Spotting Opportunities & Making Referrals

Lessons in Cross-Selling for the Call Center and the Frontline

Every day, frontline personnel and call center agents typically interact with more customers than anyone else in your organization. It makes sense for leadership to expect your company’s high traffic locations and high call volume points to generate quality referrals that lead to product and service sales. Yet understanding how to cross sell banking products isn’t always straightforward. People in frontline or call center positions often struggle to spot opportunities or make a smooth transition from handling a transaction to a short, needs-based discussion that can lead to a referral or cross-sell.

There are many critical responsibilities of any customer-facing employee, but none will be more important than these two:

1. Process transactions accurately and look for ways to expand the relationship.
2. Every client encounter presents an opportunity to engage the customer.

When you keep customers engaged, you may uncover a need that’s not being met. Alert, attentive frontline staff can spot these opportunities and act accordingly by introducing a new product or making a referral to a specialist. However, if the employee doesn’t know how to engage the customer, or feels unprepared for questions about your products and services, that conversation most likely will never happen and the opportunity is lost. Add to that the common assumption that customers don’t have time and they would ask if they need something, and you’re missing out on a lot of potential business. Research proves time and again that customers are interested in ways your business can help them with their needs.

The keys to successful referrals and cross-sells are preparation and curiosity. Preparation involves knowledge of the institution’s offerings and best matches of products and services to meet customer needs. Curiosity about the customer leads to engagement that can provide discovery of a life event, need or problem that an attentive call center agent or branch staff person can offer a solution or a referral that results in a satisfying match.

Benefits

• Overcome fear of engaging with the customer
• Change your mindset about cross-selling
• Learn to prepare for a successful conversation
• Meet product and service customer targets
• Build product-matching guides
• Use your curiosity to build customer relations
• Discover curiosity-seeking questions
• Learn to multiply referrals

Format

This 2-hour program is available as a remote learning session and a live workshop at your location. Participants will learn how to cross-sell banking products and how to bring out their curiosity-seeking skills. Virtual programs are available for this session.