Up-Selling and Cross-Selling: Transforming Your Cost Center to a Profit Center

In order to build a successful up-sell and/or cross-sell call center, three topics must be addressed - business model issues, training and staffing issues, and technology issues. From the database of thousands of call centers, the authors recruited a group of ten "Best-In-Class" companies that represented major industries to participate in a study to determine what makes a successful up/cross-sell call center. Each participant was an inbound call center with at least 100 seats. Each had the opportunity to up/cross-sell on at least 40 percent of its inbound calls. This paper is based on findings from that study.