Why You Buy:
Factors that Influence Your Purchase Decision
Paul Stockford, Saddletree
Research and NACC Advisory Board Member,
pstockford@saddletreeresearch.com
One of the questions we
asked in our survey of In Queue readers earlier
this year had to do with understanding which factors
influence your purchase decision. This followed the
question covering which technologies were of enough
interest to you to consider purchasing them this year.
Results of that question have been published in previous
issues of In Queue and can be found on the In
Queue archives through the NACC website,
http://www.nationalcallcenters.org/pubs/in_queue.html.
In order to keep the question of influencing factors
reasonable enough to get those of you who participated
in the survey to answer the question, we whittled down
the universe of potential influencing factors to a
manageable number and concentrated on the factors we
were most interested in.
We listed nine factors from which respondents could
choose the top two factors that influence their purchase
decisions. We did leave one open ended “Other” selection
and asked respondents to fill in what factor other than
those listed influenced their purchase decisions. The
results of the survey were not entirely unexpected and
in many cases put an exclamation point at the end of
trends that seem to be developing in the contact center
industry.
We received 125 completed surveys with the responses
illustrated in the table below.
FACTORS CITED AS INFLUENCING PURCHASE DECISIONS IN 2008

It came as no surprise that the majority of respondents
cited price as a major factor influencing their purchase
decisions in 2008. With economic uncertainty and the
effects of the weak U.S. dollar on monetary markets,
savvy managers have to consider price at the top of the
list of considerations.
Second in importance in the ability to influence
purchase decisions was the reputation of the company.
This was somewhat surprising in that companies in the
contact center business do not seem to be investing in
public relations and brand advertising the way they did
just a few years ago. This fact may have also
contributed the poor showing of many of the other
factors that that used to be highly influential in the
purchase process such as website information and trade
shows.
A decade ago, trade shows were a critically important
factor in any company’s sales efforts. It was a chance
to meet prospects face-to-face and demonstrate your
product’s capabilities. By about the year 2000 the trade
show demonstration was being replaced by extensive
product information that was made available on a company
website. In 2008, it appears that neither trade shows
nor websites hold much sway over buyers. Keeping in mind
that company reputation was the second most important
factor in our survey respondents’ decision making
process, we assume that companies are maintaining their
industry reputation today through word-of-mouth inasmuch
as traditional means of brand establishment and
maintenance such as magazine advertising, trade shows
and websites appear to hold little value to buyers.
Among the write-in purchase influence factors in the
open-ended question, 18 percent of respondents cited
return on investment (ROI) as one of their top two
influencing factors. Given the focus on price among the
majority of respondents a corresponding concern with ROI
makes sense.
At the bottom of the heap of influencing factors was a
prior relationship with the salesperson. I’ve always
believed the old sales adage that states “People buy
from people,” which essentially highlights the
importance of the seller/buyer relationship in the sales
process. In light of the results of this survey perhaps
that sales adage should be changed to “People buy from
people as long as they have the lowest prices.”
The list of influencing factors in our survey is far
from exhaustive, but it is broad enough that it should
be of interest to vendors who want to reach buyers and
to buyers who want to know what is important to their
peers in the industry. The good news is that there is
still purchasing activity in the market, but the factors
that influence those purchases are undoubtedly changing
with the times.
How to Win a No-Win Situation
Sanjay Patel, Datanutix,
sanjay@datanautix.com
In the movie Star Trek
II: The Wrath of Khan, the Kobayashi Maru is a
computer simulation that takes place on a replica of a
starship bridge. The “captain” receives a distress
signal stating that the Kobayashi, a ship with 400
passengers, is disabled in the Neutral Zone and is
rapidly losing life support. The cadet must decide:
• Rescue the Kobayashi,
which involves violating the Neutral Zone, potentially
provoking a Klingon attack; or
• Avoid a Klingon confrontation by abandoning the
Kobayashi and leaving the passengers to die
The objective of the
simulation is to test the cadet's thinking and behavior
in a no-win situation. If the person tested chooses to save the
ship, the simulation proceeds. As the starship enters
the Neutral Zone, three Klingon starships appear on an
intercept course. Attempts to contact them fail and the
Klingons open fire and the starship is destroyed.
It’s not as dramatic, but
call center leaders are in the same no-win situation.
Since the first centers opened almost forty years ago
right up to today, there has really been only one core
challenge: trying to get agents to do what you want them
to do as accurately as possible, as completely as
possible and as quickly as possible.
Underlying this challenge is agent variability. Unlike
manufacturing where you can set up machines and expect
them to perform with defined parameters, call center
agents are inherently variable. The application of
conformance-oriented quality assurance is the most
common approach to combating agent variability. But this
approach has been limited in its ability to continuously
drive Key Performance Indicators (KPI) improvement. We have to do something, but what
we are doing (trying to control agents) is not working.
In other words, it’s a no-win situation.
Of course, if you saw The Wrath of Khan, you know
there is only one cadet that ever saved the Kobayashi:
Captain James T. Kirk. How? He reprogrammed the
simulation so it was possible to save the ship. In other
words, he changed the game.
Several studies in consumer behavior show that there are
some pretty basic aspects of the customer/agent
interaction that, if engineered correctly, can
significantly increase the likelihood that the agent is
going to be quick, accurate and complete. To change the
game and break out of our performance rut, call center
leaders need to develop more of an engineering mindset:
1) Leverage tools on the market to decompose
interactions into basic steps, similar to manufacturing
assembly lines
2) Analyze those steps for problems with between-agent
variability at a more granular level
3) Once those key segments have been partitioned and
defined, leverage desktop consolidation and
agent-assisted voice solutions, which standardize what
agents do with their systems and say to customers
through the use of pre-recorded audio files, to
dramatically increase adherence to the defined process.
This approach allows agents to focus on understanding
the customer’s key issues, rather than just trying to
get the call right, which can drive breakthrough
improvements in the customer experience and other call
parameters.
It is not as sexy, but every day you face your own
Kobayashi Maru: Keep doing the tired,
try-to-control-agents approach and destroy shareholder
value or change the game by focusing on the process with
an engineering mindset?
Your agents, customers and shareholders stand ready for
your decision.
Rewarding Behaviors: Show them the Money… or a Trip to
Hawaii: Part I-The Unrealized Potential of Incentives in
the Call Center
Christopher Cabrera,
President and CEO, Xactly Corporation,
info@xactlycorp.com
Inbound or outbound,
sales or service side, agent or supervisor: cash is king
when it comes to call center compensation. Carefully
calibrated cash-compensation plans – combining fixed and
variable pay – certainly ought to be the bedrock on
which to build a productive call center team. We all
have to eat and pay the bills. But can cash by itself
really overcome the challenges of inspiring top-flight
sales and customer service behaviors, and retaining call
center personnel?
Enter non-cash rewards incentive programs. Savvy call
center managers know the power of contests and incentive
programs, particularly in uncertain economic times like
these, when base compensation is holding relatively
steady. Many call centers have used contests with cash
or non-cash rewards, recognition programs, or other
incentives. And, again, cash rewards have their place in
this scheme. But non-cash rewards – currently
underutilized and undervalued – are what have the most
potential to drive and motivate behavior.
Cash rewards can be seen as an extension of cash pay. In
motivating group behavior, cash rewards can provide an
excellent incentive. Cash is impersonal – we all like it
equally. Non-cash rewards, on the other hand, can be
highly personal and thus extremely motivating for
individuals. That is, provided the individual truly
wants the non-cash prize that is offered. This is just
one point where non-cash rewards programs haven’t lived
up to their potential. Too often, non-cash rewards
programs have been boring, being limited to fixed-prize
giveaways like gift cards (27 percent of which are left
unredeemed, according to Consumer Reports!) or to
one-size-fits-all prizes that don’t get everyone equally
excited.
Another issue with rewards programs, cash or non-cash,
is that they are rarely well integrated with companies’
overall compensation programs and are consequently more
often tactical than strategic. That is, they are
valuable as “kickers,” and for getting people to
“stretch” to meet a short-term goal, but not ideal for
molding sustainable long-term behaviors. How they are
managed and tracked hasn’t helped either as management
by spreadsheet (today’s standard method) results in
dumbed-down contests that do little to motivate
employees over the long haul.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. When liberated from
the confines of management-by-spreadsheet and
one-size-fits-all prizes, non-cash rewards incentive
programs can go where cash compensation can’t. They can
be personalized and highly targeted to specific
individuals at any level across any call center audience
(outbound selling, customer service, collections, etc.).
They can be made not just more compelling but also
“stickier” than cash, meaning that employees will be
less likely to forget why they received them. They can
play on the desire for instant gratification, in that
they can be tied to points that can be immediately
redeemed via the Web for merchandise, travel,
entertainment, etc. And they can be integrated with
strategic compensation programs and CRM applications to
become a major driver in improving and sustaining call
center productivity and combating turnover.
What it takes is a programmatic approach, resting on
best practices and enabled by a level of automation
similar to that provided by today’s ubiquitous CRM
applications. Part Two of this series will examine these
best practices, while Part Three will explore automation
strategies and potential return on investment (ROI).
Call Center Comics

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