– Lucy Glennon specializes in customer service training and recruitment and hiring. She can be reached at 866.645.2047 or lucyg@hireguru.com. www.hireguru.ca.
CUSTOMER SERVICE – You may be losing sales if there is any point in your sales or fulfillment funnel that’s a challenge for your prospects or clients. How can you make it easier for people to do business with you?
Sadly, most businesses do not make it easy to do business with them. And if it’s a challenge for people to buy from you, then they won’t!
At a workshop I went to several months back, the speaker shared a great example of this. He asked the audience, “How many of you have ever shopped online? Raise your hand if you have.”
Naturally, most of the hands in the audience went up.
Next, he said, “Okay, if you’ve ever found it challenging or a pain to complete the checkout process, leave your hand up. Otherwise, put your hand down.”
Most hands stayed up.
Finally, he said, “Now if you ever abandoned an online purchase because of how difficult it was, leave your hand up. Otherwise, put your hand down.”
A huge portion of the hands stayed up. Those people got all the way to the end, but chose not to do business with the company because they didn’t make it easy.
Online, that can be an easy thing to see. But that happens in businesses around us every day. Big sales are made or lost because you make it easy or hard to do business with you.
Are you making it easy for people to do business with you? Take a look at how you gather information, how you work with clients, and how you initially sell to clients. You might even gather feedback from existing clients, and potentially even people that didn’t do business with you.
Find out what was challenging for them, and come up with some strategies for improving your customer care process to eliminate those challenges.