Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format. With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Customer experiences need solid foundations

It can be a minefield when brands are planning to start from scratch, or thinking about how to improve on existing processes. Bringing pre-sale, point of purchase and after-sale together, across a variety of channels, can often be daunting but it doesn't have to be. An experienced outsourced partner has the technology, capabilities and skill sets to do this and bring together the right mix of systems, workflow and fulfilment.

"The most common question I am asked is 'where do we start?' and this is no real surprise," said Mylum. "Typically, my answer is nearly always the same. We need to understand the expectations and needs of the customer and then organise service delivery and systems around this. That's the first objective in my book and we work in this customer-centric way for all our clients. Once we've established a starting point, and processes and systems are up and running, we need to be able to understand how satisfied the customers are."

It is tempting to really try and understand the whole picture right from the offset, tracking every interaction that a customer has with the company, across every channel at each stage in the lifecycle. Our advice is to refrain from this initially as it is too much of a 'Customer Experience Nirvana'. Instead, focus on getting the basics right and moving forward from a solid base. A good place to start is simply to understand where in the customer journey it's possible to make the right use of feedback. One of the most powerful metrics is the likelihood of a customer to recommend the product or service and this can be done through - for example, the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

NPS is a common methodology, used across many leading organisations but it's important to not fall into the trap of assuming that if someone chooses to 'not intend to recommend a product or service' then it is likely to spread negativity. This isn't the case and this kind of rating will not necessarily detract others from using the brand's product or service. In fact, the detractors (as they are labelled by the NPS system) do not portray nearly as much negativity as previously assumed. To get a better handle on this area, new methodology is now available to enhance the NPS process. It includes questions such as 'likelihood to detract'; and knowing the subtle difference is key to getting the service design right from the beginning.

Closing the loop on this is vital and working with an established outsourced provider offering expertise and flexibility is paramount. It is as important as choosing the right tool, whether post-transaction NPS surveys, customer panels or after sales survey.

Businesses that integrate their Contact Centre and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions will be the ones to benefit from customer feedback. The feedback ascertained in the Contact Centre can feed back into the CRM programmes and close the loop. In our world this is too often where brands fall down; they collect the customer experience data but fail to develop processes to act upon these. There's just no joined-up solution.

"If we're running NPS or Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSS) simply to measure the propensity of things, it seems silly not to go that extra step and build objectives and outbound resources to follow up on this with 'actual' relevant offers and samples to the original customer that was surveyed", concluded Mylum.

And finally, it is crucial to make sure that feedback channels actually work for the customer. If there is the need to complain then there's nothing worse for them and their experience than being caught in a round robin between departments or having to engage with people that have no care or empowerment to recover their custom. Building the customer experience on solid foundations really helps to eradicate this possibility.

Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format.

With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

You'll learn to sell yourself, sell your products, and sell your brand on the internet, writing high-conversion landing pages, social media posts, and more. You'll start attracting customers you didn’t even know existed, and learn the top trade secrets for customer retention.

You'll become a lean, mean selling machine. See how the experts do it and learn to adapt what they've done for your own profit. You'll learn to write strong, powerful, effective sales copy, whether it's for a sales script, sales letter, flyer, insert, advert or just about anything else.

You'll learn how to sell whether you're selling by telephone, by mail, or even meeting prospects face-to-face. You'll find out how to size them up, present yourself, nail down their true needs, close the sale, and learn to tackle the tricky ones.

You'll discover the biggest secrets of successful direct mail sellers, sales letter writers, and how to segment and choose the right prospects for each campaign.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)