As a service and sales manager, you have probably been asked more than once to reduce resources, improve efficiency, and “cut” 15% of the workforce – while still meeting sales targets and improving customer satisfaction. So what can you do? How can you sell more? How can you improve service levels with the resources you already have?
7I’s helps you look beyond sales and service skills. Three operational components can provide significant opportunities to improve efficiency in sales and service operations, without changing the offering or the supporting systems.
Opportunities and Critical Moments
In both service and sales, each interaction can be viewed as a standalone event, but it is far more effective to manage the process as a whole. A sales process begins with a lead. Will that lead become an opportunity? Will the opportunity become a sale? How many opportunities are not fully pursued because attention shifts to newer, easier opportunities?
Managing the sales process from the initial lead through to service delivery, creating visibility, and defining appropriate KPIs throughout the process can significantly improve the ability to maximize sales opportunities.
Similarly, the service process is made up of critical moments. From the moment a customer first contacts the organization until they are satisfied with the resolution, they may interact with different functions across the organization and encounter multiple decision points, potential failures, and moments of frustration.
Beyond their impact on service levels and customer satisfaction, these issues can ultimately cost the organization a significant amount of money through repeat calls and additional back-office work. Defining the critical moments throughout the process and managing the flow between them – much like managing an opportunity in the sales process – can provide early warnings of potential failures, maximize opportunities to create satisfied customers, and improve resource utilization.
Maximizing Service and Sales Agent Time
Skilled service agents – and even more so, skilled sales agents – are an expensive resource and are often in short supply. It is therefore important to periodically examine whether work processes and sales methods are designed to maximize the amount of time these skilled employees spend actually providing service or selling.
In most of the research we have conducted, we found that the average salesperson, as well as the average service agent, spends only around 50% of their time actually selling or providing service. The rest of their time is spent on supporting activities such as administration, research, building databases, and following up with other functions across the organization.
Of course, it is unrealistic to expect sales or service agents to spend 100% of their time interacting with customers. However, managing agents’ time according to predefined guidelines can lead to significant improvement. Supporting activities can often be reduced through process redesign, and in some cases it may even be more efficient to transfer them to lower-cost resources.
Optimizing Service and Sales Channels
Service and sales channels continue to evolve. What was once concentrated primarily in face-to-face channels, customer service locations, stores, and service centers, expanded significantly to telephone channels around two decades ago and, in recent years, increasingly to online channels.
Which services should be offered through online channels? Should all services be available digitally? Should they be offered to every customer segment? The answers naturally depend on the nature of the organization’s activities and, above all, on its business strategy.
Mapping the effectiveness of each channel against the organization’s objectives, whether service, sales, increasing share of customer, improving customer satisfaction, or strengthening brand image, while considering the cost of each channel and the factors that shape the customer experience, such as availability, accessibility, complexity, and cost, makes it possible to prioritize services and channels for different customer segments and direct customers to the channels best suited to their needs.
In this way, the organization can maximize resource utilization by focusing resources on the most effective channels, based on both the product and the customer.
