A company’s staff is responsible for running major day to day parts of its operations. Having qualified, motivated, and appropriately placed employees in your business is what usually makes or breaks it. This is especially true for employees that are in direct contact with customers.
These employees are the front end of a business, the face and voice of a business for the people outside. Their tone and behavior with the client is how the company will be perceived by the latter. And if that puts a wrong impression in the mind of the caller, who may very well be a potential or a loyal customer, the results will show up in the balance sheet.
Let’s take a look at how the staff influences the overall performance of the business.
Making New Customers
Once a business expands to a certain size, owners don’t usually go out door-to-door handing out their pamphlets or marketing their business, it’s the employees who perform that task. If these employees, who come in direct contact with the clients, are not trained well, or do not understand what the business does, they will not be able to properly convey the message of the business to potential clients.
A lot also depends on the way they interact on these calls. A potential client would convert only if they feel that the company is ready to meet their demands. If, however, a welcoming or appropriately informing interaction is not provided, people will look the other way.
Retaining Existing Customers
Making a new customer is about five to twenty-five times more expensive than retaining existing customers. This shows the immense significance existing clientele holds on the bottom line of the business. It is the staff again that has to perform this retention task for business. This is true not only in terms of maintaining product quality and standards, but also in facilitating customers with their post-sale needs.
This includes complaint registration, problem solving, and provision of information required for the products or the services the business provides. An unsatisfactory response will not only dissatisfy the existing the customer base of the company, but will also become a barrier in creating a new one. This is because any customer, with their word of mouth, is the biggest marketer of the business.
In Projecting the Company’s Professionalism
If you, as the owner of your business, pick up the phone in your office, you are your business’s voice and should conduct yourself professionally. This in turn will reflect on the business. But if that call is being picked up by an untrained internee, things can backfire.
This is especially important when dealing with other corporate callers. Corporate clients are often the biggest source of revenue generation. But attracting them has a catch, if they find the services of the company unprofessional by any means, they are most likely to not award your business with their coveted contracts. Therefore, it is important to have a professionally trained workforce that interacts with clients at this level. Otherwise an unprofessional image of the business will be portrayed to the world outside.
