Alignment Of Customer Service And Sale to Optimize Growth?
Every department in an organization should have centralized customer data and share a common vision to help the customers effectively with the most relevant and valuable solutions at any minute. And two of the main departments that can bring the best outcome by working together are customer service and the sales team.
Customers get all the information regarding the products and services of a brand from sales, and the customer service agent continues to maintain positive interactions with the business and provide a seamless experience throughout the customers’ journey.
However, these two departments generally work in their bubble as two independent teams but if aligned, they can enhance CX, brand loyalty, increased revenue, more referrals, and customer retention.
Aligning customer service and sales teams are vital for every organization, as together they can develop a good relationship with the customer by having more confident interactions and can collaborate on ideas candidly. This makes the working culture of the company quite affable; creating an environment that can offer a customer-friendly purchase experience.
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How to align customer service and sales to optimize growth?
The rift takes place as the customer service holds the sales teams responsible for bringing in bad deals and the sales team lays the blame on customer service for reduced customer churn rate. To align sales and customer service, both teams must primarily work with faith, confidence, understanding, and value each other’s job role.
That way they can provide a unified experience to their customers. Here are some of the practices that can help in aligning customer service and sales to optimize the growth of the company-
Bring the leaders of both teams on-board.
At times, the sales teams compromise on their services and products to settle for less desirable terms only to achieve aggressive targets. And the customer service team is obligated to inform the customers about their alteration in the company’s product and services.
This creates a certain gap in the communication between the two teams. Creating one team of decision-makers from both departments can bring common and valuable solutions. These key leaders can conduct meetings; discussing every detail of their deals, products, services, issues, complications, etc. fill the gap in the communication between both teams and create alignment. It develops a common foundation between both teams, where they can clearly analyze customers’ expectations from what the company’s sales team has promised to deliver through customer support.
Provide access to customer data to sales for understanding customer's journeys.
The customer service team should share the documented customers’ data with the sales team so that they can understand customers’ interests and demands. It also includes tracking conversations and emails of customers with the support assistant to bring transparency.
As a result, the sales reps are aware of the customer journey after the purchase like customer feedback, reviews, implementation barriers, common complaints, preferences, demands, and issues.
This leads to improving the products and services for the next time and understanding how and when to connect with their customers in case of reducing churn rate and retaining the business.
Locobuzz is a unified customer experience tool/platform that can create this smooth transition from sales to customer service by providing a single view of the brand’s digital presence and AI-driven audience insights. With these analytics and insights, companies can understand the audience profile, sentiments, keywords, etc. They can also be updated by their brand mention across all touch-points.
Means of communication.
Communication is key to the success of any company, whether it is between the brand and the customers or within the organisation between all the departments. If the sales team establishes the primary relationship with their consumers, customer service continues to retain that with uninterrupted assistance. Their jobs are technically co-dependent.
The sales job is to provide solutions and satisfaction to the customers through the products and services of the company, while the customer service is supposed to assist by resolving customers’ issues in no time regarding the product and services and keep up with commitment made by the sales team.
Thus, a constant line of communication should be maintained between the teams to keep them updated with problems, challenges, and information. This can guide the customer support to recognize the chances where they can upsell or cross-sell new products and services to the customers.
They can even help sales teams by sharing customers’ behaviour, actions, and preferences that suggest profitable deals.
Make a vision to choose customers over competitors
A company can be both sales-oriented and customer-centric. If a company is entirely sales-oriented, it may bring clients but often fails in satisfying the customers.
There are certain situations in which the sales focus is shifted to the competitors’ shortcomings, and they plan their marketing strategy accordingly to promote their own products and services but with their competitors’ product features, avoiding what customers certainly expect from their brands.
Therefore, share a common customer-centric vision, and measure the brand equity, only to develop marketing strategies that can match your customer’s expectations. Conduct training sessions that talk about how to drive customers’ focus on the suitable features of your products and services.
Stick to the core value of your product and services, improve your product and services based on customer’s recommendations, feedback, and experience rather than competing with other brands. If the company’s sales approach is customer-centric, then the company is capable of providing the best customer service.
Absorb the feedback
The customer service must share positive customer interactions with the sales team.
Feedbacks are important to improve the overall brand’s effectiveness and credibility. Positive customer experience creates interesting interactions, which the sales team can use to create an innovative advertisement to promote the efficacy of your customer assistance.
For instance, Zappos, an apparel and footwear brand, uses the recorded interesting customer experience with their customer service for their advertisements. They used this sales pitch to showcase how effective their customer assistance was while establishing a brand voice.
Their content was humorous and had values that support their brand’s ideology so that the viewers can recognize and align with their brand.
Conclusion
Aligning sales and Omnichannel customer service teams can enable you to improve your brand communication and engagement across omnichannel platforms. It encourages both teams to empower each other’s ability to drive customers. Together, they can make suitable use of resources, data, information, and expertise. As a result, a company can provide enhanced CX, revenue growth, and customer satisfaction with the help of customer experience tools.
