10 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service and Increase Sales Performance

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Customer Service

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Customer service is the golden key to any successful business – if you don’t have it, act fast and make it a priority. Customer service has evolved over the past years; instead of just one-on-one private interaction in person or via phone call, it is now evolved around social media as well. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instconsumer purchase for consumers to connect with their favorite brands almost instantly, making customer service much crucial than ever before. Want to improve your customer service and increase sales performance? The following will help you gain insight on what to do in order to improve your customer service and increase your sales performance:

1. Clarify Your Mission and Break the Mission into Specific Goals

Begin by understanding your business niche. What do you do best? Who needs what you do? How do you best approach these prospects? These are some questions you might want to stop and think about before you start diving in.

Once you have figured this part out, it’s now time to think about your weekly, monthly, and yearly goals. Start off by setting results goals to measure your progress, and track them closely. Increase your activity and measure the results.

2. Solicit Feedback From Customers

Receiving feedback from your customers is essential in order to improve your business overall. Find out ways to solicit feedback, for instance, as a business request telephone numbers or email addresses to text or email surveys to them. Regardless of the manner, the important thing is identifying whether your business is meeting or exceeding your customer’s expectations. Use the comments you receive to increase your sales by improving your products or service.

3. Respond Quickly

The most efficient aspect of social media is that it works fast and is easy to use. It allows brands to quickly connect with their consumers via any of their platforms. Consumers are now also turning to Twitter or Facebook to voice their experiences online – and expect to receive a response from their favorite companies within a 24-48 hour gap.

4. Cross-Sell at Every Turn

A great way to increase sales without the added cost of a separate marketing campaign is to make sure your sales reps are cross-selling at every turn. Cross-selling is the act of offering new products and services along with those in which the customer may have expressed an initial interest. So for instance, if consumer purchase a camera and the salesperson offers her/him a camera bag to go along with this purchase, the salesperson is acting in a cross-sell activity. The more you add on, the more sales you receive. It’s crucial to have trained your sales and customer service agents this type of skill because it is an effective way to increase sales.

5. Provide Educational and Appropriate Knowledge

Customer service should not only be about being responsive, but you should also be offering customers with knowledge related to your brand. For instance, if you are a dental office, you can use your Twitter account to easily connect with your patients, while using your Facebook account to post dental tips or educational blog posts. Sharing knowledge can help to provide value to customers and give them a place to go if they need advice.

6. Create Referrals Through an Incentive

Customers love incentives – so the perfect way to gain referrals is to have your customers refer your business to their friends and family and in return receive an incentive. A study who analyzed a bank referral reward program showed that new customers who were referred to the bank by existing ones were 18 percent more likely to stay with the bank and generated 16 percent more in profits.

7. Take the Time to Train Your Front-Line Staff

The heart of your customer service operation should rest with your front-line staff. These employees are the face of your business and if trained well, it gives your business the opportunity to define how your customers perceive your company’s products and services. You want to make sure these employees are skills at conflict resolution, are empowered to exceed your customer’s expectations and have the kind of winning personalities that your business’s patrons are unlikely to forget.

8. Take the Responsibility But Not the Credit

You’re the team leader of your business; your company looks to you for direction and supports your effort. In order to build a strong support team willing to go the extra mile when you need it, you need to appreciate your team by giving them credit for everything that goes right, and take the blame when it goes wrong.

9. Go the Extra Mile

As a successful business, going an extra mile for your customers is vital. Going that extra mile can change a stressful or ordinary experience into a positive and remembering one, highlighting the brand’s ability to not only empathize with its customers but to also enact real change that positively affects them as well. Showing that you care about your customers allows your customers to appreciate your services and want to continue to build a relationship with you.

10. Take Advantage of Negative Feedback

It’s no secret that nobody likes to hear the negative comments about themselves or their business – but instead of getting hurt, take it as a great opportunity to turn your customer’s experience around. Nobody runs a perfect business with the perfect customers, receiving any kind of feedback helps you and your company to learn and grow as you go. Addressing a complaint or bad experience shows customers that their voices are being heard and that each individual is a valued customer. Increasing engagement and value can increase customer loyalty, resulting in continued engagement and sales.

Use these 10 tips in order to achieve your goals this year. In today’s society, the quality of customer service can effectively enhance a brand’s image. Don’t neglect great customer service – be a better brand and cultivate strong customer-client relations in order for greater exposure and increase in sales.

Hassan Mansoor
Hassan Mansoor is the Founder and Director at Technical Minds Web. After completing Masters in Business Administration, he established a small digital marketing agency with the primary focus to help the small business owners to grow their online businesses. Being a small entrepreneur, he has learned from project management, and day to day staff management and staff productivity. He's a regular contributor on Business.com.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Very well thought. I like point #8, and it is something a lot of people fail to do. Giving credit is one of the best ways of creating a motivated team

  2. Wow! I never knew that people who were referred to banks are 18% more likely to stay with the bank and generated 16% more in profits! My husband and I are thinking of starting a small business, and we’ve been thinking of implementing some kind of incentive system once we get off the ground. Hopefully we can approach our customer service really well so customer’s will be more likely to refer their friends and family. We’ll have to look for ways to do well in that area!

  3. Customer service is important!

    A chatbot can emulate a human conversation and accomplish simple tasks, human assistance is clearly beneficial in helping the bots handle more complex tasks. Familiarity with the subtleties of human-to-human interactions is necessary for on-brand communication. Chatbots are not yet able to process human emotions and nuances perfectly and that’s where live chat comes in. Integrating live chat into your chatbots gives you a power-packed combination that is greater than the sum of their individual capabilities.

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