What separates the best from the rest?

Have you ever wondered exactly what separates the best sales and service agents from their peers when they’re talking to customers? If you’re like every other sales and service professional I’ve met, you probably have heard terms like building rapport, engaging, understanding and closing in mind. But let’s go back to the question I posed above, exactly what are the best customer-facing people doing?

Terms like building rapport and engaging are outputs that describe the desired state, but they do little to help us understand what agents are actually doing to get there.

So, GRIST did some research to hone in on what these exceptional sales and service agents were doing differently. And then we worked out exactly which micro-behaviours they were applying to their sales and service conversations.

Every year we conduct the Australian Top 10 Sales Contact Centre research. This year we made over 900 inbound calls to 62 different contact centres across nine industries. Each call was a warm sales lead where the customer was looking to change providers. These calls were then assessed against GRIST’s behavioural framework, made up of 70 micro-behaviours, allowing us to determine which behaviours an agent was demonstrating, or not.

Based on this research and equipped with over 64,000 data points, we were able to establish that there are five critical micro-behaviours that customer-focused, high performing agents demonstrate more often than the rest. The most surprising thing about these findings? The behaviours really are that simple.

The graphs below indicate the percentage of times the micro-behaviour was demonstrated by high performers and the rest.

Given that these micro-behaviours are so simple you might be wondering if they can possibly make a difference. A long-term client of GRISTs who has taken a disciplined, long term approach to embedding these micro-behaviours has seen a significant lift in NPS, Employee Engagement and Conversion. In fact, conversion percentage lifted from the mid-30s to high-40s.

Sometimes it is the simplest things that make the biggest difference.

[Photo by Sonja Guina on Unsplash]