We could subtitle this article “How not to do service like Comcast,” and you’d get the point right away. If your company sells a great product or service, but you don’t want customers to experience what Comcast customers go through, you need to improve your sales-to-service handoff process.
Why the Handoff Process is Vital
During the sales or “wooing” phase, you say “yes” to every question or need the potential customer has. The prospect wants a special phone number for their business that they will own? Not a problem. They’d like for their plan to include certain services every month? Absolutely.
But once the prospect moves into the customer phase, they confront all sorts of obstacles and find out that all the “yesses” you gave them are really “nos.” The problem isn’t necessarily that the customer can’t get the business line, it’s that your company can’t live up to what it promised.
As a result, because your company’s service team isn’t living up to the expectation you set during the sales’ phase, the customer is very likely to cancel the service altogether.
A Better Way of Doing Things
Obviously, the best way to do sales-to-service handoff is to set realistic expectations. Your company’s salespeople shouldn’t be promising the world and promoting expectations that your service team can’t deliver.
Here are some strategies to use to smooth out the sales-to-service handoff process:
- Make an introduction. In whatever way you can, either face-to-face, in a phone call or via email, introduce the new customer to the service rep, and talk through the details of the promises you’ve made to the customer.
- Document pain points. In your customer relationship management system, be sure that the salesperson documents the paint point that got the customer to sign on the dotted line. This pain point should then guide the onboarding of the customer. When the customer care rep logs into the CRM, she’ll see the pain point and be able to deliver the right solution or features to address that need. For example, if you made the sale based on your top-notch training package, which addresses the customer’s complaint with his previous CRM’s lack of training, the sales team can move right into seamlessly onboarding the customer via training modules.
- Know the next steps. Your company should have a documented set of steps to follow during the sales-to-service handoff process. These steps will help the sales team cover precisely how to onboard the new customer. Without it, customers will slip through the cracks, or worse, have to reach out and call you to get the process rolling.
Maximize the sales-to-service handoff process by setting realistic expectations, making the right introductions, documenting pain points, and making sure everybody knows the next steps. With these strategies, your company can stand out in a world of customer service failures.
