Why would your customer service team work to generate additional sales?
Since your customer service team is in daily contact with your clientele, in most cases, a level of trust has already been established. Customers trust what your customer service staff have to say, which makes them more receptive to recommendations. By presenting existing customers with a suggestion for a service upgrade, for example, or a new product recommendation, you will be able to pair your product or service offerings with existing customer needs. Is the customer currently satisfied with your company? If not, is there anything you can do to optimize either the customer experience or the product/service you sell so that it is better adapted to this particular customer group? Or maybe it is the case that the customer feels satisfied with your service but your staff can find new solutions to further improve upon the customer’s positive experience. How do you work to generate additional sales in the company today? Can you manage to generate more sales internally or do you need the help of an outside partner?
If you would like to create a customer service team that is driven to generate needs-based additional sales, then outsourcing to an external partner is an effective alternative. By transferring this responsibility to a partner who is a professional customer service provider, you can ensure the customer experience without expending extra resources. Handing off day-to-day customer service responsibilities to an external supplier with cutting-edge competencies can also offer an advantage in that you can focus more on your core business.
The ability to focus on the customer’s needs
The generation of additional sales does not necessarily need to take the form of a direct sales pitch, in some cases, it can be synonymous with exceptional service – the kind of help a customer gets without even having to ask. It is important that you constantly exceed the customers’ expectations. The role of the customer service team is to guide the customer to the solution that fits best, whether it be an upgrade or a downgrade. Sometimes a customer may be tied up in an unnecessarily complex or overly expensive solution for their actual needs and would actually benefit from a downgrade. In a case like this, you show that your customer service is honest and professional in its approach and you will further solidify the customer’s confidence.
Of course, it is never OK to manipulate your customers just so you can sell a product. Generating additional sales in this way often leads to customer dissatisfaction in the long run and the customer may end their relationship with your company altogether. Long-term customer relationships are built simply by being responsive to the customer's needs. A customer who has received excellent customer service hangs up the phone with a positive experience committed to memory. The next time the same customer comes in contact with your company, the individual in question is more likely to be open to a sale, since you have already established trust. In other words, efforts to generate additional sales (when done correctly) can be a benefit both to the customer, who gets their needs met, and to the company, who increases their business.
Tips to naturally generate additional sales
One mistake many companies make is that they fail to adequately train their staff in ways to generate additional sales. With proper training, you can create a better understanding within the customer service team so they know how, why and when they should work to generate additional sales. It is important to once more emphasize that additional sales should be needs driven and never feel forced. Your customer service team should not turn into a new channel for telemarketing, where you push out new products or services for example. Team members in the customer service department are generally driven to provide excellent service and help solve problems, not to generate new business. For this reason, it is important that additional sales opportunities are presented in a natural way, where the employee asks the customer questions with the intention of helping them, thereby guiding the customer towards a potential additional sale.
It is important that the customer sees the customer service staff as a team of experts whose recommendations can be considered reliable. For that reason, the customer will generally get on board with a product or service the customer service team suggests, as long as the transition occurs naturally. As a consumer, you are not always familiar with the market, and that is exactly why you are contacting customer service – to get expert assistance.
At Transcom, we provide our customer service staff with on-going training, which we follow up, evaluate and develop as needed. Since the market is constantly on the move, it is important that service remains at the forefront. By outsourcing your customer service team, you will suddenly have access to a team of 100 people who will work continuously to sell to your existing customers, instead of the three internal employees you have in your own operation. In other words, outsourcing is a good alternative for companies who are looking to streamline processes and optimize the customer experience in order to increase sales over the long term.