Maureen supporting the Business Matters Awards this Summer
This Friday, Cullen Scholefield is sponsoring the Customer Service Award at the Johnston Press South Business Awards at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. We chose to sponsor this award because we believe that customer service is the backbone of Cullen Scholefield and in fact, is the backbone of most businesses…
Others out there might say that sales is the backbone of their business. After all, sales are what keeps the money coming in so it is an integral part of any business. Without good customer service though, how can you expect to get good sales?
Customer service and sales are intrinsically linked and it is easy to increase your sales by paying a little bit of attention to your customer service…
For example, a few years back Cullen Scholefield helped out a national chain of bakeries with their customer service and sales. After we were done, they had seen a significant increase in their sales and had implemented new systems to ensure up-selling. So how did we do it? Let us let you in on the secret…
Investigate existing service
There is no point in trying to improve something when you don’t know what you have already. We started by doing a mystery shop – we wanted to experience how customers were treated. This gave us a clear view of what we were working with and showed up what areas needed to be addressed for improvement.
Isolate your unique offer
Our client had identified that their trainer would increase the sales wherever she worked. Once she left the store the sales would dip back to usual levels. Our next step was to watch what she did that made a difference. We watched her work and were able to identify several selling techniques that she was instinctively using.
Identify skills and knowledge
Once we identified these skills, we worked out a way to introduce this skill-set to the other employees. The main thing that made a difference was product knowledge, so we introduced a game for employees to play with each other to enhance their knowledge of what they were selling. We also introduced a new selling format which we called ‘seven winning ways.’ This involved seven different ways to enhance a sale and employees were asked to try one for each sale they processed.
After trialling this system for a few weeks, we saw the bakery’s sales increase by 12% and consistently stay up for a period of 3 months.
Invigorate – keep showing your people that you are interested
With any change to systems, you run the risk of projects losing steam, employees falling back into old habits and management losing interest. By coming to Cullen Scholefield, the bakery was sure to invoke the Hawthorne Effect. By putting in the extra effort of having us help with their systems, employees were more likely to sustain high performance levels due to the likelihood of being observed. You get your money’s worth when you seek help!
Innovate – the real challenge
Involve your people in finding new ways to offer good service and recognise their efforts. This is one of the really interesting issues – it sounds so easy to do but in reality this seems to challenge business owners and managers the most. Our view is that managers sometimes fail to give their people the freedom to express their opinions. Just a simple question “How can we give our customers an even better experience?” can really get ideas flowing.
Inspiring passion
There is no point in trying to engage your employees to improve if they aren’t inspired. They should want to be their best and achieve their best everyday and they can’t do this unless they see those above them doing it too. Inspiration and passion has to come from the top down, so make sure that all levels of the organisation are transparent and that everyone from the till worker to the CEO is working towards the same goal.
This is just one way that you can improve your customer service, but there are many others worth looking into. Have a look at how we can help here.