6 Ways to Turn Customer Service into Customer Sales

Utter the words customer service to sales managers and/or business owners, and you’re likely to get a scowl and some reference to it reducing net profits from revenue at little value. While this is understandable from a department vs. department viewpoint, it proves puzzling upon even a cursory review.

What is one approach all successful sales managers use in training their sales people? Find the customer’s pain and offer to solve it for them with XYZ product(s) or service(s).

At its very core, customer service is an even faster means of identifying a customer’s pain—because they reach out to tell you—allowing you a more efficient means to solve it.

Here’s typically what happens with a customer service call/email/visit.

1.    The customer volunteers information regarding his/her relationship with the company.

2.    The customer voluntarily gives you a candid description of their view of the company and/or products and services.

3.    The customer clearly describes the pain they are experiencing.

4.    The customer explicitly establishes what can be done to resolve the pain satisfactorily.

Any salesperson worth their title would give anything to have that knowledge when making a sales call! So why is the sales group looked upon as a profit center and the customer service group viewed as a cost center? Makes no sense.

Worse yet, this distorted view creates a perpetual decline in customer service! When this “cost center” is viewed negatively at best, and actively hostile at worst, its personnel feel the pain and are inclined to regurgitate it to the customers they deal with. Poor customer service feedback to sales managers and business executives reinforces the view of it being a necessary evil, which in turn generates poorer attitudes among those charged with making customers happy—and the perpetual negative engine is engaged!

Fortunately, this situation is easily addressed when leadership sees customer support interactions as opportunities instead of headaches. There are six areas most company marketing departments spend major dollars in developing which customer service can significantly improve effectiveness and/or reduce costs.

1. A Natural Up-sell to Customers

While this should be the most obvious based on what has already been discussed, it must also be pointed out, that the time to up-sell the customer is not while the issue is being resolved, but after.

Nor should it be a hard sell. Follow-up emails, phone calls, and for the high value clients sending an inexpensive (but meaningful) gift, are the perfect times to offer a coupon or promotion on other products and/or services. Additionally, the follow-up should be personalized based on the interaction with the customer. This suggests there is an outstanding CRM product and process in place.

2. Increase Success of Customer Internet Searches.

Companies pay for ads on major search engines in order to drive potential customers to their digital doors. Additionally, SEO experts and content specialists are considered key personnel in any marketing group.

Most searches are focused on solving a problem. As already mentioned, there sits within the customer support group a goldmine of the most common problems and the solutions customers are looking for.

Proper refining of this gold will reveal a content marketing bullion—including authentic plain language consumers are using naturally—making native searches more effective. Create a dynamic symbiotic relationship between content marketers and customer service employees and you see the results in increased online traffic and better engagement.

3. A Low Cost Conduit for Product Development

There are a lot of resources (people, big data mining, outsourced experts, etc.) used in determining what customers really want. Unfortunately, silos between sales/marketing and the dreaded customer support group, more often than not leave some of the best customer data untouched.

In the rush to embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) the data mining efforts seem to be focused on what can be collected through clicks, views, shares, purchases, returns, etc., when there is a source of customers telling the company what they want.

Spending millions on mining external digitally driven data and ignoring the internal customer driven data, is not only expensive, it is short sighted and illustrative of the shortcomings of silos.

4. Building a Successful Continuous Improvement Process

You should have figured out by now that this approach to customer service will be transformative to your company. A key ingredient of successful transformation is the introduction of iterative innovation and continuous process improvement.

Frequent review of customer support interactions for the first 3 areas will naturally result in a review of business processes. Everyone knows process reviews “should” be done, but they are frequently overlooked in the rush to get things done.

However, when reviewed for purposes of growing sales and market share, the priorities change—allowing processes to change under more frequent (and positive) review. Support employees start seeing such reviews as a means of participating in growing the business instead of finger pointing and fault finding, and become more proactive instead of hiding.

From an operational perspective, instead of paying large sums to external consultants to suggest improvements, you get free advise from those who can accurately describe how you can serve them better.

5. Implement Successful Automation

Continuous improvement will lead to a customized approach to automation. When customer service is viewed as a cost center, automation is introduced with the sole focus of cost reduction. However, when it is viewed as a profit center—especially with focus on the other 5 areas—automation is evaluated from the perspective of freeing up employees to focus on the most meaningful customer engagements.

Approaching automation from this standpoint will actually allow you to increase customer loyalty by giving them what they want in the most efficient, and customer friendly, channel. With customer satisfaction as the driver, automation will still offer personalization and custom touches that please customers.

You can also become the cost reduction hero by reducing operational costs as you demonstrate that properly configured automated feedback channels are saving money. This tailored approach can include consolidation of systems—or strategic integrations to maximize better value and results from existing platforms, such as CRM. It should also incorporate capturing key metrics on call resolution, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction using real time dashboards and reporting.

6. Getting a Qualified Prospect

Sales people LOVE referrals! A satisfied customer is a happy customer and more happy customers equal more profits. Not only from the satisfied customer, but also the customer’s friends and family.

Thus far, the focus has been primarily on the customer. Except for mentioning the negative feedback loop that results in poorer customer service in a downward spiral, little has been mentioned about employee performance.

That makes for a great ending to this article. Not only will this transformation result in more profits, you’ll end up with happier employees who move from resisting change to enthusiastically suggesting change. Since most professionals spend more time with the people at work than with their families, it makes sense to conclude with the thought that of all transformations, this one can be both fun and profitable!