Did you know that most businesses are unaware of the repeat business and new sales opportunity potential that lies within their customer service teams?
There’s a stat going around that says around 65% of business sales come from repeat customers. There are various sources given for this information, mostly based in the US. This percentage would vary between industries, business size, etc.; however, no matter how big or small that percentage is, the fact is that most of those sales are realised by customer service teams, not sales teams.
Did you also know that customer service management is much more critical than marketing for repeat sales?
I mean, these people are in client contact dependent careers after all and we know, from our experience with Barrett clients, that if we bring customer service teams into the sales fold and show them the organisation/division’s sales strategy, what new business opportunities look like and how to capture them, then customer satisfaction and sales results can go through the roof.
The Lesson: If we’re not engaging customer service teams in sales, opportunity management and how to work proactively with customers, then we’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
In speaking and working with the head of Sugar CRM APAC, Jason du Preez and lead BDM, Darshan Dhumal, they like us, find too many disconnects between marketing, sales and service teams in businesses.
Customer service teams need to be designed, not as cost centres, but as profit centres where they can participate in both service delivery, opportunity maximisation, and revenue generation. This is not new. We’ve been writing about this for years. We’ve also got firsthand experience with clients adopting this approach.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are some stats from Gartner’s Predicts 2021: CRM Customer Service and Support:
Gartner’s strategic planning assumptions
- By 2025, 40% of customer service organizations will become profit centers by becoming de facto leaders in digital customer engagement.
- By 2025, 80% of customer service organizations will have abandoned native mobile apps in favor of messaging for a better customer experience.
- By 2025, proactive (outbound) customer engagement interactions will outnumber reactive (inbound) customer engagement interactions.
How do we achieve this?
Everyone has to be on the same page. In practical terms, this is the active mapping and integration of marketing-sales-service processes in our businesses so we can all work together to create a seamless buying-selling-service experience. This means no more working in silos.
Organisations need to adopt the ethos that selling is everybody’s business and everybody lives by selling something.
Remember everybody lives by selling something.
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