The Executive Suite: 5 Ways to Turn Your Customer Service Team Into a Secondary Sales Force

Sunday, April 26, 2020

5 Ways to Turn Your Customer Service Team Into a Secondary Sales Force

For many companies, a typical customer relationship involves selling to customers at the beginning of the sales relationship, and then reengaging when it’s time to renew. This process is efficient, but it doesn’t always maximize the value of each account.

Customer service representatives, on the other hand, have plenty of interactions with customers throughout various stages of the post-sales cycle. To make the most of these valuable relationships, some companies have begun leveraging their customer service reps as secondary sales teams. In fact, studies show that there is a strong link between the amount of money a customer is willing to spend and the quality of the customer service they receive.

Here are five ways you can use your customer service reps to increase company sales while still providing your customers with great support:

1. Provide strategic live chat support

Most companies provide chat support at key points of the sales process, but often it’s with their sales reps. A better idea would be to position your live chat agents as customer support. People are hesitant to deal with salespeople one-on-one and will feel more comfortable talking to a support agent. Considering that the average customer has over four touches before converting, you don’t need to focus on giving them the hard sell right away. Providing support before trying to close the sale positions your company as helpful instead of overly pushy.

2. Capitalize on quality interactions

Customers are always happy to post negative customer service interactions, but they need a little nudging to share the good experiences. Whenever a customer is especially happy, or a rep goes above and beyond the usual call of duty, make sure to ask the customer to share the experience with their friends and colleagues. Even better, offer an incentive for sending you any referrals. Referral leads will convert at a higher rate, and will spend up to 25% more than typical leads over their lifetime.

3. Train customer service reps to upsell and cross-sell

Many companies, especially ones that sell SaaS products, have many different plans to address customers who have different requirements. If your business has multiple plans, it’s important to make sure your customer service team is trained to not only understand each plan, but to understand the problems each plan solves. For example, if a rep talks to a customer who has a basic plan, they should listen carefully to the user’s problems and ask plenty of questions. There’s a good chance that they’ll uncover a plethora of opportunities for upselling or cross-selling; at the very least, they’ll obtain lots of useful information that can be passed along to the sales team for future use.

4. Use reps for product development

Customer feedback is crucial to finding new ways to improve your product or create new ones, and your customer service team is the logical place to start since they receive a constant stream of feedback every single day. Whenever a customer has an idea or a problem that can’t be solved with your existing offering, make sure the rep reports this to your development team. This is where your most valuable feedback will come from–who knows better what your customers want and need than the actual customers?

Additionally, you should make sure all customer service reports are thoroughly labeled and sorted. You can then generate reports to see what your customers’ most common issues are and to help you focus on the areas that need the most improvement.

5. Leverage your customer service content

When customers have a problem, a first step that many will take is to visit your website; they’ll look for FAQs or relevant blog posts that contain the answers they’re looking for. Having this information readily available on your website will relieve your customer support staff from having to deal with the same questions over and over, and it also makes for a better customer experience.

These web pages are important for your sales team, too. Use them to generate organic leads through relevant keywords and by making sure they’re kept on your own domain. Develop content for general industry-based questions that can bring in prospects who are looking to solve specific problems. Have your marketing/sales and customer service teams work hand-in-hand to make sure your content stays useful, relevant, and updated.

Using your customer service team as a secondary sales staff may require a bit of retraining and strategizing, but the ability to focus on sales throughout your entire relationship with a customer is well worth the effort. Simply follow the advice outlined above, and you’ll have a more sales-oriented customer service team in no time.