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)

Most consumers will defect if mistakes aren't fixed

The research found that the consequences of this consumer frustration are serious: some 82% said they always or often switched supplier if they failed to correct their mistakes.

The 'Power of Linguistics in Customer Service Study', which surveyed both consumers and contact centre agents, highlighted a growing understanding gap between the two sides when it came to customer experience. 61% of agents found it hard to understand the language and vocabulary that consumers used, and nearly a third (31%) found it hard to recognise anger or upset in written communications.

Agents empathise with consumers, with 71% believing that customers number one frustration was receiving inadequate or partial answers. 85% thought consumers would be likely to switch if they received poor service. However, they feel powerless to help. Part of the issue is that text-based communications, such as emails and tweets are fundamentally more difficult to understand than face to face or voice-based channels as they lack context or visual/verbal clues. This adds to the challenge of dealing with an expanding number of digital enquiries from increasingly impatient consumers.

Consumers overwhelmingly now use email to contact brands, with 87% of consumers selecting it as their primary communication channel, ahead of Facebook (6%), chat (4%) and Twitter (3%).

To help bridge the understanding gap, agents want better tools and technology to help them do their job and become more productive. Over half (51%) listed technology that analyses questions and suggests relevant information as their 1st or 2nd choice, with the ability to prioritise answers based on tone (anger, sadness, happiness) specified as a priority by 50% of agents. 34% wanted better, centralised knowledge bases that provided faster access to more consistent answers, and 55% asked for a single view of the entire customer history.

"In an attempt to increase loyalty brands are focusing on building stronger relationships and engaging with their customers," said Julian Sammells, UK & Ireland Sales Director for Eptica. "However our research shows that their efforts are being seriously undermined by a breakdown in understanding between consumers and frontline customer service staff. A failure to comprehend what customers are asking, and how they feel, is causing frustrated consumers to switch suppliers, hitting revenues and brand reputation."

As well as the impact of customer churn on revenues, the understanding gap also adds to costs for organisations. Failing to resolve a query first time leads to consumers having to re-contact a company, adding to customer service workloads and putting pressure on thinly stretched resources.

The research also asked agents what words or phrases made them happiest and most upset. Chief amongst the negatives were being sworn at, general abuse, emails written totally in UPPER CASE and use of the word 'disappointed'. On the positive side simply receiving thanks and being told they were helpful were enough to make agents feel happy.

"As the results of this survey show, manually deciphering written communications is incredibly difficult," said Eptica's CEO, Olivier Njamfa. "Given the paramount importance of engaging with customers it is time for brands to invest in linguistic and natural language powered technologies. Only by arming agents with the right tools will brands successfully bridge this widening understanding gap."

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)