Reachschools

If you have ever received disappointing customer service, you won’t be surprised to learn that most companies spend more on acquiring new customers than keeping existing ones happy. Winning lifelong customers requires the ability to not only get a prospect to buy again and again, but to do so happily. The benefits go far beyond inspiring loyalty and repeat business; happy customers become advocates for your brand, driving referrals by sharing their experiences with friends, colleagues and social networks.

Great customer service is a competitive advantage. Say you need something fixed at your office. Company A was an hour late, talked on their cell phone the whole time and left without telling you they were done. Company B, on the other hand, arrived on time, explained what they were going to do to fix your problem and gave you a coupon for your next service. Which company will you use next time? The same warm, friendly, accommodating approach you take to nurture a customer should be continued for the duration of the relationship. Positive experiences lead to repeat business and referrals. Service as a strategy has to come from the top and be truly ingrained in your company’s core values. Every process, every decision, every employee must act in alignment with this strategy in order to be successful.

Personal Selling

For some companies, customers must connect with a salesperson before making a purchase. Unfortunately, many of these sales-intensive businesses lose revenue because of a buy-or-die mentality on the sales floor. If a lead comes in that isn’t ready to engage right away, it can fall into a black hole of lost leads that could have become customers given enough time and nurturing. These wasted opportunities add up to a lot of lost revenue in the long run.

To prevent this, you must be able to nurture leads and identify when they are ready to distribute to your salesperson. Your sales team is a valuable resource, the driving force behind growing your business. They can be much more effective if your system automatically evaluates certain behaviors and factors, identifies hot leads and intelligently distributes them based on specific factors such as industry and geography.

In addition, every day your sales team engages in dozens of communications with leads. Automating some of these communications could free up your team to focus on only high-impact conversations instead of routine follow-up messages. This type of workflow automation can be used to automatically add notes to records, send thank you notes after sales calls, kick off educational emails and more. The best part is, by leveraging workflow automation to save time, your sales team starts to view your system as a valuable resource—and not just a waste of time.

Deliver as Promised—Automatically

Despite their best intentions, many small businesses over-promise and under-deliver simply because they don’t have enough time and energy to meet the expectations set during the sales and marketing process. Luckily, many elements of great customer service can be automated, which eases the burden on the business and helps customers feel valued and appreciated. For example, a big customer service challenge for many businesses is training customers on how to successfully use their product. Instead of training customers in person or over the phone, which requires a big commitment from both parties, automation allows you to create engagement campaigns that slowly drip information over time.

Another advantage of automation is that it allows you to easily identify and segment happy and unhappy customers through a simple survey. Customers who are satisfied can be automatically rerouted to a testimonial and referral campaign while unsatisfied customers can be routed to customer service for personal follow-up.