Delivering Sales Through Service: How to do so Effectively
How to Deliver Sales Through Service Through the Contact Centre – Ventrica explains
If an organisation can blend sales and customer service successfully, there’s much to benefit from. Not only will it be more beneficial for your customers, but your brand can thrive from making the most of opportunities when interacting with its customers. In the past, both sales and service were siloed, working independently from each other. However, the shifting behaviours of your customers and advancement in technology have made it easier to provide an all-in-one approach.
Every interaction has the potential to change a customer’s opinion of your brand and whether they will remain loyal or not. According to Hubspot, as many as 93% of customers are likely to become repeat customers if they experience excellent customer service. Not only is this important for brand loyalty and reputation, but also for growth. Here are some of the ways sales through service can deliver for your brand and make a difference.
Understanding Your Customers Fully
A crucial part of sales through service is understanding your customers to the best of your ability. Without knowing what makes them tick and want to be loyal to your brand, the more difficult it is to deliver the service they need and increase customer lifetime value (LTV). As the stat above highlights, those customers who feel looked after, listened to and understood are the ones that are more likely to spend money again with your brand. This makes the prospect of upselling and cross-selling much easier and will help deliver sales through service. 63% of customers expect advisors to have the same information about them and anticipate their needs, only possible when an omnichannel approach is taken and advisors have the tools to work effectively.
In a contact centre environment, it’s important to be human in interactions and actively listen rather than sound scripted and uninterested. Customers will quickly notice interactions with your teams that do not provide them with value and are just merely transactional relationships. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer; how would you want to be treated? Would you be a repeat customer with a brand that comes across as cold and as going through a tick-box exercise? Probably not, so brands that take the time to understand their customers and help their teams do the same, will be primed to succeed with sales through service.
By knowing information about your customers, you can then find the best opportunities to look at upselling and cross-selling. During interactions, your teams will then know the best way to approach this, rather than adding in as an afterthought at the end, or choosing a poor moment to do so when not actively listening. Building better customer relationships makes sales through service easier for all involved.
Engage & Train Your Teams in this Approach
Your teams need to ‘buy in’ to a sales through service approach. However, you may have advisors who do not see themselves as salespeople and immediately struggle to adapt, especially if their role did not focus on this before. With customer service intertwined with sales, you’ll need your teams to be engaged and understand basic sales through service techniques. As already mentioned, building relationships with customers and rapport is key, so your teams should already be comfortable with this idea as it is essential to customer service roles. Ongoing training of teams will help here, and speaking with them about any concerns or barriers they may face will help them discover the best techniques to use.
You may have advisors unsure of how to approach upselling or cross-selling, so a good exercise is to determine the different scenarios they may face. Being able to identify what motivates your team can help tailor this training to them. Both group and individual training will be effective, and eventually, your advisors will approach all interactions in a similar way, with sales through service at the heart of it. Change can take time to adopt, but once your teams understand the value of selling through service and become more used to having those discussions, the easier and more natural it will become. Giving feedback regularly is also important, especially if received from customer reviews or NPS, helping fine-tune advisor technique further with direct customer feedback.
Why is Selling Through Service Important for Contact Centres?
As many as 78% of customers will back out of a purchase if they have a negative experience with a brand. This highlights how important a focus on customer experience (CX) is when looking to deliver sales through service. Without satisfied customers, this can have a lasting impact on revenue and brand reputation overall. For a contact centre to become a profit centre, sales through service is a fundamental requirement. It enables increased opportunities to increase sales that otherwise would be missed. Rather than having one team focus on sales, aligning your service departments who interact with new and existing customers every day, will be of huge benefit.
From the customer’s point of view, their experience will improve too. Rather than having multiple different interactions, anything that improves on the number of touchpoints they go through and provides seamless interactions will benefit them. Rather than a customer service advisor having to refer a customer to sales, it makes more sense if the advisor can assist and provide a solution in the same interaction. Effective cross-selling and upselling needs to feel natural to the conversation and as convenient as possible for the customer. This will provide a more positive outcome and customers won’t feel like they have been passed around and treated poorly.
Deliver Sales Through Service with Ventrica
It can take time to develop the right sales through service approach and have all of your advisors ‘buy-in’ to this culture. Not only that, but the right technology needs to be in place which may take some investment to do, with balancing the costs with quality output not easy. Minimising touchpoints, having knowledgeable advisors who can also spot up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, and an omnichannel approach to deliver excellent CX, may seem unattainable for some brands, but that’s where we can help at Ventrica.
As customer experience specialists, we know what it takes to deliver sales through service effectively. We have teams trained and ready to go to help your brand deliver superior customer service. Our range of BPO services can make things easier for your brand and help deliver during your busiest periods. If you’d like to find out more, talk to us today and have a discussion about your current challenges and the solutions we have to help.
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