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?
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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.
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Your First 90 Days as a Brand New Manager – Diagnosing Some Challenges

Picture this – it’s the last day of a tough, tough quarter. You and your young sales team are just one contract away from reaching your target, and your pipelines have been completely exhausted – except for one out-standing option. The CEO of a prospected company has agreed to speak with one of your junior sales consultants again in 15mins. Anything can happen, and team target hangs in the balance…

Do you:

a) Handle this important call yourself? You know you can close this and the team will be glad to reach target after the rough quarter we’ve all had. The team can practically start breaking out the celebratory beers and bubbles now!
b) Let the sales consultant handle the call? The CEO is a good guy, and if he has agreed to talk then he knows the game. It shouldn’t be too tough and could be a good notch in the new salesperson’s belt, and encouragement for the whole team too.
c) Let the sales consultant talk the talk – or rather talk your talk? You’ll be with him/her every step of the way, scripting and directing the conversation to make sure the team gets the positive outcome they deserve.
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Linking Innovation with Effectiveness

The generation of new ideas is simply about inspiration and, whilst indispensible in growth and development, if these ideas remain as simply that then they have little practical use apart from being the seed of other ideas.

It is when an idea is combined with action that it is transformed into innovation.

So how do we ensure that these ideas develop into an innovation that is effective, and does not simply represent change for the sake of change? As Peter Drucker, the leadership and management guru, is quoted as saying – “An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused.”

So let’s take a simple, focused approach to innovation by breaking the process down into three bite size pieces or steps:
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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.
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