customer service

The process of buying and selling saw drastic changes over the past few years. Earlier, the sale was a universal approach.

Now, it is more fluid and dynamic. Both business and buyer’s journeys thrive on understanding the ultimate goals, transparency, and an inquisitive tendency.

You may think that both of the parties share more similarities. Although, it’s quite the opposite. Both have contrasting expectations from one another.

Customers usually look for services or things to fulfil their needs. On the other hand, sellers incline more on reaching revenue targets and satisfying customers.

In simpler words, lets see “How to Better Align Your Sales Process with the Customer Journey ” your marketing teams should understand these basics to make sure both enjoy a mutual advantage while growing your business.

Moreover, it is indeed true that the market is ever-changing. Simultaneously, a customer’s journey is also ever-changing. It has become a much more customized process.

However, many fall under the pretence that customers are likely to follow a well-worn trail. In reality, the whole process is a random leap of faith.

Additionally, in the initial stages of a customer’s journey, marketing remains resolute. Similarly, decision-making in the case of complex purchases also remains unvarying.

It is easier to spot the shortcomings that your sales team might be facing when you set the strategy against your customer’s journey.

Why is the buyer’s journey important?

A well-planned sales strategy allows a business to avoid miscommunication with the buyers.

Transparency with your customer will help your business grow. But how can you ensure that? Well, this factor depends on how your sales rep handles the buyer’s journey.

Also, the only solution to guarantee alignment with the customer’s journey is to personalize the sales processes.

For marketing teams to establish consistency, sales process revision is the key. This will help you to understand the needs of the target audience.

Moreover, to make your business more demanding, focusing on a scripted sales strategy is primitive.

Instead, businesses with aligned strategies ensure to guide their customers through their journey. This also contributes to gaining credibility and reaching more target audiences than usual to leverage sales for maximum gain.

Personalizing sales strategy to align with the customer is a powerful visual tool. You can understand market trends and figure out the steps taken by your customers before making a decision.

This allows you to recognize the stages of communication with your business. Moreover, this is an important factor for the sales team. They will base the sales strategy on this information.

Moreover, you can gain a clear insight into the bigger picture, their experience with the company.

This helps in comprehending the customer’s expectations alongside predicting the change in customer’s behavior.

Your customer’s decision-making process predominantly depends on the following factors:

Problem Recognition.
Information Search.
Evaluation of Alternatives.
Purchase Decision.
Post-Purchase Evaluation.

Steps guide to Align your sales process with the Customer Journey

Reconsidering goals and definitions

Misalignment is easily avoided through reframing stage definitions and targets. In simpler words, it is common for the sale process to “ pass” a stage.

This stage incorporates whether or not a customer will purchase at a given time. Furthermore, this qualification can be a sales perspective.

On the contrary, your buyer can perceive this as committing to change.

Reframing and resetting goals allows you to revise your customer’s targets and expectations. This helps you to build clear and valuable communication.

However, it is important to look at whether your buyers understand what to expect from the business.

Sometimes, your customers face confusion. Providing guidance will go a long way to align your business while you attract more target audiences.

Recognizing Value points

Identifying the value points is another important step on the list. Map out all the possibilities that can help you offer value to your customers.

To align your business correctly, think about analyzing solutions, make sure multiple opinions or issues for your buyers are answered.

Testing and Validating

Changing your strategy is a great step. So, better safe than sorry. Before you venture out, seek consultation from high-experienced personnel.

They will help you give the feedback you need. Moreover, they can also suggest ways to improve your strategy.

Besides, validation also incorporates testing. Run a pilot program to check whether the strategy is worth it.

Although, if it is a complex process, testing can be difficult. However, your sales team can help you with predicting the possible outcome of the strategy.

Aligning your business with SNWN TECH SOLUTION

Among the thousands of companies offering business alignment services, SNWNTECHSOLUTION is the best. Why? They have a plethora of services tailor-made for your business.

They help you through their Tech Support System. Moreover, they also varnish caching to accelerate HTTP boosting website performance and saving storage.

Here are the services they offer:

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OUTSOURCE SUPPORT

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How to Better Align Your Sales Process with the Customer Journey, So they also ensure that the correct message is delivered to the right set of audience.

To put this plainly, this platform can help sales rep avoid chaos and attract target audiences in a productive way.

ALSO READ : Time Management is the Key to Being a Successful Sales Rep

Customer Service has existed for as long as the business has; simply because the two things go hand-in-hand.

With the passing of ages, technology has improved and this led to a simultaneous evolution in customer services.

With these, customers have grown to expect faster and efficient support from businesses.

And this is true for every kind of business, be it a small business or a multinational conglomerate.

Advancements in artificial intelligence, real-time messaging, crypto-currencies, self-service, and many more such technologies have the potential to affect the future of the customer service and success industry vastly for the better.

In this article, we will take a look at 10 ways in which the future of customer service will be affected by these advancements in technology.

1. The age of video communication is now!!

Eye contact is a very powerful thing, not just in the novels but in every day-to-day task. And in the customer service industry, this aspect is becoming very necessary.

This is because video calling is no longer a myth. The positivity of video calling lies in the fact that with video calling.

It becomes easier for both the customer to explain his/her issues and the professionals to understand the requirements of the customer easily.

Moreover, with video calling i.e. eye-contact things become very transparent and help improve relationships with customers.

They too can rely on the authenticity of the business. As such this is becoming a very important and useful tool for many businesses.

2. Email will be outpaced by real-time messaging

Just like video communications which are also done in real-time, customers expect support techies to be always “on-line”. This means they would rather prefer to chat than ring up or communicate via email.

One example of such a communicating medium is the Facebook Messenger that has gone one step further to even show their average responsiveness. This means you can avoid unnecessary engagements depending on the responsiveness.

On-site conversations and chats are considered by customers as authentic and in real-time which is a very reassuring option for customers to engage.

There are various tools for helping businesses to collect and assign all incoming messages from customers across various channels in one place so that businesses can effectively carry out their customer service and support tasks.

This helps professionals to identify potential roadblocks and effectively counter balance them.

3. The future is here: Data-driven decision making

Customer service no longer includes only supporting the customers by understanding their issues and solving them.

A lot more goes into it. The first and foremost being understanding customer feedback and upgrading the existing customer service technology in use. To do this we need information or data.

However, in order to effectively use the technology in place, we need a mechanism to measure its success quantitatively and that is where data analytics comes into the fray.

ALSO READ : IT Support Services for Disaster Recovery

This is why service technologies nowadays record the various information gathered via customer interactions.

Moreover, other departments such as marketing and sales departments can also use these data to further develop their initiatives and sales pitches for a better business environment.

4. Social media: not just a platform to connect

Social media has long been a platform for people from across the globe to connect with each other.

However, the fact that whatever anyone says on social media platforms, remains for the world to see, has made it possible for social media to be used as a tool for both sales & marketing as well as for customer support and services.

As authenticity becomes more and more important for any business, many large and small organizations have started using social media as a service tool.

Answering customer queries online gives much credibility to a business’s customer service aspect. This can even go on to improve your brand value as well.

5. Chatbots are here to aid professionals

Nowadays if your customer support/service department does not include a chat-bot, then it is simply not considered to be an effective one. There is logical reasoning behind that.

But before we go into that I’d like to clear one thing first: Chatbots or bots are not AI; they are simply very clever mathematics and logical interpretations that are presented in a conversation-like user interface.

So, how are bots the game-changer of the future? Well you see it acts as a SaaS and answers customer queries and then resolving common issues.

In case the query is unique or not in the scope of the bot it will automatically redirect to a customer service agent. Moreover, bots are online 24/7 even when your customer service team is asleep.

6. Self-service is rapidly becoming a necessity

More often than not, customers complain about the length of time they had to wait for a call and forget about the real problem for which they were making the call in the first place.

The aim of self-service is to reduce this time delay for the customers. This is becoming more important because each and every service query does not need a human response.

This is why many organizations are including self-service tools in their customer service department.

These include creating a detailed FAQ section that the customers can go through thoroughly and be able to solve the problems themselves.

Chatbots are another self-service example as we saw just above.

These tools are most effective for those customers who work for long hours or like to get things done on the commute.

ALSO READ : 10 Mistakes Sales Representatives Makes Way Too Often And The Solutions To Avoid Them

7. Customer support and SEO

Contacting customer service to get your issues resolved has been the traditional and conventional method in the past.

However, with the turn of the century, we were introduced to this awesome thing called Google.

Nowadays we tend to ask Google for any big or small issues we have in every sphere of our lives.

But with this, there also comes the chance that your customers may end up on a different page and find wrong suggestions to their solutions, which can make things worse for your clients.

And in this age of customer success and services, that is the last thing you want to happen to your customers. This is where SEO comes in as it can really work wonders.

8. The role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence is something that is no longer a science-fiction. It is as real as sunlight and rain.

According to a report, 85% of customer interactions are predicted to be managed without any human intervention by 2020.

AI and Machine Learning can effectively impact customer support and after-sales support in the days to come.

9. Blockchains for e-commerce customer support

Blockchains are going to be very beneficial to the e-commerce and electronics industry in the future; mainly their post-sale customer support departments.

This is because, with Blockchains, a company can access all the information regarding their products in a single ledger.

This will contain everything from the manufacturing date, installation date, product details, and ownership details.

Moreover, this information will be shared between all the parties involved, i.e. the manufacturer, the customer, part-providers, and any other parties involved.

This means more transparency and hence better customer service and success.

10. Customer success in place of Customer service

Customer success is predicted to be the motto of the future as much as customer service is today.

The pace at which companies nowadays are searching for customer value is the main driving force for this to happen.

However, this can have an adverse effect on small businesses that are looking to increase their customer base.

That is why organizations already practicing customer success today are bound to stay ahead of the curve when this finally hits the ground.

Always remember that better customer support improves customer satisfaction and that is what really drives for a successful business.

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