Upselling, the Multichannel Way

Since the 1980s, when the majority of catalog orders began shifting from mail orders to the telephone, it’s become standard practice to not just take phone orders efficiently, but also to incorporate the upsell as a regular part of call center operations.

But it’s 2007, and the typical catalog order isn’t necessarily over the phone anymore. Consider this scenario:

Your customer calls to place an order and everything in the process goes smoothly. Your order taker follows standard practice and offers one or more upsells. In the classic equation, you’ve created additional potential value for the customer — more satisfaction with your fabulous products, more sense of loyalty because of your extraordinary care, increased order value for little or no increased cost, and a greater share of wallet, among others.

Here’s the modern-day twist: Your customer is online shopping the site during the phone call. How can you take advantage of this multichannel experience to add value in a new way? Naturally, this is going to happen more and more frequently, so it makes sense to approach the process strategically.

Feel Them Out

The first thing you want to find out is if calling customers are online. Certainly you can find this out if they announce it, but even that knowledge will need to be filtered by a rep who is listening and making appropriate decisions. At some point, try asking customers if they’re online so you can guide them from there.

If they’re online, figure out whether it’s worth addressing the situation. Do you want them online while you’re on the phone? The cost advantage of self-service on the Web no longer applies; the full expense of any inbound phone call has been triggered anyway.

But now you have some new opportunities, including the chance to teach customers how to deal with any online order problems, so the self-service option gains relevance again. Spending that kind of teaching time on the phone can show how much you want to support the relationship and participate together, and it’s well worth the labor and telephone cost if you end up with a successfully completed transaction instead of an abandoned online shopping cart.

Do-it-all Shopping

Adding on real value helps cement customers’ sense of loyalty because it demonstrates both helpfulness and the ease of one-stop, do-it-all shopping. This is true whether you’re offering additional services (e.g., gift wrap, cards, personalization, club or community memberships, newsletters) or products (e.g., upsells, cross-sells, discounted specials).

The biggest advantage of the phone/Web order-taking combo is that customers can see exactly what you’re discussing. Plus, you get the double-whammy of interactivity; as the rep and the customer shop together, you get to learn more about customer preferences and needs — both pay off in better decision making in the long run.

There could be some potential problems, too. Customers can be distracted by what they’re seeing and not pay enough attention to what they’re hearing. They may want to read your wonderfully written Web copy, which is going to be a little different from a live person’s dialogue. So calls may take longer.

And you may cannibalize some of your Web promotions if the Web has different specials and deeper discounts. So you’ll need to honor any discounts online to avoid a sense of bait and switch (although you may be able to convince customers to take an extra item or two).

You’re still investing in relationship-building, though. So if you decide that the pros outweigh the cons, consider the possible reasons why customers might call when they’re already online — or vice versa.

• Difficulty ordering.
• Word choice, i.e., your search function doesn’t recognize the name a customer used to find a particular item in your mix.
• Confusion regarding the shipping and handling method or expense.
• Service concerns the Web site doesn’t answer.
• Optimization, e.g., your site was created for Internet Explorer and they’re using other browsers, so nothing works/displays quite right.

Consider the Possibilities

In sum, they might be calling about any possible usability, product or service issue. Conversely, they might have no problem at all. They may have started out by calling you to order, and while they were waiting in queue, they heard your on-hold message about visiting your Web site and thought they’d go check it out. Or they might be at the office and multitasking — calling you while looking something up on the corporate intranet.

Your reps should be sensitive to all these possibilities so they can shift gears for greater speed, confidence-building, or outright salesmanship, as the circumstance requires.

Some set-up work is necessary to maximize these opportunities. You’ll certainly need support from your Web designers for this audio-visual approach to be as successful as possible. Consider some potential infrastructure problems. The probability of error is very high if your rep dictates as your customer types, so minimize the likelihood of this situation, whether via “pushing” pages to the customer or having buttons or other clickthrough devices on the relevant pages.

Some other ponderables: Will customers be able to toggle smoothly from cart to selling page if they want to see their order subtotal and you don’t run it on the screen they’re currently on? Should you have a “compare” option so customers can consider several alternatives they hadn’t noticed before? If you can’t build in such a function, make sure your reps know the browsers your customers use and can explain how to open multiple tabs or windows, and switch back and forth.

In the same way your marketers think about the landing page, have them think about the termination page, which may remain open on the browser once the call is done. This either could be on the order confirmation screen if the transaction itself occurred online or on some other page the rep led customers to if the rep places the order during the call. Do you want more product pictures? A big thank-you message? Information about upcoming promotions?

Offer Options

In addition to requiring training, reps will have to possess sound judgment to choose the best timing for an upsell offer. If the offer is geared specifically to a product the customer is choosing or to a specific circumstance the customer has noted, the offer should occur as close to the purchase or discussion as possible. If the call is plain vanilla, though, with the customer requesting item after item, then your rep can offer a generic upsell at the end of the call.

Although many reps feel more comfortable with a generic offer on the assumption that it’s less threatening, it’s also less engaging to the customer. Particularly if the customer has explained the reason for being in two channels simultaneously — it should be relatively easy for the rep to segue into an offer:

“While we’re on the phone and you have the Web site up, could I just ask you to click the link under the photo so you can see the discontinued colors you might want to stock up on?” Try to emphasize products the reps like; it’s amazingly easy for them to avoid making offers they don’t believe will be successful for them.

Above all else, reps need to know when enough is enough. Customer tolerance for the combination of phone time and clicking around will come to an end quickly. So unless an individual customer is an avid buyer, it’s best not to ask to change pages more than once or twice.

Check out most research reports these days and you’ll see that more than half of most catalogers’ orders are coming in online. Back when phone orders became commonplace, the opportunity to upsell caught on fast. Now comes another new opportunity worth jumping on.

Liz Kislik is president of Liz Kislik Associates LLC, a consultancy that focuses on customer satisfaction and employee success as the building blocks of a resilient, effective enterprise. You can reach her at (516) 568-2932 or lizk@lizkislik.com.

*For more on how to get your CSRs ready to deal with phone/online order taking, check out “Prepare Your Reps” under Related Content in the upper-right corner of this page.