In many ways, driving more sales is the litmus test to customer success. Even though generating revenue is a shared goal that requires a collective effort, one team that can directly impact your sales quotient is customer support. It provides significant ancillary revenue by creating upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
Your service reps interact with customers who already trust your brand. That makes upselling and cross-selling a lot easier. In fact, according to a Forbes article, you have a 60-70% better chance to sell to an existing customer as opposed to the 5-20% chance of selling to a new prospect.
The Art of Upselling and Cross-Selling
Upselling is a sales strategy that involves pitching an upgraded version of a product or service to the customers. For instance, consider a customer, Max, who contacts your support team to resolve an issue related to his iPhone’s storage space. In addition to resolving the issue, the support rep encourages him to upgrade to a newer model with a bigger storage.
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Contrarily, cross-selling involves pitching additional products that complement the existing purchase of the customers. For instance, if the customer has already purchased the latest iPhone, the representative might encourage them to buy headphones or a wireless charger to accompany the purchase.
The right offer at the right time delights customers. Therefore, the benefits of upselling and cross-selling are not just limited to generating revenue but also improving customer retention. But how exactly can your support reps upsell or cross-sell? In this blog post, we list four ways how AI helps them drive more sales.
1. Use a Personalized Approach
Blatant sales pitches that ignore a customer’s needs are not only annoying but disrespectful. Be mindful and only make upsell or cross-sell offers if they provide value to the customer. That said, building an upsell or cross-sell strategy without knowing the customer journey is just guesswork. This is where your support team can help you.
Since they talk with your customers regularly and know their pain points, they can pass insights to the sales team to provide better offers. To ensure that the focus essentially remains on providing value, integrate your support ecosystem with intelligent applications that are powered by machine learning.
Why? Because a little help from ML and your agents can switch from a generic upsell/cross-sell strategy to a more personalized approach. ML models learn from customer behavior, purchase history, likes, and dislikes to come up with proactive offers and recommendations.
For instance, Amazon displays a separate section of ‘Recommended for You’ based on the buying and search history of a user.
2. Use Previous Interactions to Drive Suggestions
Knowing how the customer’s product usage has changed over time along with the various factors that influenced it is imperative to developing smart selling strategies. When upselling or cross-selling, geographical attributes matter, but knowing how customers behave beats everything else. That’s why you should empower your support agents with cognitive technology as it provides rich insights into customer behavior.
Applications like Agent Helper and Escalation Predictor harness the power of AI and deep analytics to help you with the same.
Agent Helper proactively provides relevant, enterprise-wide information to your agents on the fly. What’s more, it leverages advanced case clustering to classify each case and provide a one-stop view of the customer’s journey. Escalation Predictor, on the other hand, computes the likeliness of a case being escalated after analyzing past support tickets so that agents can offer preemptive corrective measures.
3. Build an Omnichannel Customer View
Go beyond the ambit of one interaction and get a 360-degree view of customers across all touchpoints. Leverage ML and NLG to get actionable insights and context about a customer’s needs and interests from different channels. With insights into a customer’s buying behavior, a customer support representative can find the right opportunity to present them with a compelling offer.
To elucidate further, a customer might be calling in to report a software issue, whereas for the last four times the customer called in to enquire more about the various software packages. Your support rep can pass the necessary information to the sales team so that they can make the right offer at the right time.
4. Identify the Needs and Goals Of the Customer
Emotions are one of the biggest drivers for purchase decisions. That’s why CX leaders are reorganizing their business strategy towards understanding the needs and goals of their customers. Under this, enterprises first construe the needs of a customer correctly. After that, they orchestrate actions like upselling and cross-selling only if it fulfills the goal or is relevant to a customer.
Usually, companies have enough customer data but it’s scattered and trapped in different platforms that aren’t integrated. Due to these data silos, companies don’t have a 360-degree view of customers which further prevents them to identify customers’ state of mind and emotions. AI-powered applications like Escalation Predictor can save the day. It performs sentiment analysis to gauge dissatisfaction from support tickets and forewarn agents if a case is about to go south.
For example, let’s say you have a customer community and the members express their struggle to find relevant information during a crisis. Using rich insights from AI-powered apps, you can fill content gaps and expedite knowledge discovery by surfacing relevant information.
Key Takeaways
It’s about time to give cross-selling and upselling the attention they rightfully deserve. Technologies like ML and deep analytics don’t merely help to achieve a marketing goal but also meet customer expectations.
If you too are looking for tools that help you turn the corner, then next-gen apps powered by SearchUnify fit the bill. To witness the magic yourself, request a demo right now!
