By Paul Bartick, Outsell Consulting

An internet service provider whose retention queue takes more than a million calls every month wanted help increasing their retention rate. Within 18 months their rate soared from 46% to 61% adding millions of dollars to the bottom line.

An airline carrier whose call centers take more than 5 million inbound calls a year wanted help increasing their sales conversion rate. Within 6 months the conversion rate increased more than 1% resulting in more than $400,000 of additional revenue every week.

Both these companies put forth tremendous effort to improve the performance of their call center teams, and each company applied a Customer Care process to generate a world-class customer experience on every call.

Catching Them Doing Things Right

The philosophy that propels the OutSell 8-step methodology is the belief that we want to encourage our agents/operators/consultants (associates) to do more of the behaviors that top producers do on the phone. We collect the best practices of the best people and teach them to the rest of the team. We then focus on catching associates doing the right behaviors and transferring the right skills. Once this “success generates success” mentality takes hold, things begin to happen…sales increase, customer service improves, and productivity and efficiency metrics typically improve too.
When a call center organization is performing effectively in the 8 areas, they are going to attract and build employees that can deliver “over-the-top” sales and service performance…over and over…day after day…call after call. You can hear the genuine interest and excitement in the voices of the best call center agents and customers feel it. There is a sense of cooperation between management and the front-line employees and a deep commitment throughout the organization to deliver world-class customer service that leaves the competition behind.

The OutSell 8-Step Call Center Customer Care Methodology

1. Setting and communicating high-performance vision and compelling expectations
2. Installing processes that generate world-class results
3. Generating visible leaders that lead through example from the field
4. Clarifying, identifying and transferring top-performer behaviors to all levels of the organization
5. Instilling a strong “inspect what you expect” work ethic that holds team members accountable to the high performance expectations
6. Increasing honest and actionable feedback including effective recognition, appreciation and natural consequences
7. Reporting important performance data in a simple and highly visible way
8. Building the right behaviors through action steps and follow up

In upcoming posts, we will go through each of these steps in depth.