Sales Incentive Plans: 10 Essentials

By Michelle Nichols

November 17, 2006 11:37AM

The best place to start when creating your sales pay plan is by determining what your customers want. If they would prefer more service and expertise, you might want to pay your salespeople more salary and less commission. If your customers prefer less hand-holding, or if a group other than your sales team handles customer service, then setting up a plan that offers more — or all — commission might be right for you.

Creating the perfect sales compensation plan is a struggle for companies of all sizes. Salespeople want to make the most money with the least effort. Business owners and managers want the most profits and the fewest hassles. I addressed this issue in a column over three years ago and continue to hear from readers asking what they should do.

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Building Loyalty That Lasts a Lifetime

By Bruce Clapp

November 6, 2006 10:14AM

All the strategies in the world won’t have impact unless employees understand how to integrate them into their daily activities. Communication with customers, a focus on relevant offers and the ability to problem solve are attributes every employee should possess in order to facilitate the creation of brand loyalty.

For many banks, the issue of retention only shows up on the radar when customers begin to walk out the door. However, focusing on retention after an exodus has begun is typically too late.

Banks need to start work on retention long before customers enter the branch for their first interaction. Retention strategy should be woven into every aspect of the bank’s philosophy: How you attract customers, interact with them and keep them coming back all.

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Customer Service Is Back in Style

November 22, 2006 9:46AM

The customer service that’s giving retailers their robust sales numbers is more complex than the perfunctory “How may I help you?” of yesteryear. Today, retailers are responding to customer demands on many levels, from making the store an inviting destination to restocking shelves regularly and stocking the right mix of products.

“Hi, how can I help you?” For years, that was the hallmark of customer service for many retailers. Zip ahead to Black Friday, 2006. Customer service is in the midst of a transformation across the retail landscape, becoming a more focused, strategic weapon in the competitive arsenal for a variety of retailers.
Retailers angle for better customer service in several ways: signing up trendy designers, finding products to appeal to their specific customers, and listening more carefully. The result? They’re seeing the payoff in their profits.

At office-supply retailer Staples, for instance, the old “Can I help you?” is out, replaced with: “What can I help you find today?” “We then walk a customer to a product and might use that opportunity to cross-sell other items,” says Shira Goodman, Staples’ executive vice-president of marketing. She notes that Staples’ customer-satisfaction metrics increased by 5 percentage points after employee training was focused.

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Going End-To-End with CRM

By Elizabeth Millard

November 29, 2006 10:24AM

Implementing an end-to-end CRM system takes planning and a shared goal, but the actual technology doesn’t have to involve particularly heavy lifting, says Oracle’s Mark Woollen. Many CRM vendors have added integration tools over the last few years, and can work with companies to create customized end-to-end strategies.

Customer Relationship Management software, which is better known these days simply as CRM, can be beneficial to many parts of an enterprise, particularly by helping sales reps and service personnel track information about customers and prospects. But it’s putting the pieces together, extending beyond the basic functionality and establishing connections from end-to-end throughout the enterprise that can really make for more powerful processes.

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Four Components of the Successful Customer Experience

It’s about more than fulfilling a transaction.

by Randy Saunders

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Most contact center leaders are battle-tested enough to know that each and every customer interaction is a test of the service organization as a whole. But not everyone realizes that each and every customer touch is a test of the entire brand and its promise to that customer.

When your brand goes on trial, you must deliver the kind of experience that transcends the ordinary and the everyday, and reaffirms the company’s entire brand premise. In the contact center, the front line of so many businesses, revenue is made and lost every day not on price or performance, but by the quality of the customer experience.

“Managing the customer experience is a complex undertaking that requires strategic choices to be made, new competencies to be developed, and management’s will to execute,” says Shaun Smith, customer experience expert of Shaun Smith + Co.

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Prospect Development Management for On-Demand CRM

Can these new tools solve sales teams’ old problems?

by Timothy Ramos

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

In an effort to make your sales team more effective, you invest a chunk of money licensing a new on-demand CRM system. The result? Your reps don’t use it, or they use it just for forecasting because they are required to. So you spend more money buying market intelligence from a variety of data providers. The result? Your reps have to search multiple online and offline sources for the details they want. And because there’s no simple way to input their research into the CRM system, the market intelligence information never makes its way there either–therefore losing its value.

Sound familiar??? Read on….

Banks must focus on listening to their customers and tweaking their services to help improve retention and cross-sell initiatives; a study says that Wachovia leads in online banking satisfaction.

by Coreen Bailor

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

A superb online experience can have a significant impact on a bank’s ability to retain its customers and attract new ones: 52 percent of the 1,349 online users very satisfied with online banking surveyed for a Jupiter Research report would recommend the bank, 32 percent wouldn’t change banks, and another 32 percent would consider the bank for additional products. “U.S. Online Banking Consumer Survey, 2006,” which leverages the responses of random online consumers from Ipsos-Insight’s U.S. online consumer panel, examines the correlation between online satisfaction levels and propensity to stay and buy additional offerings, while also highlighting online banking best practices.

For the full story, click here…..

Top Ten Success Secrets of Email Marketing

According to Jupiter Research, 93% of U.S. Internet users consider email their top online activity. Email is a fast, inexpensive, and effective way to communicate with your prospects, customers, and vendors.

But how do you use email marketing effectively, without irritating the receivers? In this white paper you’ll learn:

How often to send email
How to write messages that get a response
Why you must systematically deliver what your customers value, and quickly fix problems when you don’t
When to use HTML and when to use text only
How to build lists that perform

Get the best practices of email marketing drawing on the experience of some of the most successful industry practitioners. Get a clear picture of trends and patterns to aid you in mapping your email marketing strategy.

To gain access to this and many other valuable CRM whitepapers at RightNow’s CRM library, click here….

IBM Develops Program for Call Centers

By Rajesh Mahapatra

November 8, 2006 8:34AM

“English has become the common language of the business world, so the ability to communicate effectively in English can dictate success or failure in integrating into the global business environment,” said Dan Dias, director of India Research Lab.

Even as Indian call centers have thrived in the past decade, helping U.S. companies cut costs and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs here, they have faced a seemingly insurmountable problem: Most Indian employees speak heavily accented English.

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Virtual Contact Centers Are Connecting

VoIP’s ability to help call centers more effectively and efficiently manage geographically dispersed agents is a key reason for expected growth.

by Coreen Bailor

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

The penetration of VoIP into the contact center, although continuing to improve, has been sluggish, but substantial uptake is on the horizon according to a report by Yankee Group: VoIP adoption in North American contact centers will jump from about 17 percent in 2005 to more than 47 percent by the end of 2007. The findings of the report, “Migration Costs, Vendor Loyalty and Need for ‘Agents Anywhere’ Define Contact Center VoIP Adoption Plans,” are based on Yankee’s survey of 351 contact center decision makers in the U.S. and Canada.
The forecasted adoption rate of more than 47 percent is attributable to the additional 21 percent that plan to adopt within 12 months and the 9 percent that plan to deploy within 24 months. But another 38 percent of respondents are researching and investigating VoIP, according to the report, which indicates that the VoIP penetration rate will grow even more dramatically as these investigations drive future conversion decisions. “It shows a difference from ’should I implement VoIP’ to ‘when should I,’” says Ken Landoline, customer centric strategies senior analyst at Yankee Group. The remaining 15 percent have no plans to adopt VoIP.

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