Contact Centers: Two Ways to Improve Sales and Customer Service

* Link incentives to both sales and service performance metrics. While many contact center managers incentivize CSRs for sales performance, such bonuses often result in a decrease in customer service levels, the Best Practices officials write. To preserve and improve customer service levels, the authors suggest designating a specific percentage of bonus pay to service performance based on monthly customer satisfaction scores. If you have a sophisticated measurement system, split incentives based on customer satisfaction, sales performance and overall productivity. Such an approach, however, often is more costly due to the need to gather reliable data and assess each CSR’s performance individually.