As a service and sales manager, you have more than once been asked to cut resources.. to drive efficiency… to “cut” 15% of the workforce and still hit the sales targets and improve customer satisfaction. What do you do? How do you sell more? How do you raise service levels with the resources you already have?
7I’s helps you look beyond selling skills and service skills. Three operational components are your added value for driving efficiency in sales and service operations without changing the offering or the supporting systems.
Opportunities and Critical Moments
In service and in sales alike, you can treat every interaction as a standalone event, but the process is better managed end to end. A sales process begins with a lead. Will it become an opportunity? Will it become a sale? How many opportunities are never converted, giving way to easier, fresher ones?
Managing the sales process from the moment the lead is generated through to service delivery, and creating visibility by defining the right KPIs along the way, will deliver a significant improvement in how well opportunities are converted.
Service works the same way: it is built out of critical moments. Between the customer’s first approach and their satisfaction with the resolution, the customer may encounter several different parts of the organization, decision points, failure points and frustration.
Beyond the damage to service levels and satisfaction, all of this ultimately costs the organization a great deal of money in repeat calls and back-office work. Defining the critical moments in the process and managing the flow between them, much as you would manage a sales opportunity, produces early warning of failures, maximizes the chances of a “satisfied customer” and gets the most out of your resources.
Making the Most of Service and Sales Agent Time
Skilled service agents, and skilled sales agents even more so, are an expensive resource and often one in short supply. It is worth checking periodically that the way work processes and selling methods are defined maximizes the time these skilled people spend selling or serving.
In most of the studies we have run, we found that the average salesperson, like the average service agent, spends only about 50% of their time actually serving or selling. The rest goes to adjacent activities: administration, research, building data sets and chasing people around the organization. No one can guarantee that a sales or service agent will spend 100% of their time in front of customers.
But managing agent time against predefined targets produces a marked improvement, adjacent activities can certainly be reduced by redesigning the process, and sometimes they are better handed to cheaper resources.
Optimizing Service and Sales Channels
Service and sales channels are reinvented daily. What was once concentrated in face-to-face channels, walk-in points, stores and service centers, expanded substantially to the telephone two decades ago, and in recent years has expanded substantially to online channels.
Which services are worth offering online? All of them? To every population? The answers follow from the nature of the business and, above all, from the organization’s business strategy.
Map channel effectiveness against the organization’s goals – service / sales / growing share of customer / improving satisfaction / image – combine that with a cost analysis for each channel, and align it to the parameters that shape customer perception, such as availability, accessibility, complexity of the task, cost and so on.
You can then set the priority of services and channels by segment, and optimize how customers are routed to the channels that suit them best. The result is effective use of resources in the channels that pay off most for the product and the customer.
