Designing a business workflow is part of starting a business that you don’t often hear about. It’s generally implied that if you hire the right people, the right things will happen. This, of course, isn’t true at all. Any business leader will tell you that to achieve your goals, you need a system that your team can successfully
implement to see results. This is especially true when architecting your sales and customer service process.
How do you know which software to rely on, or what routine to build for your sales and service team? Unfortunately, many business leaders guess at this point, leading to a few common and now-predictable rookie mistakes in customer service.
Let’s take a closer look at the top 5 mistakes in architecting your sales and customer service process. This will give you a much better perspective on how to do it right.
1. Doing Too Much Out of the Gate
When you first build your customer service process, you don’t have to do it all. Over-leveraging yourself and your team to provide service on every channel or to reach unrealistic goals will only result in stress and mistakes. Instead, focus on streamlining your customer service and sales in one or two ways extremely well. Perfect your email response technique or train your sales team to work primarily with phones and live chat, or leverage a digital solution that can automate some of these tasks.
You can always keep it simple, then make iterative updates as they are needed or called for.
1. Choosing Technology Before Assessing Your Business Needs
Technology works for you, and never the other way around. The software stack you build to support your sales and customer service operations should be shaped to the needs of your business. The operations of your business should not be shaped by your tools, only empowered by them. First, assess your business needs, the preferred workflow of your team, and how you want to build customer relations through sales and customer service in the future.
Then choose the software and other technology you will use to facilitate these goals.
3. Not Focusing on Customer Expectations First
What do your customers expect from your sales and customer service capabilities? This single factor is more important than your big plans for an omnichannel service platform. What do your customers really need, and which channels do they typically reach out through? Having a live chat widget is only useful if your customers prefer live chat to email. Having pre-qualifying phone automation is only useful if your customers call – and have patience. Provide the customer service and sales contact your customers expect, then impress them by going beyond their expectations.
4. Not Focusing on Self-Service and Revenue-Generating Opportunities
Big impact, small investment; this is a formula every business leader should know. When it comes to sales and customer service, why spend on a solution if the solution can pay for itself? Self-service is a popular trend among businesses and consumers, where customers seek answers to their own questions without needing the time of a live admin or rep. Revenue generation is a chance to make sales without spending, like a concierge chatbot or targeted upselling panels.
Focus on self-service and revenue generation opportunities as you build your sales and service architecture for a stronger and more sustainable stack and better customer experience.
5. Using Static Data and Data Silos
Never have a single isolated pool of customer data, especially in sales and customer service. Today, advanced CRMs and CDPs make it possible to handle customer data more smoothly and completely than ever before. Ensure your data is dynamic and define sources for a master data set that is used by multiple software operations at once. Focus on data integration and automation to empower both your customer service and sales teams.
Here at 5P Consulting, we are experts at architecting Sales & Customer Service processes. Reach out to us today for a free consultation on how to build a robust, sustainable, and satisfying sales and customer service process infrastructure for your business.