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Tips to Build a Productive, Reli-able,

High-Quality Global Team

Turning Support into a Profit Center: How to Cross-Sell, Upsell and Satisfy Customers

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Table of ContentsIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Part 1: Support as a Profit Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Part 2: Customers Success and the Turn: Reframing the Definition of Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Part 3: Process and Key Operational Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Part 4: Measuring Success: Leads, Sales Cycles and Sign-Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

About GlowTouch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

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Imagine, for a moment, as a support leader you’re actually receiving requests from senior manage-

ment to grow your team, rather than cut expenses.

Imagine your team isn’t viewed as just a necessary cost but rather as a source of revenue and growth

for your company — and imagine doing all of that while improving customer satisfaction. That’s

what Support As a Profit Center looks like. At GlowTouch, we’ve done this. It’s not easy, but if it’s

done right, it can result in not only a return on investment but a source of pride for your team.

In this guide, we walk you through what Support As a Profit Center is, and show you step by step,

how to set up a support operation that turns a profit.

Introduction

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Part 1: Support as a Profit Center

When we say profit center, we mean a support team that generates more revenue than it costs to employ the team. You do this by directly generating sales during support contacts, as well as generating leads that can be transferred to a traditional sales team.

The Math is Pretty SimpleLet’s say you have a support team of 10 agents and a supervisor that collectively cost $20,000 per month, fully loaded. Now, let’s say that team generates sales of $40,000 per month. That’s a profit center! You are generating twice the revenue it costs to employ the team — a 200 percent ROI. In reality, the benefit is even greater than just revenue, because in the process of generating sales, the team also adds value by supporting customers.

A Real-Life Case StudyHere’s a real-life example. We’ve provided 24/7/365 live-chat support for a client in the web presence industry for more than 15 years, handling both technical support and customer service. For many years, our team was viewed as just a necessary expense to handle our client’s support. A few years back, our client came to us and asked for ideas on how to cut costs without sacrificing the quality of service. We looked at all the usual operational metrics — handle time, occupancy, concurrency — but nothing stood out as a great opportunity. We needed to get creative. As a result, the solution wasn’t to reduce team size or squeeze any of these metrics, but to offset the costs by bringing in additional revenue from the contacts we were already handling. Initially, we set a goal to try to offset costs by creating $1 in addi-tional revenue for every contact we handled. Six years later, that team consistently brings in more than $4/contact, and, just as important, they’ve also improved customer satisfaction.

Still a Support Team, Not a Pure Sales TeamIt’s crucial to note that support is still job #1. We’re not talking about turning a support team into a sales team — not entirely. It’s a “soft sell” approach.

As your support representatives listen to customers and resolve their initial challenges, agents can subtly shift the conversation and introduce an additional product or service. When it’s done correctly, the customer should never notice that it happened.

Staff should be trained to listen and really understand the issue or problem being communicated, then provide the proper solution for the customer. As your support representatives listen to customers and

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resolve their initial challenges, agents can subtly shift the conversation and introduce an additional product or service. When it’s done correctly, the customer should never notice that it happened.

By providing great customer service, resolving initial reasons for contact first and providing solutions, you’re really providing great service, and we’ll touch more on that in the next section.

Don’t Sell on Every Contact One rule to live by: you absolutely do not sell on every contact. The discretion of your team (and their training) is crucial. The typical reason for not introducing a cross-sell or upsell is when a customer is dissat-isfied. When you’re trying to introduce sales into a support conversation, you can’t be too pushy; agents have to recognize when a customer isn’t satisfied and won’t be receptive to new products and services.

Another instance when you wouldn’t sell is when a customer already has all of the products that could be considered appropriate or is already on your highest-level plan. 

Part 2. Customer Success and the Turn: Reframing the Definition of SupportWhen selling through support, having the right mindset is crucial. Approach each customer support contact not only as an avenue to solve a customer’s immediate challenges, but also as an opportunity to support lasting customer success.

Reframe support to move beyond answering a customer’s question, and even anticipating their next question. Focus on truly understanding what is important to that customer and finding them the right solutions to meet their long-term needs.

Our mindset is that we’re always supporting lasting customer success — not just solving the most immediate problem. We’re truly being an advocate for the consumer. In fact, NOT introducing relevant products and services can mean NOT providing the best possible service.

Avoid selling to unsatisfied Customers.

Some customers have maxed out on your offers.

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The TurnSo how do you actually transition support contacts into sales opportunities?

We refer to this as “the turn.” And it goes like this:

When a customer starts a contact, say on a chat, and asks for help with an issue, staff should always start by resolving the customer issue or problem first. During the conversation with the customer, the agent also proactively listens and engages with the customer.

Engaging effectively means asking questions and developing a deeper understanding of what that customer is really trying to achieve — in other words, a deeper understanding of what customer success is for them. The agent should work to uncover a number of key pieces of information. For example:

• How are they using your product or service?

• What gaps do they face?

• What do they need to achieve to accomplish their goals?

Focus on understanding these challenges. Then, you can ultimately enable lasting customer success by proactively offering solutions beyond the reason for their initial contact.

Support agents won’t have any credibility until they fix the issue. But once an agent resolves an issue, there’s this amazing opportunity, a split second, where you’ve got their attention and you’re their hero. Agents can turn the conversation around to introduce a product or service that can help the customer. In some cases, additional products ARE the solution to a problem. But we recommend really focusing on discovering something about the customer during the process of helping them. Then, when the opportunity presents itself, you’re prepared to intro-duce something of interest. Throughout the contact, the agent determines if any products or services would make sense for that customer.

For our web presence client that we mentioned earlier, a great example is where an end user contacts us for help in setting up their email. As we’re in the process of guiding the customer through the setup process, we’ll ask a question or two about how the customer is intending to use their new email — if it will be for collaborating with co-workers, sending out marketing messages to clients or for another

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purpose. It may only seem like small talk to the customer as we’re helping them get set up, but as soon as we’ve confirmed that they’re up and running, we now have an opportunity to mention additional products that may be of real value for them in terms of collaboration or email marketing software.

Training and Mindset for “The Turn”Staff must be trained to see every customer interaction not only as an opportunity to help the end user but also as a way to grow your customer base and revenue. Sales should be ingrained as part of support, following the mindset shift that offering products and services is really a way to help customers achieve lasting success.

We also recommend training staff to practice “turning” conversations. Practice some transition phrases and some closing phrases. We don’t recommend using full-blown scripts, per se, but practicing tech-nique and having some phrases available can be quite helpful for agents executing the turn.

Improving Customer SatisfactionIntroducing these extra offers is a win-win. For you, it results in more sales (and profits), lead generation and better retention.

And in our experience, this kind of approach usually improves any measurement of customer satisfac-tion. When done correctly, it creates a real connection between your support team and your customers. Even when it doesn’t result in a sale or lead, it still feels like you’re going the extra mile to provide great support and true understanding. When it’s done right, it feels just like outstanding service, and selling becomes a natural extension of a customer support contact.

Orienting support toward thinking about cross-sell and upsell opportunities also gives the support team a real sense of how important their role is and how much value they can add — above and beyond taking care of customers and building a great brand.

Part 3: Process and Key Operational RequirementsThe process for setting up a successful cross-sell or upsell program within your support operation starts with having great products and a phenomenal team. Here are the general steps to take when setting up your operation:

• Build a great team full of people who are strong at critical thinking, understanding customer tone and mood and using outstanding communication skills.

• Ensure your support team understands both your customers and the products you’re selling.

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• Map various types of support inquiries to products or solutions.

• Once you have that base to build upon, train your team to understand the turn.

• Make helpful phrases available as part of training. You can also train a few closing phrases to help agents guide customers from interested to seeing value to purchasing.

• Let your staff’s communication skills and product knowledge take over — don’t over-script things.

• There’s going to be a lot of trial and error as you start to figure out what works for your staff, what customers are receptive to, and what leads to the outcomes you want.

• Experiment with different agents or teams, and have teams share their experiences with each other to standardize what works.

Operational ChecklistIn addition to following this process, you’ll need a range of key operational ingredients to cross-sell and upsell through support. Many of the key ingredients will already be present in your setup, simply because they’re already part of most support operations. After all, the beauty of this approach is you’re largely leveraging sunk costs. But you’ll probably need to add some of the items on this list to turn support into a profit center:

1. Thoughtful products and services to sellNone of this can work without the right solutions. Your support team already has a solid under-standing of these solutions.

2. Useful, accessible information about those products and servicesIdeally, work with your marketing team to create a well-designed product page that chat agents can link to directly to explain the costs and benefits of products/services

3. Tracking mechanisms to assign “credit” for sales to specific staff membersThis is something most support teams typically don’t have in place but is critical to measuring success on an agent level and leveraging best practices to help your team improve.

4. Staff incentives to reward salesSupport teams typically don’t have quotas and don’t make as much on commission as a sales teams earns. You don’t necessarily need large incentives — just enough of an incentive to keep your staff focused on turning service contacts into sales.

5. Training designed to help support agents drive sales. Training needs to address the profile of typical customers, when to sell and when not to sell, and it should include helpful tips and tricks for how to make that all-important turn.

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6. A system, likely your CRM, that puts key customer information at your agent’s fingertipsIf you’re support team is trying to generate sales, they have to know which products and services an existing customer already has purchased as well as any previous upsell or cross-sell attempts that have been made.

7. The right support channels — chat, ideallyYou can attempt a cross-sell or upsell through any channel, but to us, chat is the perfect channel in that the customer can stay in the chat but doesn’t have to devote 100 percent of their attention to it. And chat allows for agents to suggest things, send links to videos or pages to help explain the product that they’re introducing and be there in the chat session to ask for the sale when the time is right. Phone is good for gauging customer tone and making a strong connection, but most consumers just want to get off of the phone as fast as possible. Social media and email can be opportunities, but they’re open-ended, meaning you can send a link in a tweet or an email, but you don’t know if the customer will click it, or even if they do, it could be an hour later or a month later. There isn’t immediate feedback where your team can leverage their expertise to make a sale.

Part 4: Measuring Success: Leads, Sales Cycles and Sign-UpsAt GlowTouch, we love metrics and graphing results over time. When it comes to Support as a Profit Center, there are many ways to measure success, and ultimately, both the results you can get and the measures you use will vary by company. The key is to find the right measures for your support center. In this section, we’ll briefly cover the measures we’ve found the most useful over the past 15 years.

Cash/ContactThe measure we’ve focused on the most for our clients is cash per contact. It’s a simple calculation of taking the value of what we’re cross-selling and upselling and dividing that by the number of contacts handled. In other words, how much revenue are you generating each time a customer contacts you?

Now, this number is going to vary, depending on the products or services you sell, the rela-tive value of your offerings and the volume of contacts you receive. But you want to set some goals for this based on your own unique setup.

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Sign-Ups/ContactMany SaaS companies these days offer a “freemium” model, giving away a basic level of their product for free and then working to upgrade their way into a paying client. For companies like this, we might measure sign-ups per contact, because our team is interacting with visitors to their website, who are not yet customers, and the goal is to get them to sign-up for free. If you measure success in sign-ups, look at the number of visitors to your website, how many chats you can engage those visitors in and how many of those conversations result in a free sign-up — the important measure of value.

Leads/Contact or Appointments/ContactHave a longer sales cycle? Many of the examples we’ve provided in this guide have spoken more to smaller sales that an agent can close. But if you have a more premium product, a b2b service or your customers simply have a more complex decision-making process, your support team can focus on lead generation and appointment setting.

The metric would be either leads per contact or appointments per contact.

Tailor and Fine-Tune Your MetricsWhatever you see as most valuable (cash, sign-ups, leads, appointments), that’s what you want to look at on a per contact basis. Establish and refine a goal for improving over time. The most important part is picking a metric, tracking it and working on a continuous improvement process.

If you’re interested in learning more about measuring success in your customers support operation, see:The Ultimate Guide to Customer Support Metrics

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+1 502 410 1732 | glowtouch.com | info@glowtouch.com

GlowTouch provides outstanding contact center and technology outsourcing solutions to clients

around the world. Founded in 2002, our 1,700 employees deliver for our clients by combining oper-

ational excellence with high-touch engagement. Specializing in omnichannel customer and tech-

nical support, we solve issues, satisfy customers, and sell additional services, therefore providing a

superior return on investment for our clients. We help clients effectively scale their operations and

seamlessly integrate customer success across their channels, platforms, and devices. A certified

Woman-Owned Business and six-time Inc. 5000 honoree, GlowTouch is headquartered in Louisville,

KY, with additional locations in Mangalore and Bangalore, India.

Find us online at glowtouch.com. For more information, contact Vikki Karrer at 502-947-3005 or

email us at info@glowtouch.com.

About GlowTouch