As a manager, you’re likely engaged in an ongoing quest to maximize the revenue generated by your team. Perhaps you’ve gone through the various suggestions that are frequently mentioned to achieve this aim. These include:
- Adjusting your pricing strategy
- Offering attractive discounts
- Investing in your marketing materials
The options are plentiful. They can also be costly and don’t always result in the intended outcomes.
What if there were a much simpler way to increase your revenue while simultaneously developing a fantastic reputation for your organization that will help sustain these increases over several years? It might sound too good to be true, but it’s not. This is the power of customer service training.
Maximize revenue by focusing on service
The impacts of customer service – both good and bad – are well-documented. According to research from Dimension Data, 84% of companies who worked to improve their organization’s customer experience reported an increase in revenue. Forrester reported that businesses with fantastic customer service see 5.7 times more revenue than those organizations with poorer service. Customers are happy to spend a little more to buy from a business with great customer service – according to American Express, consumers are willing to pay 17% more, in fact.
As you’ve probably seen first-hand, happy customers are loyal customers. Unhappy customers, on the other hand, do not repeat their business. Worse, they tell others about their negative experience. According to American Express, after a bad service experience, the average person tells 15 people. An unhappy customer will work as quickly as any marketing campaign that you could design!
The point is likely clear at this point, but if not, consider this: attracting new customers is up to seven times more expensive than retaining existing customers, according to Kolsky. Rather than looking into more drastic measures to maximize revenue this year, focus on providing your team with training to help them make lasting improvements to the service they provide instead. The impact will be quickly apparent.
Start with these simple changes
Customer service training is a huge subject with many possible areas of focus. When you first look at the offerings from training providers such as ServiceSkills, it might seem overwhelming at first to decide where to begin for your team. Our advice? Start with the basics. Here are three simple tricks that, when employed consistently across all customer service interactions, will enhance the customer experience, helping you to retain customers, build your reputation as an organization and enhance your bottom line.
- Ask if it’s a good time to talk
So often, service representatives begin an interaction with the assumption that the customer can engage in a full, focused, and productive conversation right then. They barge right in with no consideration for the fact that the customer was unlikely to be sitting around waiting for a call. Your organization can set itself apart from the rest by doing this one simple and considerate thing – ask the customer if it’s a good time to talk. If it is, move forward with the call. If it’s not, find a time that’s better for them.
- Avoid the four killer words
While there are a lot of words and phrases that are probably best left out of customer service interactions, there are four words that can be particularly lethal for your chances of conducting a sale. These are “Hi, how are you?” While they seem innocent, they often come across as insincere. Additionally, they give control of the conversation over to the customer who can then take it in whatever direction they’d like.
- Begin the call with a clear objective
Every call from a service representative should have an intended outcome – what will this call achieve if it is successful? Without an objective, the representative has no way of knowing when they’ve accomplished the intended purpose of the interaction. Knowing your objective ahead of the call means that no one is having their time wasted; it also means that the representative can focus the call on achieving that objective to the best of their ability.
To learn about 23 other simple tips that will transform even beginner salespeople into experts, contact a ServiceSkills representative today and request a free demo of Basic Selling Skills. This series teaches your team 26 total skills and techniques that are valuable to anyone in a customer-facing position.
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- Improve Customer Satisfaction Levels
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