Care to Sell Or Sell to Care

With the push to maximise the amount of work agents do there is a move to cross killing staff to reduce the number of staff required to do the workload. But does it always work.

Let's take the push for Inbound agents to be used as sales agents when the inbound queues drop. Your very caring agent has been helping customers for the first few hours of the day, staying inline with all the key measurements used. They have been polite, to the point, ensuring all the customers questions are answered and said goodbye at the end. All of a sudden you drop a sales call in.

The customer care agent must now switch into sales mode. They have a prospective customer that needs to be convinced to buy. They are full of questions armed with competitive pricing and advantages. The agent is now measured on purely sale performance, not about customer care measures. After a 10 minute battle of wits the caller said they will think about it and call back later.

Before the agent can recover from the failed closure and lost commission in drops a customer care call where someone wants to complain about their bill. After smoothly educating the caller on their impossible to understand bill, the agent is once again reassured they are good at their job.

Then the dreaded cold call drops in, the system has called someone, you now have a person asking "what?" As you quickly scan the screen you see they are a cold call to sell the brilliant product X to. The few seconds delay is enough the inform the person on the other line that this is a telesales call, so their defenses go up immediately and you haven't even said a word yet. You are quickly dispatched by the irritated prospect.

As you tally up all your Karma point and demand to cash them in for a nice customer service call, the sales supervisors comes up behind you to tell you that you have failed to sell anything today.

In drops the next customer care call, phew!!

Any honest telesales person will tell you that you need to get into your 'sales mode', for some people this may take 1 call others it may take several, or on a really bad day lunch time. Once you get your pitch going for the day, you can then achieve your usual sales quota.

Your five calls in and things are starting to pick up, after the first three calls being struck out you close the next two. Yes today is going to be a good day. Then a customer care call drops in. Some confused old customer does not understand how to work the controls. After repeating yourself eight times you realise that she does not have it in front of her, she then heads off to retrieve it. You look at the sales score board, you've dropped off the top group. No worries I can easily pull it back.

She now returns and you begin your instructions again, but she still does not see the button you are describing, after another three minutes, she declares that she will go get her glasses. You check the scoreboard again, oh no I've dropped into the bottom group.

She back again, "Oh that button" she says "Yes the green button is the one that turns it on" you moan. Oh my god this is going to take for ever.

You check the board again, Ahhh your bottom, below Fred who could not sell water to a thirsty man. A decision must be made, do I spend the next 30 minutes explain how to use the control or...oh no the call dropped out how did that happen!!

This does not mean that call blending and skilled based routing cannot work, they very much can, but you need to think about how you are going to use the tools and with which agents. Look at the type of people you have and see who has the skill to be multi skilled. You may have some budding sales agents in customer care and it is a soft intro for them to do a bit of both, equally you could have a great customer care agent that will never be able to sell and you do not want to lose them for the a few extra sales. After all, it's harder to win a new customer than keep and existing one.

The same goes for Sales agents, they may be good for taking customer care calls that have up sell opportunity. If there is commission in being nice they can be as nice as anyone.