Customer Service Glossary
What Is Sales Process Engineering?
Sales process engineering is a business tactic that involves defining, analyzing, and evolving the sales process to achieve an organization’s goals. The process exists as an extension of overall quality and process improvement and systematically optimizes sales departments’ efficiency, productivity, and performance.
In many cases, sales process engineering goes hand-in-hand with customer support departments. Along with marketing, the services are intertwined and play vital roles in the customer journey. Further, many former sales associates transition to customer support and customer success roles following the implementation of a new sales process.
Why Is Sales Proces Engineering Important for Customer Service?
Sales process engineering enables companies to streamline operations, increase productivity, and shift the focus from income, revenue, and bottom lines to the consumers who drive the organization forward.
Many organizations turn to Six Sigma’s Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) industrial systems to optimize their sales processes. Others incorporate data from customer relationship management and sales force tools. Regardless of their methodology, companies throughout every industry can reap the benefits of sales process engineering, including:
1. Optimized Customer Touchpoints
During sales process engineering, businesses analyze the areas where the customer experience reaches a bottleneck. These points represent a type of stress or lack of “likability” driving the customer forward. However, they also represent areas where customer service departments and sales teams can collaborate to enhance communication efforts and move customers toward completing their purchasing journey.
2. Advances in Customer Care
Sales process engineering empowers customer service departments to improve customer care in several ways. First, the process enables companies to determine where performance falls short of expectation. For example, if customer satisfaction ratings have dropped below the target level, companies can work with agents to enhance the customer experience.
Sales process engineering also results in increased consistency throughout all customer interactions. Customer service representatives, salespeople, marketers, and even machine-learning engineers can provide a standardized experience, resulting in improved customer satisfaction ratings.
3. Measurable Processes
Finally, sales process engineering enables companies to measure performance moving forward. After defining clear sales and customer service department goals, employees and managers can work toward meeting and exceeding baselines, improving brand loyalty, and providing exemplary service.
Performing Sales Process Engineering
Many organizations take a five-step approach to sales process engineering based on the Six Sigma technique, as follows.
1. Define Organizational Goals
During the initial phase, businesses work to outline goals for their sales and customer support teams. These goals may include clearly defining each consumer’s problem or determining where customers falter in the product purchasing process.
2. Measure Current KPIs
Next, organizations must measure their current performance based on performance indicators. Based on the company, these measurements may include:
- Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT) scores
- The number of new customer service requests
- Average complaint resolution time
- Average first response time
- Agent performance
3. Analyze Data
Once a company has established its baselines, leadership can analyze the data. The analysis may indicate lapses in customer satisfaction, reduced agent output, or countless other metrics that contribute to operational bottlenecks.
4. Improve Processes
The improvement stage enables companies to get creative with customer support solutions that enhance the sales process. Following a thorough analysis, some problems may become evident, such as the need for more agents. Other issues may require innovation, testing, and ongoing improvements.
5. Control Activities
Finally, companies can document the sales engineering process to ensure cohesive, consistent service from all departments, standardized support team training, and continued operational advances.
Sales Process Engineering In Customer Service Departments
While called “sales process engineering,” the optimization practice applies to sales, customer service, and marketing teams as well. Sales process engineering empowers management and agents to improve support offerings, enhance the customer experience, and further company goals while providing seamless service to users. As a result, businesses can measure and analyze efforts to continually improve their offerings.