American Express

Posts Tagged ‘retail selling’

These calls come from a variety of sources. They can be via advertising, recommendations, websites, PR, directories and mailshots. It is therefore important to know that your customers have choice and that their call to you may be one of a number of enquiries that they are making. Statistically, 85 percent of calls coming into a business are customer related. The others are a mixture of personal calls and calls from supply companies. Therefore, it is essential to answer the phone quickly, ideally by the third ring.

The greeting should be welcoming. Answer the phone with your company’s name. Smile when you answer the phone, as this alters your tone of voice. A smile can be heard over the phone. Enquire as to the person’s name, but please don’t say ‘Who’s calling?’ It is far better to say ‘May I have your name, please?’ Best of all, if the call is from an existing customer, is to recognise the voice and use the customer’s name immediately.Once you have the person’s name, introduce yourself. It is so much easier and nicer for customers to have the name of the person that they are talking to. Do listen carefully to the enquiry.

If you are in any doubt, ask again, for example ‘Do I understand correctly? Are you looking for…?’ If you then have to pass callers to someone else, always give the name of the person you are putting them through to and make sure that they are connected. If there is any difficulty in connecting callers, get their telephone number, promise to call back and state when the return call will be made. Now if you are able to handle the enquiry yourself and can complete the sale over the phone it is just as important and in many cases more so to offer the add-on, as described in the previous section on retail selling. In many cases customers can be so focused on the one product that they forget or are not aware of the add-ons. There are of course occasions when there is an opportunity to ‘up-sell’. This basically means offering a better product than the one the customer was enquiring about. There also may be an opportunity to cross-sell by offering a new or different product that you may have available. For example, ‘Mr/Ms Customer, you may or may not be aware that we also do…’