Case Study 1: Blue Chip Company

The issues

Through the clients’ customer feedback a number of issues had arisen, the main points were:

Advisors were viewed as pushing client too hard to make a sale
Advisors were speaking to customers in an unnatural manner
Customer were not fully understanding the product and feeling ’overloaded‘ with information

The client also noted that during supervision / assessment of their sales advisors there were a number of issues which needed to be addressed, the main points being:

Staff was lacking in confidence while dealing with difficult customers which created stressful situations
Staff negativity in the workplace
Staff feeling undervalued

Our assessment

The Human Performance Clinic were called in to address these issues and we formulated the following process:

We observed sales advisors in their own environment, watched, listened, asked questions and were ‘sold to’ by several advisors.
Having interacted with sales advisors we ran a troubleshooting session with staff and we were able to extract information not available to Managers.

We were for the Company not of the company and this enabled a degree of trust to allow feedback and as a result developed the package thus far.

We call this process Human Performance Design. Read here in detail about this process which has been developed by us.

Feed-back after the trial

Sales Advisors:

Found the programme increased their self confidence both in and outside their work
Helped them feel more positive about work and more valued in and outside the workplace
Built greater awareness of the customer, and gave them additional skills which helped them build good relationships whilst delivering sales and productivity targets

Customers displayed a very positive response to those calls made during the trial. Feedback showed that:

Advisors sounded more natural, friendly and interested
Clearer explanations of products and services, and related charges, and more effort was put into matching these features and benefits to customers needs and wants
The customers were left with a very positive image of the client and were happier about future contact

The results of the trial

The trial was aimed at improving how the customer felt about contact and how to improve how the staff felt within the working environment. The findings show that:

Transactions per sale were constant between trial and control groups
Points per sale were constant between the two groups
Points per hour were 7% lower in the trial group
Sales per hour 2% higher in the trial group
Talk time 33 seconds (on average) higher with the trial group