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How AT&T Overlapped Sales, Service to Boost Sales

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"You’re going to see a lot of Yogi Berra quotes," said John Cushman, vice president of business marketing at AT&T, referencing the Hall of Fame Yankee catcher and blithely unaware comedic sage.

Cushman was speaking to a crowd at the 2011 Call Center Exchange, held alongside the recent 12th Annual Call Center Week. Cushman’s presentation, "Maximizing Your Resources – People, Process, Technology," covered the ways AT&T had bettered its customer service through new tactics that empower and better train contact center agents to recognize more opportunities.

"You don’t have to be a Yankee fan, but you have to like Yogi Berra," Cushman, an every-man relatable Bronx native, told the group.

The first quote: "You can observe a lot by just watching."

Meaning: watch your customers. Cushman listed transaction feedback, call center operations data, field research and market analysis and customer satisfaction surveys as different ways AT&T learns about customers. Each customer wants something different, though, and Cushman said AT&T realized that agents in different departments were only able to recognize niche specific needs. Service agents failed to identify when a customer was looking to be sold on new products. Conversely, sales agents were blind to desires for service on current products.

The second quote: "You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there."

Meaning: recognize the goal of your contact center before determining your process. AT&T refocused its goal to provide the end user with more robust service and target more user needs upfront. Previously, AT&T had focused on offering the best sales training within sales and the best service training within customer service. As a result, each department was most likely to blame its counter part for a customer’s problem.

What the company didn’t realize was the overlap between the two.

"Sales need to understand the service process," Cushman said as he casually wandered the room during his presentation. "And service needs to know how hard sales are. And the roles between the two need to be clear."

So AT&T had contact center employees switch jobs after hours to give a clear picture of what each job entailed. Immediately, agents began to recognize more ways to service a customer, whether it was a service agent spotting an up-sell potential, or a sales agent quickly troubleshooting.

Within three months, AT&T had a 15 percent lift in online sales.

"Encourage people to work together with a common goal," Cushman said. "Overlaps can provide competitive advantages. Take a look at your process and realize where the overlap occurs. How is that overlap linked to selling and service?"

Allowing overlap between agents requires empowering agents as well. Perhaps allow service representatives to authorize fee write-offs. Or maybe allow agents to authorize the dispatch of an agent to the customer’s site directly.

The final quote: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

Meaning: Be open to change and expect the unexpected. AT&T has empowered its agents in some of the ways mentioned above as part of its "Smart Risk-Taking" initiative.

AT&T also endorses a "Freedom to Fail" policy, allowing any employee to try any innovative idea if it doesn’t appear it will ostensibly hurt the company. Once, a contact center agent filmed a troubleshooting video in his own time. After running it by the legal department, which gave a "why not," the video was posted on YouTube. It garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

And in his own effort to provide robust service, Cushman wrapped up – "If you’ve had a bad experience with AT&T, I’ll be here later."


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