On many occasions we tend to prioritize the attraction of new customers, leaving in the background something as important as the loyalty of existing customers.
Keeping our customers happy can be one of the most important pillars to maintain the growth of the company. They are not only the recurring consumers of our products and services, but they can also become the best promoters of our brand.
In this article we will go deeper into what it is and how we can improve our after-sales service.
What is after-sales service?
It is the attention we provide to the customer after the sales stage. Its objective is to maintain a good relationship with the customer and it is as important as the attention we provide before and during the sale.
Contrary to what many people think, our commitment cannot end when the sale is closed, but must continue long after the sale to exceed customer expectations and improve customer satisfaction.
However, to understand the importance of after-sales service, we need to know what it is for.
Importance of after-sales service
In today’s global market there are more and more companies providing or selling services and products similar to ours, so competition is increasing. There are so many options in the market that, even if a customer has chosen you once, there is no guarantee that he will stay with you.
After-sales service tries to change this, based on building loyalty among customers who have already bought from us once and turning them into repeat customers.
Some of the benefits of taking care of the after-sales service can be:
- The customer does not feel that he/she is being attended by an automated system, but rather that he/she feels close to us and humanizes us through our customer service.
- Customers feel that we know them, we care about them, we seek their satisfaction and value their opinion.
- Customers become the main ambassadors of our brand, taking into account that most of the people who need it will purchase a product or service recommended by a friend or relative.
- This closeness with customers will also help us to know if we are meeting their expectations or if there is something we can improve.
Aspects to be taken into account to improve after-sales follow-up
It is important that we are clear about what aspects we should pay attention to in order to improve our after-sales service. Below we highlight some of them.
Customer behavior
It is essential to know the behavior of our customers if we want to offer them the best possible after-sales service. It is said that the best salespeople are not those who know perfectly what they are selling, but those who, above all, are clear about who they are selling to. This makes it easier to identify their needs and offer them the most appropriate solution.
Knowing how our consumers behave, what interests they have, how they prefer to communicate and in which digital environments they interact is a competitive advantage for our business. That is why it is important to analyze them, so that we have data to help us define our strategies focused on after-sales service.
For this we must have data analysis tools such as those provided by Fonvirtual’s Virtual PBX. Tools that allow us to know at what time our customers prefer to contact us, through which channel, the ratio of repeat calls, which channels they prefer to use to communicate with us, etc.
Omnichannel
Today it is not enough to offer a single channel as a means of contact. Today’s consumer uses different channels and devices, so as we mentioned in the previous point, one of the key aspects to offer a quality after-sales service is to know which channels our customers prefer to use to communicate with us.
The first step for this is to cover all the channels we can. With our Virtual PBX, in addition to receiving and managing calls, you can integrate Whatsapp, your web chat, call and video call buttons, so that the customer has the option to contact us on any platform they are using.
In addition to having all the aforementioned channels, it is no less important to have tools that allow us to analyze this data. That is why it is crucial that we can integrate all channels in the same PBX and be able to evaluate the level of use of each of our channels.
Keeping in touch with your customers
We must make sure to keep communication with our customers alive through CTI WebRTC phone integrations. Fonvirtual’s WebRTC solutions can be integrated with our CRM or Helpdesk software. Thus providing different tools to improve our after-sales service.
Customer identification
This service allows our agents to visualize the data of the customer who is contacting us even before answering, either through a phone call or through any other channel.
Our agent will thus be able to know the products or services purchased by the customer, as well as any other information that will allow him to anticipate the customer’s demand.
Direct contact from the CRM
We also have these tools in the opposite direction, when we are the ones who need to communicate with any customer, we can do it directly through our CRM.
If we want to maintain frequent communication with our customers, it will be very useful to be able to schedule recurring contact activities through our switchboard and have all this information available for later analysis.
Recording customer interactions
Of course, all of the above would lose some of its meaning if we could not have a record of all the interactions we have with our customers.
Our CRM integration records every communication, providing us with a history of the interactions a customer has had with any of our agents, as well as all the channels they have used to reach us.
A complete communications tool will help define strategies based on achieving the objective on which our article is based, to improve our after-sales service.
