Retailers today are experiencing a massive transformation in how customers are shopping. In fact, North American e-Commerce sales have seen an impressive increase of 146% growth in all online retail orders as of April 2020. While it’s safe to say that retail is booming, and the current crisis will have implications for driving change across the industry, one factor that will remain constant is the importance of customer service throughout the customer journey.
Whether customers are making purchases online or eventually return to brick-and-mortar options, the customer experience (CX) is continuing to serve as a powerful differentiator for brands. For retailers looking to build brand loyalty in the coming year and beyond, best-in-class customer service and CX must be the primary focus. Representatives are a major touch point for how customers interact with a brand, but they also provide added value in crucial activities such as cross-selling.
Here are a few ways retailers can leverage well-trained representatives as their best asset, to not only create a memorable customer experience but to provide the added benefit of boosting sales.
Start By Setting Teams Up For Success
The standard customer care model naturally allows for a high volume of disputes and issues, which has been challenged with an influx of customer inquiries in recent weeks. When customer service representatives are tasked with handling a slew of issues, it can impact the mindset of a representative who is also being tasked with cross- or upselling.
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For that reason, retailers need to design systems and processes so that representatives who are expected to upsell are only doing so in appropriate scenarios. This avoids a negative interaction for the customer and enables the representative to have confidence that they are “doing right” by the customer — and are not being forced to upsell with a low chance of success. Trying to cross- or upsell while resolving a complaint could backfire and cause the customer to be become more frustrated, feeling as if the representative is not being perceptive to their issue, and only focusing on making a sale.
To ensure teams are organized effectively and are ready to deal with customer issues in a positive and attentive manner, the key is to provide representatives with training as part of the onboarding process and as a regular activity while employed.
Ensure Training Is Top-Notch
As the retail world becomes more competitive, how a brand treats its customers and, more importantly, how it makes them feel, is now considered one of the most important factors in customer satisfaction. While customer service is being transformed by huge advances in technology, the human component will always be just as important. Training your customer service representatives to be brand ambassadors is going to be the ultimate differentiator against competitors.
Retailers should view training as a product that allows representatives to grow their skillset and, as a result, customer service representatives will be willing to go the extra mile, which can improve customer satisfaction scores. Customer service tasks are also becoming increasingly complex, so continuous and lifelong learning will become more relevant for representative development. To retain motivated customer service representatives, micro-learning and individualized training must be integrated into the training curriculum.
When it comes to selling as a service, retailers cannot expect all customer service representatives to know how to do this intuitively, which is why training is key — and ideally, it should go beyond traditional telesales techniques. Retailers should look to instill two key traits in its team throughout the training process.
First, create “super fans” of the brand. Your representatives need to immerse themselves in the product or service they are offering. By using the product in their everyday lives, they can increase their overall product knowledge and familiarity, which becomes invaluable during customer interactions. Second, use story selling tactics. Representatives should be able to describe the product they’re selling through stories that help make the complex simple to customers. By using analogies, personal experience and emotion, they can gain the customer’s trust, making it easier to offer a beneficial service or solution.
Putting Cross-Selling Into Action
Once the right training is in hand for representatives tasked with cross- and upselling, they also need to have the right mindset. Instead of thinking about sales and the act of selling, think about selling as a service. The intent should never be to push a product or service on a customer. Instead, representatives need to offer a solution to make things easier and better for them. By truly knowing customers and the product offering, brands can ensure the customer benefits in the end.
Retailers also need to consider offering the right incentives to customer service representatives in order to drive the desired behavior. Rather than encouraging teams to sell as many products as possible, focus on the attempt, customer satisfaction, and overall quality and knowledge delivered during the interaction.
And lastly, critical to any team’s philosophy should be the need to address a customer’s primary issue first. This should go without saying, but teams must always aim for customer satisfaction first and foremost, before any effort to upsell or cross-sell. The combination of training and brand immersion will create results that give representatives the tools they need to handle any customer inquiry — especially with an increase in call volume — and continue to build loyalty amongst target consumers.
Fara Haron is the CEO North America, Ireland and Southeast Asia & EVP Global Clients at Majorel. She leads a rapidly growing team of customer service professionals helping companies with their global customer service strategy, providing top-notch customer engagement to some of the world’s largest and most respected brands.
