Hope to see you there.
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Customer service is an extremely important aspect of running a business, which is why companies invest huge amounts of time and money in customer service courses and training methods. However, building a strong team can be a real challenge, as there are a number of essential components.
Here, we take a look at five skills that any good customer service team needs.
1. Communication Skills
The ability to communicate effectively is an absolutely crucial customer service skill for your team to possess. This includes having team members who can convey information in a clear way – whether it is through speech, letters, emails, or on social media – but also requires the ability to obtain and retain information from customers as well.
Someone with good communication skills will be a good listener, will utilise positive rather than negative words, and will make effective use of body language. Ideally, they will also have a strong talent for persuasion, allowing them to convince interested customers that your products or services are right for them.
2. Knowledge of Products and Services
While it may seem like an obvious point, good customer service relies heavily on the individual team members knowing what they are talking about when dealing with customers. This, in turn, requires a detailed knowledge of the products and/or services your business has to offer.
For that reason, a huge part of your customer service training should focus on educating staff members. Their knowledge should be based on what a customer may want (or need) to know, meaning it probably won’t include the intricacies of how a product is made, but must include a deep understanding of how a product actually works.
3. Patience
Patience is a vital asset for anyone working in a customer service role and its importance should be stressed to your team. Customers will often only reach out to staff members if they are angry, confused or desperate, and patience makes dealing with emotionally charged people significantly easier.
“Also be sure to take the time to truly figure out what they want,” says Gregory Ciotti, a marketing professional for Help Scout. “They’d rather get competent service than be rushed out the door.”
4. Attentiveness
When it comes to discussing examples of poor customer service, people often cite times when they felt ignored, or as though their needs were not deemed to be important. Repeated studies have also shown that ignoring customers is extremely damaging to the relationship between a business and its clients, so avoiding it should be a priority.
In fact, research carried out by Conversocial found that more than 1 in 4 customers would stop doing business with a company if they were ignored, while almost half would be less likely to do business with a company if they saw other customers being ignored. Therefore, it is important to have attentive staff, who are always willing and able to offer help, anticipate problems and generally engage with your customer base.
5. A Calming Influence
At those difficult times when things become heated, staff members who have the ability to defuse a situation are invaluable. As a result, you need team members who are not only able to keep their cool under pressure, but who also have a calming influence on those around them.
The ability to stay calm, no matter what the situation or how intense a customer is, can help to make sure any solutions are completely rational and carefully thought through. Moreover, that calm approach can easily rub off on other staff members and on customers, making the entire situation a whole lot less volatile.
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Invoicing is among the most important aspects of operating a small business. However, it can be such a big hassle at times- particularly if you are a start up company and new to the process.
So what is the best way to avoid having to spend so much time on the minor details of generating and sending out invoices and needing to chase late payees down, so that you have more time to focus on the important aspects of your business?
Looking Professional – Stay Consistent With Your Brand
Whenever you are generating invoices, it is very important to ensure that they look as sharp as possible. If you send a customer something that has an amateurish and cheap appearance, they might not feel so inclined to pay you as fast as if they receive a more professional-looking bill.
Make sure that your invoices have your logo on it and also ensure that the amount you are owed is clearly spelled out. Your brand should be reflected in the wording and colours of the document. For example, if you happen to be a copywriter and using plain English is something you take great pride in, don’t add a lot of legalese to your invoice. Save that for your terms and conditions, or have a good lawyer translate the legal terms into plain English.
Keep Things Legal
You want to ensure that your invoice is correct and in compliance with VAT requirements and with company law rules as well since it is a legal document. If your business is a limited company or LLP, your business’s registered number and address should appear on the invoice. It should also show any directors or members as well. Fortunately, if you are using an online accounting system, it will all be done automatically for you.
Consider The Numbers
According to HMRC rules invoices are required to have “unique sequential reference numbers.” However, the same sequence does not need to be used across your entire business. For example, a different sequence can be used for every project or customer.
Select Your Pricing Structure
There isn’t anything illegal that prevents you from requesting a deposit from your customers, or for full payment upfront prior to you doing the work. It confirms that your customer is committed to the project as well as being easier on your cash flow. It also helps to spread financial risk between your customer and you. If your customer isn’t required to pay until the work is complete, and then refuses to pay or disappears, you won’t have leverage any longer to stop the work- since it is done already.
If you are concerned that you may lose customers by asking for an upfront payment, then think about offering your customers a money-back guarantee if they aren’t satisfied with the service that you provide.
Make Sure Your Payment Terms Are Clear
Before doing any work, you should have informed your customer about what your payment terms are. However, it still is important for this information to be included on your invoice.
If you have a 30-day payment period set and are expecting your invoice to be paid by the deadline, be sure this information is included on your document to make things as clear as possible to ensure that your client sees it. Also, if you plan to make any late payment penalties or charges, be sure to make them as clear and prominent as you can directly on the invoice. That way your client will have a reminder that the bill needs to be paid promptly. Here are some good tips.
Follow Up On Invoices Right Away
Get into the habit of doing your bookkeeping at least once a week. You should invoice at least that frequently. Your invoices should ideally be sent out as soon as you have completed the work (unless your customer already paid you in advance). That way, it will be one less thing that you need to worry about. However, hopefully your customers will be pay you sooner than that.
Also make it as easy as you can for your customers to pay. Include payment details, such as an online payment link or your bank account information, either on your covering email or on the invoice itself. If you use a specific invoicing system for generating and sending out your invoice, check to see whether you can set automatic emails up to follow up on late payers. That will help you save additional time.
Get A Technological Boost
Remember that it isn’t necessary for you do your invoicing from scratch on your own. If you can possibly afford it, you should invest in specialist accounting or purchase management software to make this process much easier and convenient.
It can be especially useful if you will be send out invoices on a regular basis to the same client (for example, a monthly retainer fee) and would like to set up recurring invoices that are automatically sent. Or if you want to include multiple expenses and would like to easily and quickly attach digital copies to your invoice of your expense receipts. If you would like your client to pay faster, you might want to include a link to Stripe or PayPal, or some other online payment option so that they can pay you with one click of a button.
Be sure to do your homework first and check out all of the different options that are available to you to figure out which system will work the bet for your business’s requirements and you. Over the long run, it can help to save you many hours of hassle and administrative work.
Invoicing is a crucial aspect of any business’s administration, since without invoices there isn’t a way for your customers to know how much to pay you, and if you don’t have money coming in, your business won’t be able to survive for very long!
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After only 30 years of the internet, there are now just under 1 billion websites in the world. Of those, only 173M+ are currently active. That may seem like an overwhelming number when trying to find new leads online and quantify the size of your eCommerce market, but this task doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming, writes Liz Fulham from SalesOptimize.
Do you know how many eCommerce websites there are in the world? Less than one percent of the active internet is eCommerce i.e. 1.7M websites and growing. For sales executives and businesses in all industries, it often feels like you’re searching for a needle in a virtual haystack the size of Mount Everest. A person can only qualify 100+ websites a day, which is a big problem facing companies when trying to find sales leads using conventional search engines.
Let’s say a camera manufacturer, Max Speed, a jovial fellow, would like to know the true size of his worldwide market online. He wants to know how many websites in the world might be interested in reselling his Max Speed cameras.
The Average Joe Way: Max Speed enters “Camera shops” into a search engine and it returns about 624,000,000 results. So many of these results are duplicates. Remember there are only 173M + active websites. That’s an almost infinite amount of man-hours of work for the (no-longer) jovial Max and his newly hired team to sift through, pull their hair out and silently scream about.
After finding some quick wins using Google, Max’s team wants to find more sales leads. Businesses can look to LinkedIn, Kompass, Experian, Dun & Bradstreet etc. to do this. While these options are better than a Google search, the complete answer is still not there. The reason is that thousands of eCommerce sites are missing from these searches. eCommerce merchants live in the world of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter etc. How does Max and his team search these platforms for eCommerce sales leads?
The good news is that there are major developments in data mining and deep web analytics. This is a big investment area globally. Using some of the new search engines, Max and his team can now enter “Camera shops” into a business search engine and, in just a few seconds, they can find thousands of results for camera shops that are active and selling to his market right now. As a result, Max gets rich all by himself, keeps his hair and gets home early! He no longer needs to hire an army to search the internet to find quality sales leads.
It is estimated that 2015 saw over $1.7 trillion traded by online businesses. In the UK, Black Friday broke the £1bn ($1.4bn+) threshold in sales. When you look at the global sales opportunity of $1.7 trillion, only a very few of the large online merchants pull in more than $20 million a year. Instead, the large sales figures come from a combined larger number of online businesses (albeit lesser-known) that are consistently doing in excess of $250K a year.
Again, this goes to show that there are lots of sales leads out there still to be found – and a need for much more refined search engines/databases to identify those sales. Of the ones that are out there today let www.SalesOptimize.com be an option for consideration.
Finding new sales leads can be challenging for many businesses, but the advances in data mining and analytics means there are new opportunities for savvy business owners to narrow down their potential eCommerce market and identify leads to foster further growth.
Written by: Liz Fulham, Founder and CEO, SalesOptimize – helping businesses to quantify the true size of their B2B eCommerce market and identify new online shop leads.
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