3 Customer Service Tips to Increase Holiday Sales
By Allan Pulga
As Christmas shoppers converge on your stores in the coming weeks, the task of maintaining a high level of customer service becomes crucial. The busier your business gets, the more difficult it is to attend to all customers’ needs and wants. However, training your salespeople with a standard customer service approach, at the last minute, only complicates things.
Paul Levesque, in his Entrepreneur.com column "Creating Customer Service Dynamos," says businesses too often take an outside-in approach to delivering outstanding service. He suggests the doing opposite: Allow your salespeople to provide great service from the inside out, because good customer experience is subjective to each individual customer.
"The key is to get your employees coming up with their own ideas for delighting customers, and then letting positive feedback from happy customers motivate your workers to continue implementing more of their own innovative service strategies," says Levesque.
"This is called the ‘flashpoint effect,’ where employee motivation and customer satisfaction fuel each other in a chain reaction of contagious enthusiasm."
Levesque identifies three ways to catalyze this flashpoint effect in your employees, just in time for the holidays:
1. Exceed your customers’ expectations every step of the way.
This could be difficult, given the seasonal surge in traffic and confusion, but the key is to keep the idea in mind. "Set up a brainstorming session in which your employees break a typical customer transaction down into its individual steps, and then challenge the group to focus on each step, and uncover ways to add a ‘wow’ element of delight to each step," says Levesque.
It could be a gesture as simple as offering a candy cane to customers when they walk through the door, or as complex as handing them a flyer listing return policies and relevant contact information after they make a purchase.
2. Make your customers feel important.
This relates to point #1, but at a time when shoppers feel less like a person and more like just another nameless, faceless gift-buyer, it’s important to make them feel attended to.
"(Especially at stressful peak sales times), you see businesses making it painfully obvious that they consider their customers to be unreasonable intruders, potential criminals, annoying interruptions of the ‘real work’ the business is trying to get done," notes Levesque.
Showing a little patience and courtesy goes a long way. Doing the little things, like smiling and addressing customers by name, can make an enormous difference in improving customer satisfaction and closing sales.
3. Tailor the experience to fit the customer.
The "personalized" sales approach is never as important as it is at Christmas time because shoppers are invariably buying something for somebody else. Be conscious of this desire among your customers. Ask questions like, "What exactly do you have in mind?" or "Does he/she prefer a particular brand of phone?" or "Let me guess, your kid wants a phone he/she can play MP3s on…”
"Flashpoint businesses recognize that they deal with different customers and that each customer can have unique expectations," says Levesque.
Abandon one-size-fits all mentalities and look for ways to provide something special for each customer. Next thing you know, you’ll be providing something special for their friends, their family and everybody else they tell about the exceptional service you provide… and that was when you were swamped with other holiday customers!