BenchmarkPortal’s (News - Alert) CallTalk, a monthly online radio show, is a step away from the traditional educational platform toward a more entertaining style that is guided by the topics that the listeners ask for. The radio show, hosted by Bruce Belfiore, CEO and senior research executive of BenchmarkPortal, and author of the book “Benchmarking At Its Best for Contact Centers”, a manual for best practices benchmarking, will be discussing Adding Sales to Your Customer Service Culture: How You Can Start Paying for Your Center In Three Months” on his next CallTalk Episode.
BenchmarkPortal will be supplying industry leaders with a list of ways that organizations can take Belfiore’s advice and apply it to their call centers. In this discussion he will discuss how transitioning a call center from a typical “customer service” environment to a “sales” environment can be a challenging. However, in today’s competitive environment, it is critical to have everyone in the organization focused on upselling or cross selling products/services. The topic of adding sales to an organization’s customer service culture will provide companies with strategies for making this transition and ensuring that the call center is a revenue generator. These strategies allowed BenchmarkPortal’s own call center to begin to pay for our its operating expenses within three months, improved the morale of the employees and provided more opportunities for all center personnel.
Susan Wolski, performance and metric manager with TXU Energy, will also be adding her voice on this topic, as she has a long history in call center (sales and service) performance driven success. In her current role Susan measures, monitors and provides direction to a team that drives sales and service execution through more than 700 agents. Susan is well regarded in the industry as a person who can step in to a center and find and solve for performance gaps resulting in unprecedented performance. Wolski recently presented and served as a panelist at the IQPC’s (News - Alert) Call Center Performance, Productivity & Metrics conference. She delivered a presentation on “Strategies for Driving the Sales and Service Team to Some of their Highest Metrics.”
Along with implementing these pieces of advice from Belfiore, call center managers can also benefit greatly from one of BenchmarkPortal’s onsite management training courses. Not only does it provide managers with the tools needed to increase productivity and performance levels in the center, it also shows them how to do so with a hands-on method. This three-day course consists of teaching managers a variety of coaching methods that include how to understand the corporate business model, screen applicants, motivate their agents, ensure quality assurance and how to define caller satisfaction.
To listen to the entire episode please visit CallTalk Employee Morale on Wednesday, July 17, 2013 at 10am PT/1pm ET.