Getting your frontline employees excited about proactive customer outreach can be challenging to say the least. Add to it the complications of less-than-reliable insight into their sales activity and, as a sales leader, you have your work cut out for you.

Cell Plus, a U.S. Cellular Authorized Agent with 9 stores in Wisconsin, found themselves in a similar situation before they adopted Statflo.

Within a few months of rolling out the business messaging platform in their stores, they started seeing increased customer engagement, detailed insight into frontline sales activity, and a better customer experience.

Brad Wedel, Director of Sales and Operations from Cell Plus and our own Customer Success Manager, Janique Renaud caught up to learn how Cell Plus continues to derive value from Statflo’s personalized business texting approach to improve their outreach results.

Challenges Faced By Cell Plus Before Statflo

1. Earlier, Cell Plus followed the basic 3x3 approach – check-in with the customer 3 days, 3 weeks and 3 months after their initial purchase. It was more of a check-the-box activity that sales reps had to mark as complete.
2. There was no way to oversee the progress of customer outreach.
3. The tools they used had a less-than-ideal reporting function.
4. Sales managers could not reliably verify that outreach activity was actually being done.
5. As a result of not having insight into messaging activity, there was no way of coaching their sales associates to the right behaviors.

Time To Upgrade Their Outreach Strategy

Confined to phone calls, Brad and his team felt the need to introduce a business text messaging platform in their customer retention strategy to:

1. Increase engagement with customers over their preferred method of communication
2. Proactively build deeper relationships with customers
3. Encourage repeat business from existing customers
4. Keep Cell Plus top-of-mind beyond their last store visit

The Result - Unparalleled Insight Into Frontline Sales Activity

The Cell Plus team has accelerated their text messaging outreach efforts since they successfully rolled Statflo out in their stores. Their managers now have complete visibility into their rep activity and can audit their performance. They can monitor the number of conversations started by their reps and see the actual responses received from the customers.

“With Statflo, we now not only know if the outreach is getting done, we also know how it’s getting done. The visibility into the rep activity, not just in terms of the quantity but also the quality of the outreach, helps us to coach them better. That’s helped us to not just get the outreach done but also to improve upon it." - Brad Wedel, Director of Sales and Operations, Cell Plus

Within the 30 days of using Statflo, a store manager reported that a customer on a renewal campaign added two more lines to their account as a result of a Statflo text message. This is just one of the many success stories that the Cell Plus team has experienced since.