![\"Police_contact_centre_1970\"](\"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Police_contact_centre_1970-300x202.jpg\")
One of my early roles was in a Call Centre environment, but I still see the same culture 15+ years later!<\/p>\nOne of my early roles was in a Call Centre environment, but I still see the same culture 15+ years later!<\/p>\n
We only received inbound calls, so invariably people always had questions or problems they needed solving. We were called \u2018customer service\u2019 but, we were actually just a sales team.<\/p>\n
I was a fantastic salesman, rarely missing any of my targets, even though other people would regularly exceed theirs.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until after I\u2019d left that I realised I hadn\u2019t actually been trying to sell the products, but rather the brand.<\/p>\n
I read a story recently that reminded me of my time there; about a man who gets a flat tyre as he\u2019s desperately rushing to his daughter\u2019s wedding. A passer-by stops to help him, but instead of offering him the lift he desperately wants, offers him a tyre because that\u2019s the need he can easily see.<\/p>\n
The point being that more thoughtful solutions are often of greater use to the customer.<\/p>\n
And this is where sales people can fail. Not just in terms of achieving a sale, but also in the way it can affect brand image.<\/p>\n
When you gear up to achieve sales, not to make customers happy, you\u2019ll inevitably send a lot of people away unhappy. Even a great sales person will tell you that it\u2019s a numbers game. The \u2018trick\u2019 is to get rid of the non-sales calls as quickly as possible, so you can get onto another call that might actually be a sale.<\/p>\n
But this is the problem.<\/p>\n
And the result, of course, is terrible customer service.<\/p>\n
In the call centre, if it didn\u2019t look like a call would result in a sale, some people would just move the customer on any way they could think of \u2013 transferring them, hanging up, putting them on mute and pretending the call had been disconnected, or just flat-out lying.<\/p>\n
But these were the people with the best sales figures \u2013 because the less time they spent talking to the non-buyers, the more time they could spend talking to other prospects. And because they were the best sellers, their managers turned a blind eye to the terrible customer service.<\/p>\n
This is the type of customer service that sales targets and commission-based pay scales breed. Everything is set up for the immediate short term, with little to no importance placed on building relationships.<\/p>\n
I was always of the opinion that it didn\u2019t matter whether or not I made a sale, as long as the customer went away thinking positively about the brand and would choose to come back to us when they did decide to make a purchase.<\/p>\n
My mantra has always been: \u201cselling is about helping people find an answer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yes, you want your product to be the answer they\u2019re looking for. But if it isn\u2019t and you can\u2019t sell them something tangible, help them find the answer and sell them your brand instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of my early roles was in a Call Centre environment, but I still see the same culture 15+ years later! We only received inbound calls, so invariably people always had questions or problems they needed solving. We were called \u2018customer service\u2019 but, we were actually just a sales team. I was a fantastic salesman,… Brand Not Product<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[292,455,447],"class_list":["post-1302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strategy","tag-branding","tag-customer-service","tag-sales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1304,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions\/1304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}