How to Use Customer Support to Close the Sale

Every business wants to sell as many products as possible to make a profit. But with all the competition on the market today, it’s not enough to have an exceptional product. You have to find other ways to boost sales, such as enlisting the help of your customer support team.

Though often thought of as separate departments with different goals, customer support, and sales are intrinsically connected. With a strong customer support team, your customers will be happy, buy more, and remain loyal to your company.

 

 

Breaking Down Misconceptions Around Sales Accountability

Sales accountability is the sense of ownership that sales representatives feel for their work and the responsibility they have for their tasks and outcomes. While this is key for sales teams, it’s a misconception that the responsibility should fall only on the sales team.

Along with sales, customer support, marketing, and operations teams are all part of the selling process. Each team or department needs to be accountable as well, creating a company culture of sales accountability and alignment.

 

 

Building The Right Company Culture

Company culture refers to the shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that characterize your organization. Building a positive company culture doesn’t happen on its own, however – you have to cultivate it.

When you build the right culture, it has an influence from top to bottom. It includes your core values, benefits, and general tone of your office, but it’s more than that. It permeates every aspect of your business, from your leadership to your teams to the talent you attract.

 

Like anything else, start with goals for your culture. Do you want to build an environment of high competitiveness or trust and mutual respect? Is your company driven only by profit, or by helping your customers?

Once you narrow your ideas of your company culture, set an example and reinforce the type of behavior you want to see. You don’t need big gestures – just recognizing employees who live up to the culture you want can be a big motivator.

 

 

What Exactly Does Good Customer Support Look Like?

Customer support is key to not only improving your sales but gaining a competitive advantage in a crowded market and retaining loyal customers. Here’s how:

 

Communicate and Engage with Customers

Whether through surveys, social media, or other communication platforms, you should always be communicating with customers and collecting data to measure customer satisfaction – even after they’ve made a purchase.

Gathering feedback from your customers doesn’t need to be a challenging or costly process. Just reach out to your customers throughout the customer journey and after purchase to request surveys, monitor reviews, and ensure your customers feel heard.

 

Respond to Feedback

It’s not only important to collect feedback, but you must acknowledge it. When a customer reaches out with a complaint or writes a bad review, it’s an opportunity for you to solve their problem and improve their perception of your brand.

If there’s a positive review, make sure to thank the customer. Taking this proactive customer service approach increases brand loyalty and can turn passive customers into your biggest brand advocates.

 

Create a Referral Program

There’s no better way to increase customer engagement than a referral program. Creating a long-term program to drive awareness and sales not only attracts more customers, but it gives you another opportunity to receive feedback to improve your business.

Customer-facing programs like referral programs, reward programs, and loyalty programs help your customers feel valued and heard, leading them to introduce new customers to your product or service through word of mouth.

 

Invest in Self-Service Solutions

Younger generations are seeking more self-service solutions, such as chatbots, for their convenience and efficiency. Essentially, these tools help customers help themselves, reducing the burden on customer support teams.

Of course, you still need humans in the customer support experience. Chatbots, forums, and help resources are designed to provide assistance for common – and easily fixable – problems, freeing your customer support team to address customers who need more help.

For example, we offer tools like service calculators, FAQ pages, and blogs to help our prospective customers understand the value of the service before they reach out to a sales representative for legal transcription services.

 

Creating an Effective Support Process That Works for Your Business

Building an effective support team for your business means ensuring that all support members have the skills and knowledge to perform effectively.

 

Define “Great Customer Support”

Virtually every company claims to have excellent customer service, but not every customer has a great experience. When you’re building a support department, it’s up to you to outline what “great customer support” means to your business, establish standards, and communicate them to your support team.

 

Strive to Exceed Customer Expectations

If you want to stand out from the competition, you have to continuously exceed expectations. Consider benchmarks like the typical response times for your industry and the level of service your prospective customers are used to, then improve on them.

 

Hire (or Train) the Right Team

Providing high-quality customer support means having the right people at the helm. Whether you hire new team members or train existing team members, it’s important to have people with the right support personality.

Look for traits like high emotional intelligence, empathy, and strong communication skills. The right people will not only thrive in a customer-facing position, but they’ll infuse these qualities into your company culture.

 

Leveraging Your Customer Support Team to Boost Company Revenues

How can you put this all into practice? Here are some ways that your customer support team can impact your sales:

 

Provide Multi-Channel Support

Customers learn about products, make purchases, and communicate with businesses through an array of channels, so your support needs to meet them where they want to be. Online chat options, email support, call centers, and social media teams should always be available to communicate with customers quickly.

For example, whether it’s our academic transcription services, law enforcement transcription services, or other transcription services, our support team is available by phone, email, text, web contact form, and more.

 

Simplify the Process

Satisfying customers doesn’t happen at the sale. It begins when they first learn about your business and its products. The simpler you can make the purchasing process, the more likely they are to choose your business in the future.

Conversely, if the process is cumbersome and requires seemingly endless steps to purchase, such as long terms and conditions pages, poorly functioning sites, long waits for emails, and constantly busy phone lines, your customer isn’t likely to come back.

 

From the first lead to the sales conversion, have team members ready to help and make the process as seamless as possible.

 

Upselling and Cross-Selling

It’s important for your customer support team to learn how to identify customers’ unmet needs and know what they can do to satisfy them.

Customer support offers an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell additional products or services to your clients. Each session should end with a personalized offer to the customer, leading to the possibility of another sale.

 

Closing the Sale with Customer Support

Customer support can enhance your sales in many ways, but it’s ultimately about building a relationship. When customers can get the products they need virtually anywhere, for a similar price, customer support can be the key competitive edge you need to close more sales.