One of the biggest challenges to selling anything is establishing trust. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to be in sales, you know that there are many ways to help build trust inside a sales process. Tried and true methods such as displaying empathy, active listening, respect, being truthful, references, and following through on your promises can all contribute to the building process.
If you’re in sales, you definitely know the drill! In fact, there is a cottage industry of blogs, podcasts, coaches, and books that are meant to show salespeople everywhere how to be more successful, but most of it boils down to building trust. Trust, trust, trust. Regardless of the strength of the product, price, or solution, no trust usually equals no sale.
This axiom is magnified in the contact center industry. Without trust, both clients and agents quickly move on. In the contact center world, trust manifests itself in many ways. Clients typically worry about security and data breaches, handling of personal information, and, of course, quality client communication. These are all really legitimate issues, and some organizations never get over these trust-based issues and therefore create their own internal contact centers.
A good BPO will be able to handle the security, data breach, and PII problems pretty quickly. Even at Agents Only, we needed to build some processes and standards to handle the security, data breach, and PII issues.
But the quality of client communication was a whole separate issue.
We tend to be glass-half-full eternal optimists over here at Agents Only, but we also are experienced enough to know that regardless of how much quality assurance (QA) you put in place, someone somewhere will inevitably say or type the wrong thing and things can devolve in a hurry from there.
Without going into too much specific detail, hang around industry insiders long enough and you’ll hear some pretty jaw-dropping stories! We tried to build a platform that had enough inherent motivational tools to convince clients that our agents were better and special. But these rebuttals rarely hit the mark. People are people and our clients wanted to be sure that AO Agents were 100% accountable.
Enter Plurilock.
With our recent announcement to partner with Plurilock, we now offer zero-trust continuous agent authentication. Zero trust means 100% true accountability. Now, Agents Only clients know without a doubt that the agent that is on the phone is the right agent, fully trained and ready to take their calls. This is a comfort that I didn’t know would be so impactful to a client’s trust profile, but every time we bring it up, it seems to really hit the mark. You can read more about our partnership announcement here.
Being a true platform, there has been a constant ebb and flow among leadership of how open or closed do we keep the platform.? Is it a one-sided or two-sided platform.? How do we build more trust on both sides of the platform? As we grow, we believe that the open two-sided nature of our platform will be the key to building long-lasting success and ultimate trust from both sides of the equation. Bringing in key partners like Plurilock only strengthens that trust.
