Business Case – Employee Recognition

Moving from Service to Sales

Target Audience
Call Center Reps (union)

Objective
Increase profitability by generating greater sales of more profitable products.

Situation
Client wanted Reps to move from service only — to service and sales. Furthermore, they wanted to motivate Reps to use consultative selling techniques to sell additional products during each customer contact. However, Managers objected, believing that consultative selling would increase call duration and thus decrease sales.

Solution
Working through Manager opposition, we helped implement progressive reward and recognition for both individuals and teams who displayed desired behaviors and showed improvement in the following areas:

  • Sold more profitable products and products with higher number of added features
  • Completed training on consultative selling
  • Passed product quizzes
  • Received “excellent” observations from a Supervisor who observed and rated a Rep applying a new selling skill or using an internal system to ask prescribed questions
  • Attended team-based “efficiency” meetings

    • The recognition program was designed to move away from cash rewards and into a token reward economy. Desired behaviors were rewarded with ePoints that were immediately deposited into Reps’ online accounts. As ePoints accumulated, Reps could see their improvements reflected in their growing ePoint balance, and redeem their ePointsSales To Service Results Graphic for high-quality merchandise selected from an exciting online catalog.

    Results
    Outstanding! Reps responded to the program and their performance significantly improved — their average products sold per call increased 141% using non-cash incentives.

    Behavior changes translated into huge dollars for our client. A $2,171,000 incremental revenue gain was directly attributed to our program (total revenue increase was $8.6 million).

    Non-cash reward programs proved to be effective in increasing average products sold per call and significantly impacted revenue!