Have you ever actually listened to stories about customer service? If so, you've probably noticed that most of them ultimately come down to one of these two formats:
- I did not get the help I needed, and felt like the store was just treating me like a problem.
- The employees went out of their way to help me solve my problem and made sure I got the help I needed.
It's fairly obvious which of these situations is more likely to win a customer over and bring them back to you in the future.
Truly getting to know your customers – seeing beyond their nametag and getting to the core of their problem so you can provide great customer service – requires Whole Brain Thinking at every level. Let's take a closer look at the how these two things fit together.
Analysis: Understanding Your Visitors
Analysis is at the heart of the entire sales process. The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to address the problems they're having and offer a true solution.
Let's face it: "Here's a product you've never heard of, please buy it" isn't nearly as effective as "X is a problem, and it's going to negatively affect you in these ways – but, here's how you can resolve it."
Notice the parallel here? When visitors get the help they need, they're happier and more likely to convert into satisfied paying customers. However, you can't give them that help until you understand who they are and what problems they're having.
Practicality: Getting to Know Visitors is Good Business Sense
It's true that dealing with visitors on a personal level requires more of an investment of time, effort,, and training – but it makes sense from a business perspective. Nothing will drive away visitors faster than the sense that all you want is their money.
This principle is why most physical retailers train employees to be friendly, welcoming, and helpful to customers – regardless of how they're feeling at the moment. A customer who walks out the doors in a huff because of poor service isn't one lost sale... it's every future sale too, potentially adding up to thousands of dollars in potential revenue completely lost.
Put simply, helping customers feel that they're more than just a walking wallet is good for business – it actually helps improve your profits over time.
Relationships: How You Get These Connections
While it's true that customers come to you because they need your product or service, they want to feel like they matter to you, as a person, not just as a potential sale. The Whole Brain Thinking Model helps you figure out where this person is coming from and how to best connect with them as a person while you're addressing their issue.
Learning to build these relationships may be the most critical part of the customer service process. Every employee should be thinking about how your entire business model can be oriented to look beyond the nametags and nurture a relationship at every stage of development.
Experiments: Stop Worrying About Failing
In the section on practicality, we talked about how failing could lead to loss of revenue. If you're constantly worried about that kind of failure, however, then you're not using Whole Brain Thinking yet... and you're not actually able to focus on the customer for the customer's sake.
Everyone makes mistakes, and when we acknowledge that, we can stop trying to assign blame and start focusing on how we're going to learn from the incident. As long as you're focused on improving your business and avoiding a repeat of the same mistakes, you move that much closer to achieving the successful business that you're desiring.
As you can see, getting to know customers in a way that benefits them – and you – requires a holistic approach at every step of your customers' journey. Nobody is more involved with this than your sales team. So, here are 10 Whole Brain Thinking-inspired actionable steps to lead you towards implementing the productive sales training that can help teach them what they need to know.
- Develop a training ROI and know what you are trying to accomplish with your training.
- As mentioned, track key behaviors that you are trying to improve or change with the sales training.
- Have the material either written or in online format where the reps can review it on their own.
- Require reviewing of the material at least 6 times. Our brain don't completely grasp a concept until heard at least 6 times.
- Have a portion of the training focused on the risk your customer faces if they don't achieve the desired outcomes using your product or service. Brainstorm ways to prevent the risk, then roleplay handling these issues.
- Have senior management participate in the training. This shows commitment from the top level.
- A small amount of training over a longer period of time is better than a lot of training over a short period (i.e. a workshop).
- Inspect what you expect. Make sure the reps are doing what is required of them. Ride with them in the field.
- Make training fun. Make it a competition within a group.
- Celebrate victories.
