BY Rachel Cagle
Customer service excellence is a complex, layered part of business, much like a cake, observes Jeffrey Mack in his article, The Effortless Experience. As a sales professional, the customer service you deliver matters.
Customer Touchpoints
Your connections to your clients and accounts should strengthen after you close the deal. You’ve set expectations when you initially presented your solution to their business problem. As they onboard with your company, contact clients regularly to ask how the implementation is going.
Take care of any reported problems or concerns quickly. And if they reach out directly to you, answer them as soon as possible. Their satisfaction matters. When they feel they are being heard, they will be more like to stay with you and your company. This satisfaction can serve as the base for retaining them.
Customer Retention
In this competitive business environment, new technology is always emerging. Your competitors will be trying to steal your customers by offering a better deal and more advanced tools. You can stay ahead of the competition by staying engaged with your customers. This engagement forms the next layer in the cake of customer service excellence.
For example, free training sessions on your product or service for the customer’s new employees allow you to forge deeper connections. Holding webinars to train on new features or discuss industry trends is another way to show your industry expertise and commitment to their success.
Recommendations and Testimonials
When you delight clients with customer service excellence, they notice. You may think this will take too much of your time and energy. But an initial early investment in your customers delivers incredible results.
Companies like Amazon and Disney are known for their customer obsession. Research shows these kinds of companies grow much faster than the competition. They pay attention to what their customers want, and they deliver it quickly.
The result is that these customers talk about the great experience they have had when engaging with their favorite companies.
As a sales professional, you can increase the number of your closed deals by being customer-obsessed. And it becomes much easier to obtain recommendations and testimonials from happy clients.
Check Your Service Levels
No matter how well you think you know service levels, your clients will always know which parts are working and which aren’t better than you ever will. By asking your existing clients a single question, “How likely are you to recommend this product or service?” you’ll learn first-hand if your clients have been promoting you to others. You will also have the opportunity to ask what you can improve on if the answer is, “Not likely.”
If the answer isn’t what you wanted to hear, take action. When you act on constructive feedback, you show your clients that you care about the quality of service. And that you care about them.
Frosting on the Cake
We all know that it’s important to keep in touch with clients, but we often don’t know the most effective ways to do so. As a result, we tend to send out spam emails. Not anymore! By using the previous layers of your cake, you produce the most effective top layer possible!
Now is when you get to prove that you value the feedback you gathered from your clients. Demonstrate that you’ve analyzed their feedback and rebuilt and customized your service to meeting their specific needs. This final step ensures that your clients will feel valued, and they’ll understand that you use their feedback to consistently strengthen your service.
Conclusion
Maintaining customer service excellence is just one way to build your reputation as a credible sales professional. For daily reminders on other ways to develop your skills, check out SalesCred, the platform dedicated to sales excellence.
Image by Jasmine Lew on Pexels
