The challenge: Improve cross-selling across service categories
The client is a multibillion-dollar global telecommunications and mass media conglomerate headquartered in the United States. With a subscriber base of over 28 million customers, it is one of the largest quadruple-play service providers in the country.
The client was pursuing a quad-play strategy of offering voice landline, broadband internet, TV, and mobile services. The goal was to increase customer stickiness and loyalty by bundling several services together. Cross-selling products and services across the four categories was critical to the client’s growth.
While associates have the opportunity to add value to non-sales conversations by pitching offers across categories, in this scenario, the associates were doing so only on 9% of occasions. The client was looking to help its associates better identify and pitch cross-selling opportunities during these non-sales interactions.
The solution: Associate training and coaching driven by analytics
Firstsource deployed firstCustomer Intelligence (FCI), a proprietary solution designed to provide insights into customer interactions and enable superior customer experience. FCI uses speech, text, and competitor analysis to better understand customer sentiment, emotion and behavior. Some of the major insights that emerged from the analysis included:
- Associates had the opportunity to cross-sell on 22% of non-sales interactions
- There was no compelling reason to switch packages. Customers tended to be satisfied with their current packages, which were often also cheaper
- The switching process was long and cumbersome, demotivating customers from considering other packages
- Processing errors led to the cancellation of over 10% of orders
Based on these observations, Firstsource experts concluded that better objection handling and stronger promotion of benefits could lead to 110% improvement in associate performance. They recommended implementing the following enhancements:
- Improve the quality of sales pitch
- Better manage customer objections
- Adhere to the correct order building process to ensure successful cross-selling
- Adhere to compliance procedures to reduce Work Order Accuracy (WOA) errors, successfully execute orders, and reduce cancellations
The results: 2X cross-selling performance
The Firstsource solution delivered a 100% improvement in cross-selling across product categories during non-sales interactions. This was supported by:
- More than doubling the number of times associates pitched cross-selling offers – from 9% of calls to over 20% of calls
- Halving the proportion of canceled orders, to below 5%
In addition, the client has a full audit trail showing 100% compliance with all sales regulations.