This week, we feature an article by Jessica Collier, VP of Growth Marketing at Assembly Software. She writes about how you can align customer service and sales in your organization. More often than not, when we think of customer service, we tend to picture post-purchase tasks and activities, such as returns, refunds, exchanges, delivery information, […]
This week, we feature an article by Jessica Collier, VP of Growth Marketing at Assembly Software. She writes about how you can align customer service and sales in your organization.
More often than not, when we think of customer service, we tend to picture post-purchase tasks and activities, such as returns, refunds, exchanges, delivery information, and the like. But what if we told you that, in fact, customer service and sales are much more interlinked than you may think?
And because of this natural synergy, it’s vital to keep these two areas of your operations as aligned and harmonized as possible. Are you interested to find out how you can achieve this? Keep reading our brief guide packed with excellent tips on aligning customer service and sales for top-notch results across the board.
Whether you are a company providing law firm SEO marketing services or an eCommerce store selling outdoor living products, aligning customer service and sales can yield various benefits. Let’s find out more about the most impressive ones.
To inspire trust in your customers, you are probably already focused on keeping all your channels as coherent and cohesive as possible. This helps reinforce your brand image and reputation, presenting you to your customers as a reliable, professional, and trustworthy company.
Therefore, it only makes sense to ensure that your sales operations are as harmonized with your customer service as possible.
When your sales and customer service areas are aligned, the chances are that all the operations you perform across these are smooth, accurate, and streamlined. And who loves smooth, accurate, and streamlined sales and services operations?
You’ve guessed it: your customers. Therefore, aligning these two crucial parts of your company should be one of your priorities if you are serious about keeping your customers happy and satisfied.
Aligned sales and customer service don’t just benefit how you interact with your customers but also prove advantageous to your internal operations. One of the main advantages you can expect is the ability to optimize your resources, including at the point of sales.
This happens because, despite working in different departments, your sales and customer service teams will focus on accomplishing the same set of goals instead of obsessing over department-specific KPIs and other things.
When both these teams work in synergy, you can reuse and repurpose resources in a smarter and more efficient way. For example, you could encourage your sales rep to share a pitch deck with a customer service rep or ask a service rep to show a customer satisfaction report to their sales counterpart.
Let’s delve into how you can achieve the all-important alignment of customer service and sales.
Unless you know exactly what your goals are, it’s almost impossible for your customer service and sales teams to reach that level of alignment that you are seeking. Therefore, it’s crucial that you spend some time zooming into your vision, getting clarity over it, and sharing it with the relevant people within your customer service and sales teams.
The next step? You’ll want to share that well-thought-out vision with the relevant people within your customer service and sales team.
Even the best and most detailed company vision won’t do much if it sits at a metaphorical corner of your desk gathering dust. Think of your vision as a living and breathing document: for it to make sense and to spur change, you’ll need to share it with the right people.
Ensure that both your customer service and sales team have access to any materials relating to your vision and goals – from written documents to videos, graphics to audio files – and you’ll be ready to move on to the next step.
Ensuring that your customer service and sales team work in synergy also means helping them to communicate and interact easily and seamlessly. This can become even more of a challenge if you run a remote or hybrid company where staff is scattered across different physical locations (and, sometimes, time zones).
For this reason, you’ll need to rely on advanced software tools that enable your teams to communicate whenever and wherever, at the touch of a button. Solutions like Slack and Discord are some of the most common for this intent but also remember to implement a unified CRM solution that allows your teams to access the most up-to-date customer data quickly and securely.
Similarly, it can be useful to deploy one of the best email finder tools, which can help your teams to look up customer information and can be accessed by both your customer service and your sales teams.
Utilizing an effective CRM system can significantly enhance their capabilities as a sales tool, allowing them to access customer data seamlessly.
Answer this question: “Why do you want to align your customer service and sales teams?” If you have answered, “To improve the relationships with my customers”, you are on the right track.
While equipping your customer service and sales team with the best technology, making sure they interact regularly, and sharing unified visions and goals, the ultimate star of the show is not them: it’s your customers.
So, remember to always keep your customers and their needs, wants, and expectations at the core of both your sales and your customer service strategy. Only by doing so will you succeed at synergizing these two fundamental pillars of your operations.
Running a successful company also means having a clear, solid, and consistent vision for all the different components of your business. Specifically, you’ll want to align customer service and sales, as these two areas are directly linked to exceptional customer satisfaction and retention.
In this article, we reviewed some of the most important benefits of this alignment, as well as explored ways to achieve it. Are you ready to take your customer experience to the next level by aligning customer service and sales? Start today!
Jessica Collier is VP of Growth Marketing at Assembly Software, a developer of practice management software and cloud-based solutions for the legal sector. Her passion for digital innovation and agile marketing has led to significant success in innovative tech marketing, client collaboration, and driving conversion results. You can check out her LinkedIn here.
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