Summary

Telewest Broadband, now part of Virgin Media, appointed Prosell to introduce a conversational selling culture into their service teams to improve “save” rates.

• Matching behaviours to objections - up 38%
• Closing - up 30%
• Probing for needs - up 29%
• Handling objections - up 31%

Most importantly - save rates increased by 47% compared with the control group of managers that did not take part in the programme.

This 47% increase in save rates far exceeded the 15% programme target set by Telewest Broadband.

About Telewest Broadband

Telewest Broadband provided TV, broadband and telephone services in the UK, before being acquired by Virgin Group to form Virgin Media with Virgin Mobile, thus launching the first quadruple play service in the UK.

The challenge

The market is highly competitive, with high customer attrition/churn rates. Telewest Broadband identified that forming longer and more profitable relationships with customers would be a cornerstone to its goal of growing the customer base.

The Customer Relations Executives (CREs) were the ideal team to directly market the benefits of staying with Telewest Broadband. However, the team worked in a customer service environment and did not have much selling expertise.

The solution

Prosell undertook a training needs’ analysis, identified the skill gaps and designed a programme that combined best practice sales training with workplace coaching. We used our Conversational Selling methodology that allowed the CREs to have natural conversations with customers that developed rapport, identified needs and opportunities and closed the sale without either party feeling it was a “hard” sale.

Our TNA also identified that the customer relations’ managers did not have the necessary skills or expertise to performance coach their teams. Prosell’s solution was to put the managers through the Procoach® Licence to Coach programme, which developed the managers as coaches so they would be able to reinforce and sustain the skills and behaviours being learned by their teams.

The Results

There was a significant and sustained shift in behaviour across the department, reinforced and enhanced by coaching from their managers. The managers themselves also improved their performance.

Overall the programme delivered an uplift of 47% in save rates.

This was 100% attributable to the Prosell Procoach programme, as the control group of managers and teams did not achieve any uplift during this period
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