Customer Service and Customer Care are not only touchpoints by which we talk to the customer, but they can also become essential sales aids. With a direct line to the customer, their function of finding solutions, and providing a positive experience with the brand, these two company activities can in effect help create warm leads and set the stage for eventual up-selling or cross-selling actions if carried out in the right way.
Understand the need and propose the solution
When a customer buys our product or service they are also rewarding the experience they had with our brand. The perception that what he buys will solve his problems is the main engine that convinces him to take action, but we should not underestimate the long-term effect that the touch points touched when he is coming to purchase can have. Customer service is one of the few encounters that occur between customer and company and has the potential to turn a simple purchase into a relationship-a value for the company, not only “today” but also for the future.
This is why companies that have prioritized the quality of customer service and customer care find themselves, in the long run, with a larger user base and more likely to welcome future offers. Just think of the likes of Amazon, which have founded their “empire” on the concept of “Customer-Centric,” building their entire Customer Care on the relationship with the end customer.
Customer Care is the service that handles customers and complaints, takes care of customer issues, works to solve them, and leaves the Brand’s value imprinted in their memory. Customer Service is the customer care that works before, during, and after the purchase.
Where Customer Service supports consumers in getting acquainted with the product, Customer Care takes care of their needs. Both are irreplaceable resources for building relationships, upon which our sales will be based.
Customer service and sales: the 5 steps to working together
Customer Care and Customer Service increase sales because they manage to turn a prospect into a customer who has already had a good impression of us, has already felt understood, and is now probably curious about what we can offer him or her. A well-structured relationship can lead the company to learn about a particular user’s needs and fill them with its products or services.
So here are the 5 steps that help customer service to value the prospect and improve business sales:
1- Invest in relationships (before sales).
There was a time when after a product sale it was really rare for the customer to be contacted again. Those were the days before Big Data and before the need to build a relationship with the company was known. Today, that is no longer the case. The customer is looking for valuable content from the Brand and leaving them empty-handed means offering a business opportunity to competitors. Creating and maintaining a relationship is the job of customer service and sales who, working together, will be able to close new sales simply by offering “value.”
2- Share the sales process and structure customer service to sales
If salespeople encounter any resistance in the course of a sale, they need to be able to analyze it with customer service so that they can better prepare subsequent consumers with offers that will enable the company to drive home the result. The expectations of hot leads created through customer service and customer care must be organized in communion with sales. An example? The sooner the salesperson tells customer service that the price change does not appeal to potential customers, the sooner customer service will be able to better work on consumer expectations thus saving the customer-brand relationship.
3- Work on the same CRM
The ongoing relationship is crucial for both business parties involved in this process, and it is necessary to share the discoveries made about the customer. For this, there is the CRM, which must be a useful and intelligent resource, capable of managing the information that comes in from both sides of the company, and which contains key data to allow the relationship to take flight. This is especially true for Customer Service, which has a direct line to the user and can contact them more frequently.
CRM is a key sales topic and some techniques and technologies can increase your sales quickly, if you want to learn more you might be interested in this article: Telleselling: from CRM to sales. the secret to being effective.
4- Increase cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
Because of the nature of Customer Service and Customer Care’s relationship with the customer, the data collected by this business sector is an invaluable asset. Who better than they, who are used to communicating with the consumer, can intercept and analyze the opportunities that are created? This is the main benefit of changing one’s view on these two services: understanding that this is the ideal place to recognize and push content that is relevant to the person on the other end of the wire or screen, and making sure that the proposal does not look like a real proposal, but a solution to a personal need. That the salesperson will be able to propose knowledgeably.
5- Deliver on promises made
You can create a flow of feedback essential to future business between customer service and sales. Customer Care and Customer Service can easily get in touch with a lot of information: intercepting unmet expectations, and understanding what new potential customers are looking for if they perhaps encounter the same problem after a while. Sharing this information with the sales team means ensuring success in the common goal: aligning the promise of value, which we made to the consumer as soon as they came to us, with the actual product or service they eventually purchased.
Sales and customer service: a circular relationship
Many companies view sales and customer service as two separate and independent departments, even though sales success is a function of the quality of customer service. The journey that brings the consumer to us is not a straight line from contact, to purchase of the product or service, and eventual search for support. Rather, it is a series of repetitions, returns, and information gathering, which should lead to building a relationship with consumers, a relationship that passes through both of these business parts. It is not a line, but a circle, where sales and customer service are two key points that charge and empower each other.
The next step to increase sales on your customer base is to be able to predict the probability of purchase before one of your operators contacts the lead; BigProfiles can help you with this.