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Success Stories
- Creating a Uniform Culture
- Driving Organizational Focus on the Right Customer
- Driving Revenue Through Referrals
- Establishing Differentiation Through a Distributor Sales Force
- Executing a New Sales Strategy
- Helping a Client Quickly Turn an Existing Program into Sustainable Action and Results
- Increasing New-Hire Productivity
- Instilling a Winning, Competitive Attitude in the Sales Force
- One-on-One Coaching to Breakthrough Results
- Providing Practical Tools for Sales Management in a Changing Marketplace
- Raising the Bar on Performance
- Results Soar for 700-Agent Call Center
Results Soar for 700-Agent Call Center
Industry:
Inbound Sales and Service Calling Operation
Situation:
When the EVP took over management of the 700-agent inbound calling operation in July of 2008, customer satisfaction scores were unacceptably low. At the same time, the company was emphasizing customer loyalty and cross-selling additional banking services through this group. The client realized it would require transitioning from a service to a sales culture, so Business Efficacy was called for help.
A team of representatives from Business Efficacy and the bank was charged with completely overhauling the call center’s customer experience approach. It consisted of developing new processes geared to improving agent productivity, training agents on the new skills required to execute the processes, and establishing new management coaching disciplines to ensure the new skills were applied, practiced and improved on-the-job. The goals of the project were to improve client interaction and retention, increase customer satisfaction, and increase cross selling without impacting length-of-call baselines. It was a tall order.
Analysis:
Before the new program the only metrics being used measured efficiency. There were no metrics to measure effectiveness, like converting service calls to a sales opportunity. It required a dramatic change in behaviors for both the agents and managers. The agents needed to learn how to understand and find ways to fulfill client needs, and the managers needed to utilize new tools to help coach the agents to success.”
Execution:
To address the need to be productive quickly, the project team worked closely with the managers to design, and equip them to lead, a 90-day launch and implementation plan. It required the managers to radically change their coaching culture and focus, and take total ownership of the new direction, to ensure meaningful change in a short period of time.
“We made sure the managers really understood the process and were committed to it. Then we provided step-by-step, week-by-week tools to help them accelerate the change process.”
Once the managers were equipped, the final step was training the phone agents. “We divided the training into five modules, and then we gave people a couple of weeks to practice and provide feedback. After agents were grounded in the new behaviors, we had them complete a two-day training program to close the gaps. We didn’t ask people to become experts when the modules were rolled out. We asked them to practice and test the new protocols and start to experience some success. We did it this way because early on our key constituents told us, ‘If you’re going to implement change, do it in a way that it sticks. Hold people accountable to success measures and don’t vary from those measures.’”
Impact:
Before the project began, customer satisfaction scores were in the mid 40’s on a 100-point scale. Once everyone had completed the modules, and prior to attending the classroom experience, the scores were in the mid 60’s to low 70’s.
“Within a 90-day period, after training was complete and the managers were executing the new coaching routines, those scores moved up to the mid to high 80’s. I was surprised how quickly people embraced the program and made the changes we were looking for.”