Your current customer is your best sales prospect

It’s a well known principle of sales that if you want to generate more revenue from your customers, either cross-selling or up-selling to them is the answer. Winning the new customer is the costly bit of the sales process. Once you have them, you look to generate the maximum value from them, by either getting them to buy more expensive goods and services or complementary ones.

So what does that have to do with customer service? Sales and customer service are two sides of the same coin: delivering to the customer what they want and need; delivering increased sales for the organisation. It’s about achieving win-win for both.

How can technology-based learning help? Here are two examples.

Restaurant staff – upselling
In the catering business, most profit is generated in drink, not food sales. If the UK’s largest food and drink retail businesses could increase the average per customer spend on drink by £1 per visit, across all their outlets, their revenue could increase by several million pounds a month, if they are already delivering high volumes of meals.

So why don't they? The challenge is that their staff are usually engaged and trained primarily as table clearers and order takers. They are not comfortable with asking customers if they want another drink.

As there is a lot of employee churn in this sector and a high degree of staff whose first language is not English, it’s simply not cost effective to put ongoing face to face programmes which take people off the restaurant floor.

E-learning on tablet PCs provides a flexible and viable alternative. By making the training available on these portable PCs which require no keyboard skills, they are able to use down time and quiet spaces in the restaurants to train staff on how to ask their customers if they want more drink.

The e-learning could cover:
• A brief questionnaire on the barriers to upselling – managers could use this data in their restaurant to inform coaching or wider briefings
• When the right moment is to offer another drink
• How to introduce the idea
• What drinks to suggest with different meal types
• How to introduce drinks to children
• How to introduce special offers

The e-learning would have a highly practical dimension include video footage of successful up-selling to illustrate the techniques in practice.

Using a blended approach makes sense here. So managers could pair up higher performing staff with less experienced ones and help them put their skills to work in situ.

Financial services counter staff - cross selling
Every time I go into my bank to cash a cheque, I’m congratulated on being eligible for a loan. This makes me laugh as well as cringe – as the offer has no context and pays no attention as to whether I have a need or not.

Of course, the teller is attempting to cross sell to me. Cross selling is well embedded in the financial services sector. Most of the big players have extensive portfolios of services ranging from the basic banking offering, through investment and pensions services, insurance, property, motor etc.

They look to lever their enormous customer base to cross sell these goods and services. And it’s not only them. When you look at e-bay buying skype or Google a stake in  AOL – it’s all about access and selling services to wider audience bases.

In the front line of the financial services organisations, there is an increasing burden on call centre and counter staff to cross sell services. The challenge is how to enable them to spot genuine opportunity and to turn these into leads to be followed up by sales staff.

The skills challenge can be divided into the following areas:
• Excellent listening skills
• Identification of potential opportunity
• Confident knowledge of the products and services on offer
• Being able to move to a call to action promptly

Various blended solutions could come into play here. One of the main issues is how to embed skills that can be used directly and effectively in the workplace situation, rather than in the abstracted classroom location.

E-learning is the obvious solution for the core product knowledge and context. It is rapidly up-dateable with the latest information. It can be searchable – which is ideal for just in time referencing, and it can be delivered either direct to the employee desk top or to a PC near them.

The softer skills (listening, spotting opportunity, moving customers to action) probably benefit from more traditional methods of learning including coaching and role play.

Ideas for you today

If you're looking to maximise the value of each customer, you need to look at how you're training your staff to cross and upsell and ask if any of the e-learning examples above could make a difference. If you'd like to discuss them further, contact us.

Ideas for you tomorrow

Here are two tecnology developements that we think will make a difference in to cross- and up-selling in the future.

Intelligent prompting – based on rapid diagnosis of customer intent or account profiling. My bank example isn’t a good one. But what if cashiers received not the product to promote but a set of just in time questions to ask, depending on the account profile of the person in front of them. The questions would take them through a customer-focused conversation which may be lead generating towards a service cross-sell (or not depending on how it goes.) However, from the customer perspective it will feel like a needs driven conversation, not a sales push.

Organic knowledge networks – across large financial services organisations, there are many best practice examples of successful relationship management, customer service and cross selling. But how do these get replicated across the organisation?

With self-managed Wiki intranet sites or by capturing customer interactions in the banking core system, you could feed the ‘intelligent prompting’ system and help it learn tips for success from employees and then disseminate them back through the system. The key is to require minimum effort to capture and share these best practice tips. The just in time model of intelligent prompting provides the ideal distribution channel.