The 80-20 rule, or Pareto Principle, is one of the basic business-driving principles and fits almost every business. Its basic understanding tells that almost 20 percent customers for any business construct 80 percent of its income. The general thought behind this rule is that these 20% buy larger service plans or expensive products on offer or in bulk. So, a business growth plan will like to explore more from the same customers.
But how do you sell more to these existing customers? Support or customer service can be the answer to that question, at least for the IT and application businesses. Here is how a business can use the customer service or support team for making a profit.
Sell the Support
Even if your product (or service) is perfectly fine, the peculiarity of different customers can create various issues and they will need expert guidance to get going. In case your product can be attuned with other third-party products, the possibility of such issues increases many folds. To assist the customers, you can offer them support.
But when it comes to selling the support and it must be worth purchasing. Most businesses offer a support team for the customers for free but assistance is either not instant or do not entertain third-party compatibility needs. Customer in immediate need is then left high and dry. Considering this case, it does not come as a surprise that a research by Oracle showed that 81% of the customers are ready to pay for the customer support. If the customer is ready to pay then why not cash into it?
Business simply needs to assure that quality of the support is appreciable and customer should find the support services worthy. As a business, offering the paid support does take a handful team and some requisite tools that can bite the pockets. However, the long-term returns that it promises to deliver are incomparable. Not just that the customer will pay for the support, but a quality support can also enhance the chances of customer retention, up-sale, and referred sales considerably.
Let Support Team Learn Some Sales Tactics
The first job of the support team has to be the fine delivery of resolutions for the customer and maintaining customer satisfaction level optimum. With that remains a great scope to explore more needs of the customer. After understanding those needs, the support officer can rightly suggest to upgrade the plans or to pick more products. However, this sales pitch must not be forceful or assertive on the customers. Since they have already used some of your services, convincing them for more will not be tough if the satisfactory support has been delivered. So, teaching some sales trick to the support officers is essential.
Additionally, they can be appropriately rewarded for their sales performance. Such rewards will serve as the encouragement for them to earn more sales for the business. For a business that offer a number of products (or services), this approach can be huge money minting solution.
Learn From Support
The support team has to interact with the toughest customers often and they understand what these customers find uneasy with the products. At times, they may even discover some completely new uses of the products. All these factors can make valuable contributions with the improvement of the product quality. Most businesses make sure they work on the feedback that they get from the existing customers. But reviews of the support team can prove to be even more critical as they understand the product better than the customers. They know the business structure more closely, which makes their analysis more precise.
But how one learns from the support team remains a challenge. Some 100-odd guys cannot be invited for a brainstorming session. The ways to grab such information from the support staff will vary as per size and nature of the business.
Conclusion and Vital Challenge
A business can easily lose an unsatisfied customer when asked to spend more. Another truth is that support team has to deal with unhappy customers on most occasions. So, the prime concern of the business remains at convincing them with the existing services. With some strategic planning and right approach up-sales can be achieved, if the customer is not misguided. So, when the support person goes for pitching the sale, the customer’s need must be centered.
