Sales & Customer Service Leaders: 3 Green Principles
by Kate Nasser | 3 Comments »
In the continued hunt for financial success, sales and customer service leaders benefit from these 3 green principles.
Customer Service & Sales Leaders: Green Principles 4 Success Image by:KevinGrocki
- Learn from our customers not about them. Customers do business with those they like and trust. Customers have greater reason to trust and like us if we bond with them in two-way learning. The principles of going green focus on learning from the environment for a win/win – preserve it and make our lives better. Biomimicry takes this green principle to great lengths and tremendous innovation. We can innovate for our customers when we learn from them.
- Create sustainable relationships. Going green means giving back. What can we contribute to our customers beyond what they purchase? Resource connections, ideas, just-in-time help? We can build the trust and say thank you to customers by volunteering our brainstorming talent to some of their issues. This too is a two-way renewable (green) effort; it allows us to learn more from them which might produce additional business for us (green).
- Inspire customer service & sales teams with purpose. The green movement has gained strength over the years because of people with strong purpose and commitment. They were able to spread and sustain the cause with this purpose. We can inspire our teams with purpose — build sustainable relationships and innovate for the customer — and gain tremendous results in morale and performance for us. Once again a two-way renewable (green) effort with positive financial (green) business results.
EXAMPLES:
Ask customer care and customer service teams: “What have you learned from the customers and how do we translate that into improved customer service, better interaction, and innovative services?”
Give sales teams incentives to bring lessons learned from customers back to design teams and contribute new product ideas.
Win/win is not old fashioned logic. It brings people into a trust bond that lasts longer than a one-up event. Learning from the customers, giving back beyond the purchase (the “&)”, and inspiring our teams to innovate, sustains and renews our financial success. That’s very green!
What other principles or lessons from the green movement can we apply to sales and customer service? I encourage your thought-filled comments and discussion below. Add your voice.
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers innovative and inspired people-skills keynotes and workshops for customer service, teamwork, sales, and leading change.
I’m in the service industry. And if people don’t trust us, we’ll never hear from them again. I’d love to start getting more and more referrals but I know that takes a long time to develop those kinds of connections. But I think if we keep these green principles in mind, we can speed up the referral building process.
-Matt
I love this concept, and would add another green principle, “re-use” – of knowledge – to increase customer service and satisfaction. Efficient knowledge management (KM) within the organization is a critical factor in providing a good customer experience, and at the heart of KM has always been the principle of re-use. Some examples:
How efficient is the customer care team when researching issues? If the issue has occurred previously it should be documented in a way that is easily discovered the next time. Solutions for known issues should be re-used instead of constantly re-invented/re-discovered.
How many customer surveys do companies need to act on a satisfaction problem and actually solve it? Many times customer satisfaction issues are well known. “Green” principles should be applied by using information already collected and to act on the issues, before expending more cost/energy to collect feedback again, when the feedback will continue to be the same until the issues are resolved.
What do you think?
Bravo Ro! Excellent addition and your examples of documenting and knowledge base are terrific. Many many thanks. Glad you like this concept.
Best wishes,
Kate