You can increase your average sale per customer by increasing the prices of your products and services. Upselling is another way to entice your existing customers to buy more expensive items.
Fortunately, there are several ways to boost your team’s performance. These will provide a smooth client journey from prospect through post-sale, from quality assurance to customer feedback.
Increase your customers’ lifetime value by selling them the right add-ons, product upgrades, longer-term subscriptions, or more of the same product they already liked. We offer dedicated outbound call campaigns and can also integrate our upselling service into your inbound calls.
Upselling is Critical for an Inbound Contact Center
Contact centers have historically been a cost-causing source of revenue decline. Many industry leaders have focused on finding new methods to reduce expenditures and overhead.
However, as businesses have devised a better familiarity with customer behaviors and embraced more state-of-the-art contact center technology, the exploration to develop revenue at the contact center level has become a unique focus. This most prominent solution is upselling.
Of course, it’s more complicated than just prompting your contact center agents to present a specific product or service. The customer dialing into a contact center may not expect the conversation and become turned off by the experience. There are best approaches that can seriously enhance agents’ capability to provide a holistic customer-centric sales experience with upselling. The strategies promote increased revenue and growth, and the customer may need to be aware of some of the products they could utilize to make their lives easier.
Let’s review how upselling can easily be brought within your contact center.
Business Intelligence Information Source as a Contact Center
Establishing an upsell movement within your contact center is challenging. Therefore, it is vital to identify the most common reasons customers call your contact center. Then you will better understand why they may be interested in buying other products and services. By getting agents’ feedback and carefully reviewing data from calls, you can decide what products and services are for upselling. Certain items will have the best chance of being sold over the phone, and you should position your contact center accordingly.
It’s also essential to carefully consider the customer profile. If you are predominantly marketing to high-end customers with extensive money, you will undoubtedly have a more manageable time upselling. If customers are tight on cash, upsells must be more price sensitive. Therefore, this can include payment plans and discounts for further purchases that offer real value for those who greatly appreciate the savings.
Train Your Agents to Extend the Customer Relationship
Once you have identified what you want your contact center team to sell, the next step is to prepare them to sell. Therefore, this means giving agents the information they need to effectively present products and services to customers dialing into the center.
It also affects providing sales training to your customer service representative teams. Customer service and selling require various skill sets. Some representatives may even discover selling problematic. They may want to focus on providing a great customer experience. Resistance to selling can be overcome by implementing an incentive program. A sales training team can demonstrate the products and services provide real, measurable value to the customer. Therefore, the agents on the phone understand they are selling them an item worthy of purchase.
Use a CRM Solution
A customer relationships management solution, such as Salesforce, can quickly increase your team’s ability to sell by enabling agents to access customer profile data and suggest offers tailored to their customer’s needs and wants. This readily available information improves close rates on upselling efforts and allows agents to provide better, more personalized customer service.
Leverage Your IVR System Features
While most upselling will occur during conversations between the agent and customer, the process can be supported through marketing-driven recordings incorporated into your contact center’s phone system. An auto-attendant greeting can notify callers of specific promotions that are currently running. On-hold messages can promote items such as service contracts or related products.
Offer Incentives
If sales have not traditionally been a function of your contact center, there can be reluctance from representatives to take this on as a daily task. To minimize pushback, offering incentives for sales generated because of their upselling efforts makes sense. Whether these look like bonuses, incentive gifts, or other perks, rewarding your representatives when they perform well is a brilliant idea that will keep them motivated and enthusiastic.
Don’t Overdo It
Upselling is a fantastic method to increase revenue. However, you’re wise to avoid overloading customers with upsell opportunities during every call or risk losing them. If the perception of your contact center team becomes more relaxed, customers will be less likely to call. Then they will eventually leave for a competitor that provides a better customer experience.
Successful upsells should occur through your contact center, email, and other customer touchpoints over extended periods. Not putting a hard sell on customers every time they call can help your overall conversion rates. You do not want to present a feeling that they are being squeezed off every dollar.
Learn from Your Customers
As you upsell your customers through your call center, continuously gather information. Your agents will naturally ask questions to understand how they can provide customers with their needs. You and your agents can better understand what can be upsold through these questions. Often, a customer will need to learn about a product or service available to answer their needs better. Simply offering these products and services will sound natural when the customer service representative says, “Do you know about this product or service?”
Understanding particular customer pain points will assist you in developing more relevant offers. As you adapt to their evolving needs, the call center can help the customer by providing higher quality services and products that help increase revenues.
Many business experts will suggest 70 percent of a company’s revenue should be derived from the acquisition of customers. The following 30 percent should come from upselling current customers. If a call center is optimized for upselling, contact center agents can generate a significant amount of revenue from upselling.
Proper training, tools, and a clear understanding of your customer’s needs are essential to upselling. You may become a critical function of your contact center operations by generating revenue to reduce operational costs.
How to Upsell in a Call center Environment?
Step 1: Plan who and how to reach out to Customers
We identify the customers we need to reach, whether outbound or inbound. If it’s an outbound campaign, we plan your lead lists and how we’ll earn enough people to achieve your goals. If your business has inbound phone sales and customer service with us, we plan out how to embed the upselling processes into our existing teams.
Step 2: Figure out what to upsell them
Building a high-performance service begins with strategic planning. That means identifying who you want to sell and support, how best to speak to them, and what to do on calls and emails to achieve your desired outcomes (buy, don’t cancel, be satisfied, and so on). Our experts study your business and map this out for you.
Step 3: Build the essential service and processes your sales team will use to cross-sell.
Build strategies, tactics, scripts, offers, and rebuttals to help facilitate closing the sale. You will need a formal training program.
Step 4: We develop your dedicated agent outbound phone sales team.
This includes hiring potent phone sales agents, providing formal training, launching the team, and continuously improving to achieve great results.
Step 5: Launch the service.
Once the service is launched, we carefully monitor and improve it.
Step 6: Adapt your Top Producing Marketing
Each time you have a winning marketing campaign, we adapt that into our cross-sell pitches for your service, so your agents sell your product or service similarly to your best-performing marketing.
Leave Call Center Upselling to the Professionals
Loop Contact Solutions provide fully managed call center services with your goals in mind. We can use your existing processes and create new ones established on your requirements. We are adaptable enough to allow you to scale your enterprise quickly.
You will obtain a seasoned call center operations sales or support manager with Loop Contact Solutions. Our extensive experience is continuing to launch new services. We immerse ourselves in your business to build and launch your new service exactly how you want it to perform. We manage the team as performance ramps up to achieve great results reliably.
Contact us today to talk to one of our experts.
