Best Supporting Factor
Quick Start training turns Acuity Specialty Products support staff into stars
When a company does most of its business wholesale or with institutional and industrial customers, its sales force is critical to its success.
Acuity Specialty Products (ASP) knows this better than most. The company’s business units include Zep Manufacturing, which itself has 300,000 customers worldwide for its industrial maintenance and sanitation products, and Enforcer, maker of lawn care and pesticide products sold through more than 30,000 retail outlets in the U.S.
So, when the company recently consolidated its sales support by expanding its Atlanta headquarters, it took the opportunity to call on Quick Start to help train employees at the expanding call center.
Until recently, service representatives at 40-plus call centers supported the 1,500-strong sales staff, entering orders and helping service their accounts. Decentralized support, however, meant salespeople found different levels of quality in service at the centers. Consolidation meant adding 50 jobs to ASP’s Atlanta center, but also brought the chance to improve efficiency.
ASP sales representatives make at least 50 percent of calls to the center, where new hires realize quickly that supporting internal customers presents unique challenges.
“It’s equally important to provide superior service to our own internal customers, the sales reps, to support them in growing their business,” says Olga Martinez, ASP’s director of customer service. “Our sales force is everything to this company — if they didn’t recognize our efforts in helping them, we wouldn’t be successful.”
Ross Harding, executive vice president at ASP, says relying on Quick Start to provide professional training allows the company to focus its energy on raising the service levels the center can provide.
“This training is an opportunity to bring new capabilities to this call center,” he says. “We’re going to have people trained to engage callers in two-way conversation, to introduce new products and concepts. That’s exciting.”
“If Quick Start hadn’t been able to provide this kind of service, I would have had to do it piecemeal,” adds Martinez. “It would have affected our bottom line, because we never could have even come close to creating the caliber of center we are developing in such a brief amount of time.”
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