Smooth Interactions Between Sales and Customer Service
If your business requires a dedicated customer service team of any size, it’s vital to keep the lines of communication open between customer service and the sales department.
Most managers already know to keep sales teams from promising results that the product teams can't provide, but poor communication between customer service and sales can be just as dangerous to your bottom line, especially if customers hear one thing from salespeople and another from support techs. Collaboration and communication between sales and customer service can help you coordinate your messaging and improve efforts to bring in and retain customers.
Small companies with open office plans usually have the best opportunities for interaction between sales and customer service. In a startup environment where the sales team is overloaded and the customer service team has less to do, the customer service staff can set appointments and otherwise act as sales assistants. Assigning each sales team member someone from customer service to work with builds camaraderie. It also gives your salespeople more access to the staffers who know the most about your company’s products and services.
In midsize companies, customer service may fall under marketing or operations or be its own division. This can lead to a lack of contact and empathy with the sales team. To combat this, cross-train your sales and customer service team members. A few hours of fielding calls and responding to e-mail will give salespeople a better sense of what customers need, while cold-calling and negotiating with gatekeepers will remind customer service agents of the importance of messaging. You may even find that employees hired for one role do better in another.
Your customer service team should never be ignorant of a new product or pricing policy, especially if certain salespeople are given special leeway to make unusual deals. Delicate negotiations with important clients can collapse when a well-meaning customer service agent says “We don’t do that,” not knowing that an exception has been made. Meanwhile, your sales team should always be up to date on customer complaints, feature requests, common questions, and comparisons with competitors. If a client reports that a product won’t function in a certain environment or a service was insufficient for its situation, sales needs to know so they don’t sell another customer something that won’t work.
While encouraging a two-way flow of information between departments, avoid making it too mechanical. Regular bulletins are useful references, but face time is essential for real collaboration.
If your company operates on a commission basis or offers bonuses for meeting numerical goals, you know what motivates your sales team. Customer service agents tend to be less mercenary and more focused on giving the customer a good experience, which is excellent for customer morale but could lead to missed opportunities for up-selling. However, if customer service agents start making sales and getting bonuses, your sales team may see them as muscling in. Bring your sales and customer service teams together to discuss gray areas and draw solid boundaries.
Your salespeople should know they can rely on customer service to help them close a deal without risking commissions (though in some situations a split commission may be an option). Your customer service agents should know when it’s appropriate to offer new services to existing clients and when it’s better to hand them off to someone in sales. Encourage collaboration for mutual benefit rather than competition for scarce dollars, and the result will be solid sales, happy customers, and enthusiastic employees.
