Sales & Marketing Management - January/February 2008 - (Page 26)

technology MAXIMIZE SALES SWELL YOUR SALES WITH SPEECH ANALYTICS By Jeff Gallino rom cross-selling in the contact center to online marketing campaigns, companies today are always looking for ways to generate new revenue. But how do you know if a marketing campaign is working? How can you make sure contact center agents are fully leveraging cross-sell and upsell opportunities? How can you tell whether your efforts are keeping customers loyal or driving them away? The problem is, you can’t … at least, not using traditional methods and metrics. Sure, you can tally up the totals after a major promotion and find out whether it was a rousing success or a major flop. (Of course, if it was the latter, it will be too late to do anything about it.) And yes, you can listen to random calls to see how well agents are cross-selling or up-selling. But you’ll have no way of knowing whether the calls you happen to hear accurately reflect activity throughout the contact center. As far as loyalty and churn are concerned, you can use customer satisfaction surveys and exit interviews. But you’re likely to find that they often provide too little information, too late, to have much effect. So what’s the alternative? For more and more companies today, the answer is speech analytics, an automated tool for gathering customer intelligence that affects sales. In its most advanced form, speech analytics can listen to and accurately analyze 100% of the content of 100% of customer conversations recorded in the contact center, providing you with critical insights to positively impact sales and marketing efforts. maximizing sales opportunities Cross-selling and up-selling in the contact center represent important opportunities to generate additional revenue at minimal cost. Companies can use CRM systems or examine customer transaction records to determine whether a customer has accepted an offer. But what they won’t find out is whether an offer was actually made in the first place, if the offer was rejected, why it was rejected or accepted, and what the agent might have said to affect the outcome of the attempt. Advanced speech analytics uncovers all of this information. With this knowledge, a company can accurately monitor the percentage of offers made, track the results and take corrective action as necessary. For example, one company that employed an advanced speech analytics solution was surprised to learn that its contact center agents were taking advantage of opportunities to up-sell warranty upgrades only about 11% of the time. Even worse, only a small percentage of those up-selling attempts (16%) were successful. Based on this information, the company instituted an initiative to increase up-sell attempts to 33%, for direct potential earnings of $3 million annually. F increasing loyalty, reducing churn Keeping customers and cultivating their loyalty is critical to any company’s success today. Advanced speech analytics can help increase loyalty and reduce churn by detecting the signs of customer satisfaction www.salesandmarketing.com www.salesandmarketingmanagement.com 26 SALES &MARKETING MANAGEMENT istock photo JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008 http://www.salesandmarketingmanagement.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sales & Marketing Management - January/February 2008

Sales & Marketing Management - January/February 2008
Contents
Editor's Letter
Brian Tracy University
Sales
Marketing
Management
Cover Story: Everything Happens in Vegas
Boosting Your Brain
Loyalty Goes Global
Swell Your Sales
Training
Technology
Incentives/Motivation
Travel/Meetings
Excerpt
The Way I See It

Sales & Marketing Management - January/February 2008

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