Getting started on the right foot begins with greeting the customer. While often short, greetings are the first step to proactive support and set the tone for the rest of the interaction. This helps customers form their first impression of your service. Show
There may be instances when it’s not possible to greet the customer right away. For example, if you provide support via email outside business hours, it’s important to acknowledge that the communication has been received. Auto-responses are a great way to let customers know they were successful in getting in touch and that they’ll be hearing back from someone soon. That said, customers expect you to respond to and resolve their issues as quickly as possible and take the necessary steps to shorten the wait time. Examples of customer interaction (Greeting):
STEP 2: UnderstandingThe next step in the customer interaction cycle requires you to focus on what your customer needs. Building a customer-centric culture requires assessing how your customers feel by collecting enough facts and getting the required context for their problems. This often involves asking the right questions, which is invaluable for getting to the root of what a customer wants. You may need to ask why several times before getting to the real cause of their inquiry. Another major component of understanding is active listening. That means being present and paying attention. Tune into your conversation with the customer, avoid interruptions and let them finish. Repeat what’s been heard to allow the customer to confirm that you successfully interpreted what they were trying to convey. Keep in mind that every customer is important. A company rep will handle multiple interactions in a day, but for a customer, it’s the only interaction they’ll have with the company that day or perhaps ever. Therefore, it’s important to treat each case with utmost care. When speaking with a customer on the phone, another way to understand is simply by listening to the tone of their voice. This will be a key indicator of whether their sentiment changes during the conversation. Examples of customer interaction (Understanding):
STEP 3: AgreeingAfter greeting your customer and understanding where they are coming from, you move on to agreeing to help and find a solution to their problems. Helping a customer requires mutual agreement on the desired outcome of the interaction. This is where you need to show empathy, set expectations and offer possible solutions across preferred communication channels. At this stage, it’s important to focus on offering a quick and effective solution. Some customers may ask for things that just aren’t possible. When this happens, it’s good practice to be upfront about limitations, then communicate what can be done. If there’s an opportunity to do something similar to what they’re asking for, it can often be as acceptable to the customer as their original request. When no other solutions are available, going the extra mile to offer resources like free months of service, exclusive discounts, or special gifts is a good idea. This gesture improves customer satisfaction and encourages customer retention. Once a solution is proposed, communicate with your customer, giving them a chance to indicate if anything is unclear. Make sure your customer understands if there are any missing steps you can help them with to make the most of this solution. Examples of customer interaction (Agreeing):
STEP 4: DeliveringOnce an agreement has been made, the next step is delivering. You need to practice transparent customer communication to deliver the final solution to your customer. If you’re likely to take more time to resolve the customer issue, keep the customer in the loop. Let them know what’s happening and when they can expect to hear from you again. That way, the customer isn’t left in the dark while you are working on a suitable solution. At the end of the delivery stage, there should be no loose ends, and the customer should have everything they need. Examples of customer interaction (Delivering):
STEP 5: ClosingLast but certainly not least, the interaction should be concluded with a statement that encourages the customer to get in touch again. Thanking customers for contacting the business lets them know they’re appreciated. Expressions of gratitude can go a long way in helping customers feel valued. The most integral part of closing a customer interaction is the follow-up. You need to check on the level of customer satisfaction to ensure you meet the customer's expectations. You can simply ask them if they’re satisfied after delivering the solution or gather feedback using a customer satisfaction survey. By successfully moving through these five steps of customer interactions, companies can create positive outcomes. Examples of customer interaction (Closing):
Note: How you choose to engage with your customers will depend on the type of customer service interaction, and its success will reflect on your customer satisfaction scores. A prospective customer, or prospect, is a person or organization interested in making a purchase, with financial resources required, and the power to make purchasing decisions. There are no comprehensive criteria to distinguish leads and prospects. Both leads and prospects have an interest in your company’s products; they may be more or less qualified. However, differences between leads and prospective customers boil down to three points: Targeting prospective clients is nothing to sneeze at. At least 50% of prospects turn out to be a bad fit for companies. Put differently, businesses waste tons of resources that won’t yield happy customers. To save time and money, start with researching which prospects can become your best clients. Here are three techniques that will help you. Your clientele’s experience with your product is key to generate prospects. Start with composing a list of your key customers and find what they have in common. Maybe they work in the same industry, have similar financial indicators or needs. Look for these features in your prospective customers. Finally, survey your best customers about your product. What do they like the most? What features are the most useful? What would they change about your product? These answers can shed some light on how you can effectively reach new prospects with the same needs. People that love your competitors’ product could easily fall in love with yours too. Find out who they are — browse through competitors’ social media accounts, research their content, comments, and followers’ profiles. Look at your competitors’ promotional content. What advantages does it highlight? Knowing what their customers like about the product gives you clues to things customers value that you can implement. Pay attention to social proof as well — it shows typical buyers, problems they face, and ways your competitors solve them. Finally, pretend to be a potential customer too, test your competitors’ selling process, and learn from it. How do sales representatives communicate with prospects? What channels do they use? What questions do they ask and what features do they highlight? Create a list of criteria to estimate if your prospects are effort-worthy. If you work in the B2B sector, hallmarks may be the company's budget, industry, the market they operate in, and more. Include financial indicators, such as revenue or company growth. Businesses without financial problems probably have more interest in investing their money. Use company profiling resources — D&B Hoovers, TechCrunch, VentureDeal, or CrunchBase — to track their growth. If you work in the B2C sector, create a buyer persona. Ask yourself about your ideal customer’s occupation, marital status, geography, income, pain points, and interests. The answers can be both speculative and empirical. These techniques will help you save time and effort by picking the most promising prospects. After applying them to your sales strategy you can convert prospects into happy clients in short order. How can you convert prospects into clients?
After targeting your prospects, it’s time to convert them into customers. We’ve picked five hacks to get the most out of your prospective customers and turn them into happy clients. Try uncommon communication channelsWhat comes to mind when thinking of ways to reach your prospects? Our wager: calls and emails. However, only 23.9% of sales emails are opened, and it takes 18 calls to connect with a buyer. To stop losing time on calls and emails, implement new communication channels into your strategy. For instance, while your prospect is still researching your product, offer them to interact with a chatbot. It can provide them with instant feedback around the clock, answer frequently asked questions, book consultations, and more. Bots often gently push prospects towards the sales funnel, as Jamie Oliver’s chatbot does. It shows recipes as responses to emojis, offers Jamie Oliver’s new cookbook, and lets users share the bot on their Facebook page. It works well for both the book’s sales and promotion. Jamie Oliver’s chatbotYou can create an engaging chatbot for Facebook Messenger or Telegram for free in no time — register with SendPulse and squeeze every bit of value out of this marketing channel. Build customer-centric communicationHard selling is an excellent way to chase your prospects away. Instead of pushing your prospects to purchase, listen to their needs, and offer them help to accomplish their goals. Another hack is to address your prospects’ pain points. Build your pitch around the problems your product helps eliminate. It’s a psychological trick that boils down to our brain’s predisposition to react more to potential losses than gains. Cook Smarts use this tactic in their email communication. The email highlights a problem their prospects face every day — being swamped with meal planning — and offers a solution. You can use this approach not only in email marketing but also on other channels.  Show how your product worksMore than half of the prospects are eager to know how the product works. Show them the whole set of features and opportunities your product provides. For instance, you can create a text or video guide, make a presentation, or a one-on-one consultation. The best option is offering a free trial. It helps prospects to figure out if your proposal fits their needs, and gives you an additional reason to reach them after the trial expires. Blue Bottle Coffee knows a thing or two about the power of a free trial — trying coffee once is more persuasive than describing it for hours. Moreover, the company uses this occasion for cross-selling in the “You Might Also Like” section. Use social proof and storytelling95% of purchasing decisions occur in our subconscious mind, which makes emotional stories more powerful than facts. 88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as personal recommendations. Combined, storytelling and social proof can change your selling game. Autopilot uses this technique in the email with an engaging story. To read the full text, the recipient goes to the website and sees a precise case study ending with a call to try Autopilot for free. Automate your follow-upsTop salespeople spend more time on sales-related activities, while others get stuck in operations. To save time, automate your follow-up messages, as we did in the example below with SendPulse. This flow helps handle prospects’ contacts, manage connections within strict deadlines, and automatically finish the communication after reaching the goal. To automate your interactions with prospective customers, start with SendPulse’s Automation 360 tool. We created a flow starting after a prospect opens the email reminding them that their trial expires in three days. After opening this email, they will receive an offer to buy a premium subscription. If the recipient purchases the premium subscription, the flow stops; if not – it continues with a promotional email. Once opened, a prospect gets the next campaign with social proof. If they don’t react, the flow sends them an SMS. Those, who opened the social proof email, receive an additional trial. Meanwhile, the flow sends the seller a reminder to call those, who didn't react. If a recipient didn’t click the CTA button in the latter email, the flow will change the contact's variable to “inactive.” In the other case, a prospect gets a thank you email. Add prospects to your CRMWith a CRM system, you can visualize your sales processes. It will help you record deals, monitor their progress, store information about clients to understand how well your strategy works. You can use the SendPulse CRM system for free. Accept orders, manage deals with the help of kanban-board, build your client list, communicate with customers via email or chatbot, and automate your pipeline in one place. Look below to see how deals are displayed on a kanban-board. You can create new statuses, add information about clients and deals, and send them messages. Working with prospective customers gets tough sometimes. However, you can ease the difficulty by targeting prospects properly, using the right communication strategies, automating everything you can, and applying various communication channels. Reinforce your prospecting with email campaigns, chatbots, web push notifications, and SMS — register with SendPulse to create them in a blink of an eye. ReferencesCreate an email campaign Last Updated: 04.11.2022 Rate this article about "a Prospective Customer" |
What is the process of approaching prospective customers or clients who were not expecting such an interaction?
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