My client had me review a training by ICMI called Adding Sales to a Service Environment.  This was a class given by Mary Murcott from Performance Transformations.  The ICMI writeup is:

Have you been tasked to add sales to a primarily service environment? Are representatives reluctant to make the leap? Are you having trouble meeting expectations? Adding sales can hurt or help customer satisfaction with your call center.

It was recorded on August 24, 2007. 

These reviews were somewhat written with my client’s needs in mind. In addition to this, I selected two agents to watch this — one sales oriented and the other service oriented.  Their opinions were the same, however, when they finished up with it.  The biggest difference was that the sales oriented agent immediately came up with a laundry list of ideas on “how” to do it, where the service oriented agent was still cautious.

My review:
Although the training was not quite as detailed as I was expecting nor did it cover the information that I was hoping, it certainly had some very interesting aspects to it.  The biggest disappointed was that it didn’t cover, with as many options or thoughts as I would have liked, the minutia of how to actually change the culture in an effective manner.  What it did cover was some performance management techniques, some common mistakes, and some ideas on how to start the transition from a service environment to a sales environment.  The largest thing that I got out of it was that sales should not eclipse service, even if you’re tasked to generate revenue.  By maximizing your service level in terms of customer satisfaction, studies have shown that sales success also improves.

The other part that I agreed with and believe is a strong idea regardless of sales, service or some combination is the inclusion of predictive hiring tools including skills and aptitude assessments rather than simply using an interview process.  Although the lecturer didn’t go into it in great detail, she did stress that it improved the choices of hiring. Finally, one of the things that was interesting was the way that strong technological integration could improve the opportunity and increase satisfaction in a more effective manner.

All in all, my thought is that this is certainly worth watching for 2 hours in order to garner some additional ideas and thoughts, as well as some ideas on how to help begin the transition in a more structured way.  It also lays down some important ground rules in terms of training, hiring, and KPIs. 
 
Sales oriented agent and service oriented agent’s review:

They both went into this with the wrong perspective, even though they’d been told that it wouldn’t teach them front line skills.  After reviewing the file, they stated that it would not be worthwhile for any agent levels to watch.  They felt that Team Lead levels might gain a little from it, especially in some ways to help train and coach.  Team Supervisor or Manager levels could gain the most by this as it is focused more on their skills and the impact that they can have within the overall call center.  Both of them felt that their small group had put much of what was learnt into play already, though they thought that the technology side could be integrated more and that the center could have a much greater bottom line impact if their division allowed them to sell other divisional products or helped identify alternative cross selling opportunities through other divisions.

 The big thing that they both said that was crucial across the entire call center for this to be successful was training, training and training. They loved one of the ideas in the training with regards to showing the value proposition of the items.