When Customer Culture boosts sales everybody wins

You set up a road map with every detail and then…it’s postponed. Weeks, months later the situation gets overcast: it’s not sure anymore even whether that project will ever born: damn! If you are a manager, I bet that you’ve already faced a similar scenario and felt frustrated. When instead benefits and priorities are not questioned, customer culture boosts sales paving the way for unprecedented business opportunities. Just like in this case.

Time is never on your side

One of the hardest lessons that I’ve learnt when I was a customer service manager is that there’s never ‘a right time’ to shake things up. The worst time though it’s when you’re following after competitors that have started innovating earlier than you. And what makes a huge difference? Once again Customer Culture is the needle on the scales between acting in a timely manner and postponing a project. So whether you’re goal is integrating Gen AI in your Digital Customer Service model/platflorm or just getting your team up-skilled, these moments make a difference:

Getting top managers buy-in in advance, ideally at least 3 months before the kick-off. Meaning showing them goals, results and advantages. In a nutshell, instead of asking the budget, sell them the project!
Engaging all main stakeholders keeping all of them aligned. Think about your IT, Marketing colleagues or other departments that are involved and need to contribute in an harmonious way.
Setting the table building up strong bonds and making sure to nurture them consistently in every step. To achieve that, I recommend you take advantage of these hands-on tips.

A winning business case

Here’s a positive case example that I’m glad to share. Last year a client company (a big e-commerce player) had decided to unify two different teams – formerly sales and customer support – into a brand new one. Their goals? Optimizing external and internal customer experience: in fact the end customer would have just one interlocutor (one team instead of two) and the team could manage a wider part of the customer journey seamlessly. The biggest challenges were:

Getting people on the same page even though having different backgrounds (sales and customer service).
Detecting their specific skill-gaps focussing on technical, mindset and conversational facets.
Then bridging the gap with an in-depth up-skilling path. In this case different were necessary different training sessions in terms of content, activities and frequency (for a total of 3 months including pre/post kick off period).

Main results achieved 6 month after the launch:

+6% sales in terms of new customers acquired by competitors
+9% up & cross-selling on existing customers
-5% churn as more customers decided to renew the service for another year.

Over to you

That’s a typical case where Customer Culture boosts sales. And the good news is that the number is increasing: in fact the line between sales and customer service is getting thinner as more and more companies are building up hybrid business models. Are you one of them? So, let’s talk!