Interact is delighted to partner with the Call Centre Management Association on the launch of the Good Practice Guide: Driving Effective Sales and Retention Programmes.

At a time when customer expectations continue to intensify, there’s a requirement for an increased focus on effective sales and retention strategies.

While technologies such as AI and smarter data analytics have a vital role to play, organisations also need to ensure that they’re driving the right advisor behaviours and simplifying journeys for customers. Above all, however, they need to ensure that they have a team of experienced professionals who are dedicated to driving results and success.

Growing revenue and retaining your customers is an increasingly difficult challenge given the sales and retention challenges created by today’s rapidly-changing customer landscape. So what steps can you take to improve sales and optimise customer retention within the contact centre to maximise customer lifetime value?

Here are five key take aways:

  1. Continually analyse your customer journeys – This shouldn’t be a one-off exercise. Having access to live analytics gives you real-time access to insights from across all your different journeys – helping you to quickly identify what’s working and what’s not, and fine tune accordingly.
  2. Focus on measuring momentum – With customer behaviours and channels continually evolving, it’s vital for sales and retention teams to keep track of momentum – rather than just concentrating on the raw numbers. There’s no guarantee that last year’s strategy will work the same this year – particularly in a time of global and economic uncertainties. Make sure you have the analytics in place to respond effectively.
  3. Don’t be afraid of doing things differently – Ticking boxes and doing what everyone else does might seem like a low risk approach, but you don’t want to be the company that gets left behind. This can become a real risk as increased automation crowds out process innovation opportunities. Skip-level meetings provide a great way of surfacing new thinking. Remember it’s your frontline that are talking to your customers all day long – they almost always have the answers. Doing something different helps you stand out.
  4. Empower advisor intervention – No matter how well you’ve refined your customer journeys, successful sales and retention still comes down to having motivated, inquisitive and success-oriented people speaking to customers. That’s why it makes sense to empower your people, unlocking discretionary advisor behaviours and supporting them in winning business through tools such as AI.
  5. Break down your channel silos – Almost all sales and retention teams recognise the damage that can result from having siloed digital and voice channels. Legacy channel conflict with teams cannibalising each other’s target customers was inevitably harmful to everyone involved. Fortunately most teams now work hand-in-hand, and that’s critical given the increased complexity of today’s customer journeys. Customer contact leadership needs to keep on top of this to prevent new silos emerging.

The full Good Practice Guide is available here: Good Practice Guide: Driving Effective Sales and Retention Programmes – CCMA