Evaluating a Call Centre Sales Initiative

Evaluative Research

A retail bank was interested in conducting some evaluative research to test the effectiveness of a pilot program in one of its call centres. The pilot involved a marketing program designed to cross-sell a comprehensive service suite to the customers of another one of the bank’s products. While initial results from the pilot demonstrated modest success, there was some remaining concern about how such a model would perform in the rollout of the pilot across all of the company’s call centres, including both sales and service call centres, particularly in a few regional markets where the company had low visibility and brand recognition. While the pilot was successful, launching the program nationwide would not be without risk. So far, the bank’s metrics on this pilot only reflected what worked from an operational and marketing perspective. They did not reveal information about the customer experience and full details about sales conversions.




The challenge for the design research team was that the pilot programme was already nearly complete, and moving into implementation with the rollout to all of the call centres. What impact could design have at this late stage in the pilot? How would a design viewpoint bring any value?


It was decided that a good first step would be to revisit the assumptions made in the pilot, and to clarify the goals and success measures against the project’s intent. In particular, it was hoped that a design approach could primarily add some needed customer insight before proceeding to implementation. The bank was also organising a marketing survey around the initial pilot results to test the responses of customers, so the combination of this with the design research approach was seen as a meaningful way to provide the implementation with more solid grounding. The design team would need to examine the detail behind the sales conversion rate as well as customer satisfaction measures to find out both what was working and how it was working—from both staff and customers’ perspectives.


The design team re-framed the pilot phase as “Prototyping” and began to apply some of the design research methods appropriate to this phase in the design process. The goal of prototyping is to try things out and make needed revisions to a design, or even to introduce quite dramatic changes if needed. Therefore, evaluative research techniques would be used to observe results in real time and test the experiential features of the pilot.



The Research Plan


Purpose

The purpose of the design research was to identify the successful elements of the current pilot and to generate recommendations for further refinements to the pilot model for large-scale implementation.


Method

Research was carried out in three phases. The design research team spent two days at the service call centre, observing and listening to incoming customer calls and interviewing call centre staff. Then they spent a day with the product specialists who handled the customer sales. A few days later, the research team contacted customers whose calls they listened in on at the sales call centre and conducted telephone interviews. The purpose of this research was to map the customer’s call pathway from a service call through to the specialist team, who were trained to identify the customer needs and refer the caller to additional services and assistance. The design research team then created a detailed mapping of the customer pathway as a way of visualising and analysing the prototype.




Results

Among some of the learnings gained were that scripts provided to call centre staff were not especially helpful; the most successful staff had re-written their own scripts or worked without a script, ad-libbing each call in a way that was appropriate to each caller. We also learned that successful conversions were most likely where the call centre staff were allowed time to develop a rapport with the customer instead of being timed to complete the call within a defined limit. Converted customers were happy to be “pitched” to, providing the offer was relevant to their needs, and that they felt the call centre staff were responding directly to their queries and concerns. Lastly, the design team was able to identify three different profiles for staff, with the one profile being the most successful in making conversions. A significant surprise finding that came out of the follow-up calls to customers was that fulfilment on the new sales was not being executed well.




Recommendations included focusing cross-selling efforts on staff with the appropriate profile, and making changes to recruitment and training to reflect these findings. Also, the detailed customer experience pathway provided a mapping of where the breakdowns in fulfilment were happening so that those could be addressed at a systemic level. Feedback from customers also brought to light new opportunities for product bundling. Lastly, the research revealed a lot of key information about the brand experience and how customers actually viewed their relationship with the bank. This information would inform not just the implementation of the pilot, but also broader efforts to acquire and retain customers.


The end result was that the design research team was able to suggest ways to improve the call centre experience and effectiveness. Additionally, recommendations around some broader issues of fulfilment and customer perception were made to allow the bank to be more fully responsive to the end-to-end customer experience.

 

Portfolio > Design Research > Service Prototype Testing

Client: Top 5 Financial Services Company, Australia


My Role: Consultant and Researcher