Answering the SOS: Sales Orientated Service & Service Orientated Sales
If you ask any business leader from Multi National CEO to Small Owner Manager about their biggest challenges, their usual response is – attracting new customers.
The loss of customers that can unfold when sales and service teams aren’t at one or at the very least, do not work together – is a big business killer, as even small increases in churn can cut your revenues and profits in half.
- Design, monitor and manage all of your Sales and Service touch points to reduce customer churn and increase customer retention
- Most businesses still spend most of their time thinking about new customers and forgetting the old, realising but not acting on the higher costs of customer acquisition.
- If you lose a customer every time you gain one you’re building a process that only creates a negative cycle
- Whether you own your business or you’re an employee at a business you can’t afford to lose customers through lack of one to one ownership and engagement.
Creating a unified omni channel culture of customer engagement
We know that getting new customers is an obvious win, but many businesses still often forget about the important, and potentially bigger win: keeping the customers you already have.
Shrewd business owners know that the first transaction is really just the beginning, and that the real business value lies in engaging with the customer, growing their loyalty and advocacy of your brand and ultimately retaining each customer.
It’s much easier and more cost effective to keep existing customers and entangle them with your brand through value added services, good ‘old fashioned’ customer experience and products that deliver real benefits than it is to identify, proactively engage and convert ‘brand’ new customers.
Thus, customer retention is more important than ever to organisations, especially those that recognise the customer lifetime cycle and how to manage that relationship.
To maintain and grow your customer base, you need to focus on how to engage customers, how to delight them with every experience, how to exceed their expectations and build their loyalty. Unlocking the magic ingredients and delivering all of them together is the key to customer retention and growth.
Customers today expect personalised, seamless conversations across all sales, service, and relationship interactions with your brand through their channel of choice and convenience. Generations of future customers expect to be able to engage with you through webchat, social media, VR and SMS texts as well as the more traditional voice and mail channels.
When sales and service work together, it delivers a full-circle view of the customer and dramatically improves organisational efficiencies. This cost-effective approach in turn increases Customer Satisfaction, decreases Customer Effort and ultimately drives increased NPS scores. Most significantly the approach lowers customer churn, providing tangible business cases for becoming an Omni Channel Customer Engagement organisation or more simply, a truly customer centric company.
More & more companies worldwide are looking to specialists in international customer engagement
Reduce churn among paying customers, and you’ll be rewarded with higher revenue, guaranteed.
The solution is to remember the answer to this question “when does the sale end?” – the sale should never end.
- Why? Loyal customers are often those that lead to referrals. In other words, the lifetime value of your existing customers extends far beyond the obvious.
- How? Develop a contact strategy that has your customers’ needs at its heart. Very often the transition to becoming your customer isn’t as painless as it should be. Introduce check points and hand over points with the customer. Throughout your customer relationship proactively have meaningful touchpoints and develop a programme to support these. Retaining the customer before the end of the joining process becomes easier if you’ve proactively been customer centric. Introduce technology platforms that support customer centricity and enable your customers to contact you through their channel / medium of choice.
If any elements within the ‘How’ aren’t your expertise, look to partner with a company that does specialise in Customer Entanglement.
Your Guide to achieving Sales Orientated Service & Service Orientated Sales:
Top tips to bring Sales+Service Together as One
- Train customer service teams with strong sales skills
- Train sales teams with strong customer service skills
- Make possible the transition from sales and service teams to customer engagement teams
- Create a culture of ownership and empowerment
- Provide the channels that 21st Century customers expect to use to engage with your brand
- Establish collective objectives
- Establish collective incentives
- Establish collective job descriptions
- Focus reports and analysis around the quality of the people interactions
- With the right tools today’s no or bad experience is tomorrows sale and brand advocate
Sales & Service better as One? Where’s the proof?
- One study found that nearly nine out of ten customers have abandoned a business due to a poor experience. https://www.statista.com/statistics/329040/us-small-business-owners-assessment-of-their-biggest-challenge/
- We are living and working in the era of the customer, and customers are demanding exceptional customer service and experiences. When they don’t receive it, they flock to competitors and share their negative experiences on social media – 59% of 25-34-year-olds share poor customer experiences online. https://www.newvoicemedia.com/blog/the-multibillion-dollar-cost-of-poor-customer-service-infographic/
- A study, conducted by Bain & Company (who invented the Net Promoter Score), along with the Harvard Business School, shows that, “Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.” The study reveals some other notable facts about customer retention:
- Customers are likely to spend more money with companies they’ve already done business with
- Average consumers are likely to refer three other people to a site after just one purchase
- Businesses need to retain customers for at least 12 to 18 months to break even on their investment
- The RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report reveals “89 per cent of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service.” That means a harmonious relationship between customer service and sales is a win-win. Sales grow when customers have consistently positive experiences with your product and team, and customer churn decreases when your clients’ needs are met in a courteous, efficient, and timely manner
Conclusion
- Customer service should not operate in isolation, and neither should sales.
- Sales and service departments objectives are becoming more and more aligned as the modern-day customer is once again been crowned as ‘King’.
- When through strong service, matching needs, qualifying and nurturing potential customers becomes the standard, the sales focus has more time to concentrate on stronger customer service and experience.
- In turn, positive user experiences breed customer evangelists who spread word-of-mouth brand advertising and drive organic, inbound leads.
- By facilitating a culture of customer engagement over a 20th century approach to sales and service, companies enhance their overall productivity, customer delight and see tremendous gains to their bottom line.