How to Increase Sales Through Customer Service

Customer service should be front and centre of everything that your business does. The most consistently successful businesses maintain a focus on customers and service standards and are always striving for improvement in both areas.

Successful businesses also know that the most effective approaches to raised standards incorporate customer service training and sales training for frontline and customer facing staff. Investment in staff through quality training facilitates good results as staff have an increased repertoire of skills from which to draw when serving customers and converting interest to sales.

So, what are some of the most important features of quality customer service?
Click Here To Read More

Five Reasons Why Customer Service Matters

Although a business may go through cycles of prosperity interspersed with more challenging economic times, the importance of quality customer service should always be recognised. Regardless of economic circumstances, no business should ever think that skimping on customer service training and quality will ever lead to a successful outcome.

There is a infinite number of reasons why customer service matters and can pay dividends.

Here we look at five of them:

#1: When times are tough and sales are down, customer service matters more than ever. Some business executives may mistakenly believe that at these times, a reduced number of customers make purchases and so it is not necessary to devote time and money to sales training and the up-skilling of staff in relation to customer service. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
Click Here To Read More

How to Develop a Sales Culture

If you want your sales to increase then all you need to do is introduce training programs to develop a sales culture!

There are two intrinsic mistakes in the above statement. Firstly, it is believing that sales training is the only thing that will produce sales results. And secondly, it is believing that somehow training alone will create any kind of culture.

The truth of the matter is that training is indispensible in supporting a successful sales culture, but it cannot succeed in isolation.

Let’s look at the first of these assumptions. Coming home from a shopping expedition, whether it is to buy shoes or a golf club, what would you tell your partner – “Look at the shoes/golf club I just bought” or “Look at the shoes/golf club I was just sold”? Like most of us, you would choose the first as, from your perspective as a customer, you have been doing the buying. That is what customers do…….they buy from us, and all too often we don’t acknowledge that and only approach the sale from how we sell to them.
Click Here To Read More

Developing Customer Loyalty

Every business person knows the value of customer loyalty. We have all heard the mantra that the customer is always right, but while this may be true it doesn’t mean you know all there is to know about them. Doing all you can to win the business of your customers isn’t the only thing you need to be doing to ensure they are loyal to you both now and in the future.

In order to develop customers who are loyal to us it is vital to understand what customer loyalty is all about. This might sound like we are stating the obvious, but in fact not everyone understands the difference between having loyal customers, and having customers who choose you over another company. The difference in the two parts of that sentence may not seem like much but it can translate into a big difference to your company’s profits.

To understand how to develop customer loyalty it is a good idea to think about how you use other businesses. Think about the ones you go to all the time. Why do you go there? Is it because it’s the cheapest? Is it the best? Does it offer the best customer service or are there perks to using that business that put it above all the others?

Loyalty is clearly not the same thing as having a long term customer, and to ensure you have the most loyal customers possible you must be able to distinguish between the two. Ideally you need to determine why people keep coming back to your business as opposed to going elsewhere.

Think about one of the businesses you frequent on a regular basis for example. If someone else came along and offered you that exact same service for less money, would you move over to them instead? If you would, that tells you all you need to know about how loyal you are to that first company. The length of time that someone uses a business and how loyal they are to it are two very different things.

To generate as many loyal customers as possible you need to develop a business that appeals to each customer as an individual, rather than as someone who adds to your profits. By shifting the focus of your business from money to serving your customer, you will automatically increase your revenue anyway, because everyone appreciates the extra level of personalised service that a business offers, which means they will often pay more for that service – even if a cheaper version comes along to rival it.

Each of these opportunities to provide that personalised service is an opportunity to make your customer say “wow”, no matter how large or small that reaction may be. In today’s experience economy, this focus on creating emotional responses to the service you deliver to your satisfied customer will turn them into an extremely satisfied return client who is at the same time an advocate for your business.

Positive emotional experiences create loyal clients!

Another by-product of this is that you will be able to access the best type of advertising available today – and that is word of mouth advertising. If people are delighted with the level of customer service they are getting from you, not only will they be loyal to you for a very long time, they will also talk about the service they get to other people.

The secret to achieving all this is to work on your overall team performance. Everyone has a chance to contribute to building a stronger business that encourages customer loyalty, and a team effort will bring better results all round.

Meeting Customers’ Needs

Philip Wexler said “If the goal of every business is to make money, then the function of every business – and of every person in every business – is the acquisition and maintenance of customers”. Therefore we can conclude that every company is successful in business depending on how well it serves its customers, and as such those customers should always be at the forefront of everything the business does. Unfortunately it can sometimes be the case that everyone assumes it’s everyone else’s responsibility to attend to the needs of the customer. The managers assume it’s the job of the front line employees, and the employees assume it’s the job of the managers who come up with the policies and ways of working in the first place.

In truth everyone is responsible for how well a business meets its customers’ needs, and a team effort is liable to boost the fortunes of a business even more successfully, since people tend to flock to those businesses which clearly pay attention to what they need and provide it to them as well.

The success or failure of a business depends on how well it rises to the challenge of meeting its customers’ needs, and to that end it should be understood that the process is a two way one. Your own view of how your business can serve its customers may be very different from the views and opinions your customers have, which is why you should take every opportunity to engage with your customers and ask their opinions of how you are performing – even if you don’t like some of the answers!

Part of the role of an effective leader is also to engage with everyone in the company, to spread the idea that you should all be looking for new ways to serve the customers even better than you do at present. It doesn’t matter if you are the best company in your field; if you don’t make the effort to stay on top of the pile you can bet that someone else will figure out how to serve those customers even better and you will be knocked off the top spot quicker than you might think possible.

Meeting those needs can be done in a variety of ways, but every method you use should always begin with a deep understanding of who your customer is. Without this understanding all the improvements you make will be based purely on guesswork, meaning that while some of your efforts will succeed, others could fail and represent a huge amount of time wasted.

Take the time to get in touch with your customer base and ask them what services they would like to see in the future. Perhaps you could provide an incentive to encourage more replies.

It is clear that if you want to continually meet the needs of your customers you need to be pro-active in discovering what those needs are and deciding the best way to meet them. This is something every employee can be involved in, from taking part in a simple ideas process to helping to implement a new way of working that could make a big difference to customer satisfaction.

There is always much to be learned in any business, and customer satisfaction is a big part of its continued success. Put simply, the business that creates the best “buying environment” for their customers, based on the satisfaction of their needs and wants, will win the most customers and turn them into repeat clients.