April 27, 2015 - By Whether you realize it or not, your customer service team is in fact selling to their callers – all the time.
Have you ever called to speak to a customer service representative who didn’t listen to your problem? Did it sound like the customer support person was reading answers off a page and wouldn’t let you get a word in edgewise? Was your legitimate complaint transferred from one office to another while you were on hold listening to boring elevator music?
Experience Work Wonders for Customer Service
As someone with over ten years experience in the contact center industry, I have come to the conclusion that customer service and sales go together like paint and a brush. You can’t have one without the other because anytime you are in contact with the public–you are selling a product or a service. Sales techniques might fill your tray with paint but you can’t do anything without the brush.
After having realized this truth from the current contact center company that I’m working with, it became the catalyst to exploding my team’s performance helping us accomplish greater heights.
Sell a Solution to Problems
Imagine how much better the entire conversation could be if your team attempted to ‘sell’ the solution—not just the product— but the solution. Instead of ‘telling’ the customer what to do, the support person would have to illuminate with a series of open-ended questions and a recap of features and benefits–regarding the answers to the problems—thus ‘painting’, or clarifying to the customer that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
There is a solution but the caller has to see it. The customer service representative continues to paint pictures and listens, engaging the speaker in a dialogue, rather than a monologue. With a firm grasp of product knowledge, the caller will feel comfortable speaking to the customer support staffer and won’t need to speak with a supervisor.
By offering a resolution, he/she continues to brush masterstrokes of harmony and understanding into a relationship that will quell the tide of discontent, thus creating a work of art.
The Art of Amazon Fanaticism
Amazon for example, has 164 million customers and CEO Jeff Bezos is committed to understanding them. Every year he sends all his managers to call-center training so they can learn more about how to focus on being a customer-centric company that focuses on customer success, thereby creating more resiliency and less negativity.
Bezos has proven that the internet spreads positive energy too and he knows that unhappy customers talk, email and send text messages or post bad reviews. It’s about aiming for 100% satisfaction because even a painting is never quite complete. Ask almost any artist and they will tell you they wanted to add a few more shades or shadows to their creation. Some famous artists, as depicted in this link, actually hated their work. But that ability to grow and change is exactly what makes commerce exciting and my job interesting.
The beautiful balance of understanding and respect will create more revenue and more business for your company resulting in fewer calls being lost, less migraine headaches, fewer returns and more success for everyone concerned. Maybe, even giving you the gift of more time, so you can enjoy your success.
Can You Make a Difference?
Whether you realize it or not, your customer service team is in fact selling to their callers – all the time. They are selling the solution to their caller’s problems, and the better they are at selling it, the more positive the experience becomes for the callers.
