Cross-Sell & Up-Sell

Cross-selling and up-selling have been major sales strategies since commerce began, but it took the advent of CRM to get businesses firmly focused on them. The traditional way to reach customers with such offers has been outbound calling campaigns, but customer aversion to these calls is growing. Today, customer outreach has shifted to 'inbound marketing,' which targets customers who call the companies they patronize. This shift puts the contact center at the heart of cross- and up-sell campaigns.

In order to successfully cross- or up-sell via the contact center, a number of elements need to be in place. Customers need to be targeted with offers they are interested in and they need to be satisfied with either the offer or your company. In addition, your agents need to be trained to convert a service interaction into a sales interaction. Lastly, your agent performance metrics must be adjusted to measure this new business objective.

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Using intelligent routing capabilities, cross- and up-sell conversion can be significantly increased. By using customer intelligence from existing CRM/ERP applications, a customer's current portfolio can be examined in real-time when the customer calls. Then business rules can match the customer with the best agent or agent skill profile for a given up-sell.

Demographic matching introduces a whole new array of possibilities. Matching male callers to female agents increases the success rate of service-to-sales calls by 19 percent. Another option is to match customers with agents of a similar age or geographical location. Even matching callers and agents according to regional accents can help sales success rates.

A critical step in any cross- and up-sell strategy is the training and development of agent skills. In addition to training, agents must also be matched with the appropriate interactions and be provided with scripting tools that prompt them to ask the right questions. Proper skills training, call routing, and scripting increases agent confidence and success.

Companies also need to change the way they measure agent performance. Traditional metrics such as average call duration are no longer indicative of agent performance. Instead, new metrics such as 'average revenue per incoming call per agent' are better measures of agent success.

Real-time offer management allows you to analyze a customer's profile in real-time so you can offer a higher-level of service or suggest an appropriate product in the course of a customer interaction. For example, you can analyze a customer's buying history while she surfs your Web site, initiate a chat or voice conversation, and suggest products that match her buying history. Or you might decide, based on a customer's profile, to promote a caller from a voice self-service application to a live conversation with a trained sales agent.

Genesys brings real-time offer management to inbound interactions through an intelligent routing engine that considers business rules, agent skill profiles and real-time data retrieved from several sources or across multiple communication channels. Using this information, Genesys instantly decides whether to connect the customer with a trained agent who can offer an appropriate product. Such real-time analysis and customer contact captures sales that would normally be missed.