Do you receive more and more orders, do you have new customers, and the existing ones are looking for contact with you? If so, you probably want to make your team’s work easier and faster to make it easier for you to achieve your sales goals. Well, pandemia didn’t make it easier any- it turned marketing strategies and plans upside down, and most of the sales plans had to change as a result of the global lockdown. Do not give up! Sales support may prove to be an irreplaceable lifeline for you!
For whom may sales support be important? Both for employees of the customer service department, who focus on the most important task – i.e. sales – but also for customers. Their group is still growing and different needs emerge. Thanks to sales support, meeting customer requirements will become even easier.
Sales support and automation
Sales support consists primarily in improving the comfort of the work of traders or consultants. People who are in constant contact with the client need appropriate sales tools and solutions. They will facilitate their work and help them serve the customer more effectively. If you care about quick changes and adaptation to the prevailing realities, but you will not achieve it without the automation of certain processes. It may turn out to be necessary to ensure the comfort of work in the call center department.
Process automation is nothing more than a set of activities aimed at replacing, improving or accelerating work with the help of technology. It is primarily greater convenience and speed in the implementation of activities. By investing in sales support for business processes, you will save time and reduce costs.
So how to effectively ensure the comfort of work of the sales department and the satisfaction of the customers themselves? Later in the article, you will learn 7 ways to support the sales process!
#1 CRM systems – customer history always at hand
The department of customer service is often the first point of contact with a specific company. That is why it is a necessary investment in CRM systems. Customer Relationship Management is simply a system that manages relationships with current and potential customers. The system contains a collection of customer data that makes it easy to find the necessary information. Each client has his own contact history, collected from all communication channels in one place. Thanks to this solution, the work of employees from the customer service department is faster and customer service is more effective. Additionally, each contact with the customer (phone, chat, e-mail, SMS) is automatically saved in the CRM.
In each customer’s card, you will find data and full communication history. It is your safe repository of customer information as it stores customer data so that you know everything about them that you need to serve well. You can adapt the card to your needs using special fields that store a lot of additional information.
#2 Automating the hotline
Interactive Voice Response when used in the right way will bring you a number of benefits. How does the voice menu service work? The client, when calling our company, hears the pre-recorded welcome message. Then, using the phone, he can select the appropriate option, number from the menu on the screen. Solutions of this type are another step towards automation.
The interactive voice menu significantly shortens the connection time and is more convenient for both employees and customers. The client chooses which department he wants to talk to and is immediately redirected there. An additional advantage is the operation of IVR 24/7. When a customer calls outside of your hotline’s working hours, he will immediately hear the appropriate information.
#3 Live chat
The live chat function allows you to communicate effectively with customers who visit your website. It is used to improve communication with the client. If the customer does not want to call the hotline, the ideal solution is to use the live chat. Maybe if you have any questions, write a message and the consultant will be able to help you solve his problem in a chat.
Live chat is very easy to use. Tailored to the appearance of your website, and the widget invites you to chat with the client in real-time. This is a great place to deal with specific orders. Additionally, it is a much simpler and faster way of communication than telephone contact. Front App, for example, offers live chat, ticketing systems, and customer feedback surveys. Check out the Front app pricing for your business.
#4 Chatbots
Imagine an employee who is available 24/7, does not make linguistic mistakes, is not bored with work, does not need rest, and additionally communicates with the client in several languages. This solution is possible! If you design your chatbot in the right way, you will gain an additional assistant on the team! 😉
Chatbots relieve consultants because they deal with answering simple questions and do it in a short time – customers greatly appreciate that they do not have to wait long for an answer, and as you know, a prompt answer to a question increases customer confidence in the company.
#5 Shared mailboxes for employees
Do you want to introduce even greater automation and increase productivity? You can use a shared mailbox for employees! Working on mobile phones and private e-mail boxes creates piles of information in the company. What if the entire team had access to one mailbox? Then you can easily adjust the work to your business needs, and everyone can see the history of contact with each client, regardless of where they are. The advantage is that everyone knows what to do at the moment. This is also facilitated by the current preview of the content entered by another employee.
Thanks to a shared inbox, the flow of information is so efficient that you do not need to organize several meetings a day for the entire team to know what is going on. Just leave notes and comments in the many places reserved for this!
However, if this method doesn’t work and you can see that the aura in your team is far from desired, you may want to take additional action. Running pulse surveys in your team can be a good first step to find out what’s the reason behind lower productivity (and lower sales, consequently). You may also look for some benefits that once provided to your team, could yield results. Some of your salespeople could get interested in remote work programs to reinvent themselves in a new environment (but still working for you), for others – maybe even a gym membership card would be a nice way to get things back on track? You never try – you’ll never know!
#6 Omnichannel
During effective customer service, it is important to manage a lot of information using one panel. Full control of tasks and finding the necessary information without looking for them in different locations is another advantage of this automation.
Offering many different service channels is also an important aspect. In Polish, it means multi-channel. It assumes that the company tries to provide the customer with the opportunity to contact the company in the most convenient form.
Automation in this case consists in combining all customer movements in one panel. If he wants to contact you in the chat of your store, the chatbot will answer him. If he doesn’t get enough answers, he may dial the hotline later. Is this a problem for the consultant? Not if it has one management panel! He will then know what the conversation may be about, because he knows what question the client asked in the chat. This is how omnichannel is done in practice!
#7 Effective Content Distribution
Producing a large amount of qualitative content will help you reach audiences that may be of interest. Remember, however, that even well-designed content must be delivered to the recipients in an effective way! Therefore, by publishing quality content on other websites, we can reach potential customers. A good idea will also be articles that elect self-service customers, providing them with substantive, valuable knowledge. However, managing your content is not that simple. Outsourcing texts to external copywriters, selecting websites with good statistics, analyzing SEO parameters, or comparing offers is a full-time job, so make sure you know how to automate it. As well as using Linkhouse, of course.
Summary
Investing in sales support is a response to the dynamically changing market and consumer needs. The main goal is to facilitate the work of consultants, support them in their daily tasks, or relieve them of the number of conversations. Do not be afraid to experiment with different variants of automation, because it will help you to find the golden mean between comfort of the consultants, and customer satisfaction. The above-mentioned solutions will definitely make it easier for you!
