How can contact centers make a positive financial impact on the business? After the sale is made, most interactions with customers occur when they need help with your product or service. Not only does service have a great influence on customer CSAT and loyalty, the interactions present an excellent opportunity for the customer service organization to generate additional revenue. Agents have incredible insight into customer needs. They have the opportunity to increase customer value by offering the precise product or service customers need to be successful. A few examples of this attentive customer service in action are providing contract renewals, offering replacement parts, upselling, and cross-selling.

Contract renewals

When customers call in for help, agents need to verify the service contract is valid prior to assisting the customer. This can be done with Salesforce Entitlements. If the contract is not valid, a great service experience is to offer and transact service renewal on the spot. This ensures the customer can get the help they need right away. But how do you ensure the Agent has the information they need to provide the right type of contract and at the right price? The answer is Salesforce CPQ, Configure Price Quote, which can integrate with Service Cloud seamlessly. Agents can view historical contracts as well as automatically generate a new service contract with all the quotes and products line items preconfigured.

Replacement parts

Another revenue opportunity in the contact center is parts replacement, such as in the manufacturing industry. Oftentimes the fix is a new part. The customer might have a warranty that covers parts replacement or the customer may need to just purchase the new part. How does the agent know if the customer is covered under warranty terms or the right pricing for the part given special rates for customers? Here again, it starts with CPQ. Pricing in an Enterprise situation is often not as simple as finding an SKU off the shelf and taking the list price. Surfacing CPQ in a service scenario can help your agents if there is a contractual, volume, or metric-based discount for purchasing the replacement part associated with the core asset. In addition, once the transaction has been made, CPQ can keep a record of that transaction so the agent has complete visibility into how the install base has changed over time.

Service upsell

Getting to the front of the queue is a regular hassle for customers. A customer calls the contact center about an issue that has an immediate impact on business operations but is put in a lengthy queue for the next available agent. The wait can be frustrating and test customer patience (time is the most valued thing to customers). But upon successfully helping the customer, the agent then suggests that the customer should consider purchasing Premium Support, which will provide—among other benefits—front-of-the-line support access.

Selling this value-add service at the support point of contact is opportune because customers are much more likely to make a purchase after having just resolved a high-impact issue. This is when customers needs are most apparent and willingness to purchase is high. But how do you ensure that this selling process is easy? You guessed it: CPQ can guarantee that the agent easily gets the right pricing to the customer.

Service cross-sell

Cross-selling is the tactics used to sell the customer on additional products and services. A customer contacts your business to add a travel notification to their credit card account. This is a great opportunity for agents to cross-sell by offering an additional service the company offers, like travel insurance. Because the customer is a long-time member, they also qualify for a discounted rate. But how to ensure the discount is accurate and the sale goes through without a hitch? With CPQ the agent can offer the right discount which will, in turn, increase customer satisfaction and promote brand loyalty. CPQ can automatically apply discount rules to an entire quote or individual products and product groups, so agents get pricing right the first time.

Ultimately, by arming your service team with the above practices just like you arm your sales team, you can ensure that selling doesn’t end with sales. Service Centers are well-positioned to impact sales in a big way and increase revenue for the company as a whole. With Salesforce predictive intelligence, next best action, and CPQ, you can make it easy for agents to get the right pricing to the right customer at the right time and increase customer satisfaction.

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