It Starts With an Other-Centered® Approach
Serving and selling 60 customers a day is never easy. Asking your reps to change is even harder, but change can happen. Conversion rates, average order size, and the overall customer experience can improve. Our approach to changing the way your telesales or customer service reps serve their customer is centered around one philosophy: Selling should be the highest form of serving. It's about meeting needs, stated and unstated, not about manipulation. Reframing selling is where we start in our call center training programs. Unlike typical “call center school,” we believe this is the key to unlocking the desire of your reps to sell and enhancing the receptivity of your customers.
Customer Service Training
It’s simple: Most reps think of themselves as customer service reps or contact center employees, not sales reps.The key is to redefine their role. That’s where our call center training and development program comes in. We equip service reps, whether in a retail environment or in a call center, to embrace their role, transition from serving to selling, and build value in relevant products and services.
Telesales Training
Whether making outbound calls or handling hundreds of inbound calls a week, selling/ upselling your portfolio of products and services is challenging. We’ve designed a call center training program that will equip your call center reps to proactively lead a call, engage the unreceptive customer, and quickly uncover the customer’s needs.
HERE'S WHAT OUR CALL CENTER TRAINING CLIENTS PROGRAM ARE SAYING
Available Courses
EXPERIENCE+
CUSTOMER SERVICE SELLING
Our instructor-led call center training courses show your reps how to enhance the customers experience and grow incremental revenue on every call.
A high percentage of call center agents and call center managers believe that selling focuses on manipulating the customer, not serving the customer. Here lies the problem and the hidden solution to motivating your CSRs to sell.
We begin by identifying and reframing the rep’s role. They learn their goal is not to sell, but to serve. The most successful contact centers embrace this truth: selling isn’t about manipulation but rather proactively ensuring the customer is educated, and all their needs are met – stated and unstated.
Everyone wins. Reps are happy, customers are happy, contact center leaders are happy, average handle time drops, and revenue per call increases. With this new lens, reps learn the mindset and technical knowledge to transition from:
- Reactively responding to a customer’s stated needs to proactively leading the call.
- Asking, “You want fries with that?” to having a consultative dialogue with customers.
- Making a few scripted offers to developing a unique recommendation for every customer.
- Avoiding the tough questions to delivering the truth about why their recommendation is in the customer’s best interest.
- Being uncomfortable with closing to offering the best option for advancing the call.
- Meeting the customer’s service expectations to exceeding their expectations.
TELEGENCE
OUTBOUND SELLING SKILLS
Want to learn how to ace calling cold or dormant customers? This two-day, instructor-led program addresses your unique training needs and the specific techniques you need to succeed.
Ever since the birth of the telephone, cold calling has universally been one of the most unpleasant business challenges. And for outbound sales reps, selling over the phone requires a unique set of skills and custom training material.
Telegence is our two-day, instructor-led training course created specifically for an outbound sales rep calling on cold or dormant customers. This program is not your typical “call center school” - it’s more than just a soft skills training session or a list of call center training tips - it will transform the way your reps approach selling in an outbound environment and ensure they are able to navigate the 12 unique challenges of selling over the phone.
What works traditionally in a face-to-face selling situation not only doesn't work over the phone, it also creates more distance between you and a sale. Selling over the phone thus requires a unique set of skills.
INTELLIGENCE
INBOUND SELLING SKILLS
Our INTelligence program proactively targets your reps ability to proactively lead a call, craft unique solutions over the phone, ensure customer satisfaction, and more.
We beginby addressing the resistance to selling by reframing the rep’s role. Selling isn’t about manipulation, but proactively ensuring the customer is educated and all their needs are met — stated and unstated.
Everyone wins. Reps are happy, customers are happy, average handle time drops, and revenue per call increases.
With this new lens, the reps are ready to learn every step, process, principle, and skill to make it easier and more intuitive to serve their customers and ensure a positive customer experience. Through the in-person workshop or online training courses, your call center staff will learn to transition from:
- Responding to a customer’s stated needs to proactively leading the call.
- Avoiding rejection to eliminating resistance.
- Asking canned questions to having a consultative dialogue with customers.
- Making a few scripted offers to developing a unique recommendation for every customer.
- Avoiding the tough questions to delivering the truth about why their recommendation is in the customer’s best interest.
- Being uncomfortable with closing to offering the best option for advancing the call.
Improve Call Center Training
If you are transitioning your call center to be a revenue center, no one has to tell you that most call center reps and support agents don’t want to sell. And this resistance doesn’t just lead to a sales problem, it also impacts the customer experience.
When customers call our support center for help, the Call Center Rep’s role is seemingly simple:
- address the problem
- ensure the customer is happy.
- look for upsell opportunities
Whether your reps are primarily inbound sellers or customer service reps who need to upsell, the goal is to serve and explore additional needs. So why are most call center reps so reluctant to go along with such a simple program?
The simple answer is mindset and skillset. Our work with call centers over the last three decades to dramatically increase revenue per call validates this simple truth. Addressing the call center staff’s misconception about their role, providing customized agent training, and equipping them to address the 12 unique challenges of selling in an inbound world is the solution.
Developing an Other-Centered Mindset
The CSRs’ emotional resistance to selling is based on their belief that selling is a form of manipulation. In other words, selling (as they understand it) doesn’t align with their value system. “Sell” is another four letter word.
The solution is to build your process, how you position the call center agents’ role, and your overarching purpose on one simple goal: meet all the customer’s stated and unstated needs. Said another way, selling additional products and services should be embraced as the highest form of service. By reframing their role, CSRs are motivated to do what they do best: serve the customer.
This is why every program starts with this simple truth: we are always more effective when we are Other-Centered and we are never more fulfilled than when we are serving others.
12 Unique Call Center Selling Skills
Traditional sales training was built for those who sell in the field and not those call center agents who handle 60+ four minute calls. Therefore, most training fails to address the twelve unique challenges of inbound sales.
To excel and build the confidence to proactively serve, our call center training courses will help reps learn how to:
- Build trust through words, tone & responses
- Build credibility through presence and how they lead the call
- Enhance rapport by reading and adjusting to the customer’s communication style, unique needs, and preferences
- Transition from a service call to a sales call, from reactively answering questions to becoming the trusted guide
- Neutralize an emotional, unreceptive customer over the phone and respond to the five false objections customers use to avoid sellers
- Effectively manage average handle time while moving beyond the stated need and discovering unstated needs
- Develop questioning skills to open up dialogue when the customer is more guarded, preoccupied, or easily distracted
- Without the visual clues, interpret and identify the customer's meta-messages.
- Deliver a scripted, memorized message in a non scripted and natural way, while managing multiple screens
- Build value without any additional visual props and ensure the customer not only believes in the benefits presented, but emotionally embraces the recommendations
- Verbally identify and surface barriers to commitment
- Close the sale without the trust, credibility, and rapport that naturally evolves in a face to face meeting
Since this is where we started in 1996, ASLAN didn’t struggle to adopt their current program to the realities of selling in a call center world. No, we started by watching thousands of interactions, picking up call center training tips from our observations, and then built our call center training program around the challenges inbound reps face day after day.
If you need help in improving customer loyalty or revenue per call, maybe we can help. Our in-person workshops or online training courses might be a great fit for your team to improve their capabilities.
Implement Call Center Training with ASLAN
The challenges in leading a call center are many. It’s like running a manufacturing business, but all the parts are people. The question seems obvious but should be asked. Is it worth investing in call center training courses for your people? Whether delivered in person, virtually, or through online courses, here’s what our clients will tell you about our customized training. Their call center staff was able to:
Ready to learn more?
Contact us to discuss a no-cost sales assessment or to learn more about our call center training programs.
