Sometimes, words can do the most for your business rather than the product itself. It’s true that direct sales bring the income to a brand thanks to the strong selling proposal and the product fit, but not only. Your team and how they speak with customers play an important role in keeping customers with you, inspiring love and loyalty to your brand. In this post, we are studying the love formats of messaging with potential buyers that will help to build strong relationships or treat objections.
Positive words any Sales Person should use in customer messaging
Reply with a positive -ly
- I definitely will make sure that it gets sorted…
- I can certainly help you…
- That is exactly right…
- I completely agree with you…
- I will quickly run through this with you…
- Thanks, we aim to provide a friendly service…
- I can highly recommend…
- That’s certainly impressive, Mrs Smith…
- That is absolutely fascinating…
- You certainly are an expert on this…
- That is personally my favourite option…
- It would definitely be ideal, considering your situation…
As you could notice, most of these positive words have -ly at the ending and that is not by chance. The -ly suffix is a well-known persuasion tool used in call centers at big firms. The fact is that most of slogans use the suffix to highlight their offers:
- Exceedingly good cakes
- Probably the best lager in the world
- It does exactly what it says on the tin
So, if you educate your sales team on how to treat customers, don’t underestimate positive messaging and persuasive suffixes.
Inspire trust
FEEL, FELT, FOUND are three words that are often used together in the contact centres. They are capable of inspiring trust in your customers. Mention some use cases:
- “Mr Smith, I understand how you feel … many of our happiest customers felt the same way… however, what they found is…”
Resolving a complicated case with a frustrated customer, FEEL, FELT, FOUND can also mitigate the problem:
- “Mr Smith, I can see why you feel like that. Something similar has happened to me before and I felt the same way. What is found, and I hope this will be the same for you, is…”
Inspire optimism
Such statements as ‘marvellous’, ‘splendid’, or ‘great’ and their synonyms can seem to be upbeat but these are the ones that drive the conversation with an uncertain buyer. You show how you are interested in communicating with a person.
- That is a fantastic alternative…
- Great news!
- Marvellous choice…
- That is an excellent suggestion…
- Splendid! All that is left to do now…
- Yes, it is essential that you…
- It is a very generous offer…
- That it is an interesting idea…
- Brilliant! I’m glad we are on the same page…
- Yes, it is an exciting prospect…
- I think that it’s a terrific option…
Customers can complain about impolite replies of a sales person, but will never mind too enthusiastic dialogs like the one below:
- Could I take your phone number, Mrs Smith?
- I can give you my mobile phone number, is that Ok?
- That would be fantastic, thank you very much!
Positive scripting lists
Your sales team should be both creative and fast while responding to the first request. The average response time to process requests is 12 hours and 10 minutes. But:
- 88% of clients expect a reply from your rep within 60 minutes.
- While 30% awaits a response within 15 minutes or less.
- 77 % of customers expect to receive an instant response when chatting online with a brand rep.
A quick response needs preliminary prepared scripts. At this, templated replies should ideally feel like real-person communication, be easily edited according to a particular case, and still keep positive statements. Designing a script for your consultants, do not frustrate or anger customers. Avoid negative forms, and use the following alternatives to inspire love to your clients:
- “I don’t know/I’m not sure” -> “Let me find out for you…”
- “If you check our website…” -> “I can email you a link to the web page and stay on the phone, if you need further assistance.”
- “I’m afraid that isn’t included in your policy…” -> “Your policy doesn’t cover that, but I can check if we can offer that to you in a different package.”
- “I’m sorry but that item is out of stock and won’t be available for 4 weeks.” -> “The item is out of stock. Would you like me to pre-order it for you so it will be with you in 4 weeks?”
When beginning an interaction:
It is conventional to acknowledge the customer’s problem and then make a collaborative statement like the ones below:
- “I’d be delighted to help”
- “Absolutely, I’d be happy to assist you with that today”
- “Let’s see what we can do…”
- “That’s a good question…”
- “I would be more than happy to…”
To express support and social approve:
Strengthen your assistance with a statement to boost the customer’s affiliation with the brand:
- That’s a good choice…
- “This is a very popular item”
- “We have had a lot of positive feedback on that item”
- “This choice has proven successful…”
- “What other customers have done/tried in your position is…”
- “I’m hoping you’ll really enjoy…”
Keep your customer informed:
- “As you are a valued customer…”
- “I’m happy to let you know…”
Ending the conversation:
- It has been a pleasure…
- “Your satisfaction is a great compliment, (insert name)”
- “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
- “I appreciate your patience on this. Please let me know if I can provide any other additional support”
- Thank you for your patience…
- “Thank you for your time and patience today”
- “I hope I was able to help you with your concern”
- “I apologise for any inconvenience caused today. Please accept my sincere apologies”
Handling customer complaints
Customer complaints can help to retain existing buyers and even turn them into loyal customers if handled properly.
- Repeat customers are 10 times more likely to buy.
- Retaining an existing customer is 7 times less expensive than acquiring a new one.
- It’s 6 times easier to sell to existing customers as compared to the new ones.
Why are complaints so valuable? They give you honest insights about your brand, products and services. Without this sort of feedback, you could not understand your customer base and improve retention.
When clients complain, they teach you how to make your product better. If you successfully resolve it, you can turn a negatively minded person into a brand loyal customer.
The key word here is “successfully resolve”. Let’s focus on how to do that.
How to handle a customer complaint?
Handling a customer complaint, it’s critical to do 3 things:
- Reply specifically to the questions brought up by the client.
- Express a specific apology acknowledging any mistakes from your (your company) side.
- Tell exactly what you plan to do (or have already done) to improve the situation.
- Suggest solutions to avoid problems in future.
Customers don’t want a vague answer
You should be very specific:
- address each portion of the customer’s complaint (use quotes if needed).
- If the complaint came through a brief message, break it down and respond to each point.
- In case it was a lengthy rant, select the main (or rational) points, mark them with quotes and then reply.
Take responsibility for anything your business messed up
Apologize. Resolve the issue. And then tell the customer EXACTLY what you did to ensure that they are happy in the end.
Finally, tell your customer about how you will improve your business in the future.
Sometimes that means just a fix on your end. Sometimes, you should better explain the product value to your customer. Anyway, a tactfully proposed solution ensures that the next experience with your business would be positive for your customer.
Example of proper handling a complaint
Let’s look at a real-life example from Andrew Neitlich:
I got quite frustrated with my experience with Yahoo!’s Overture advertising service yesterday when loading up terms for a new site.
I don’t know if you agree with me, but I find Google’s advertising interface much, much, much easier to work with than Yahoo!’s. So I filled in a customer feedback form and sent in my complaint to Yahoo!
Mostly I did this to vent, as I didn’t expect a response from a huge company like Yahoo!. Most companies don’t respond anymore to individual online complaints.
Yet Yahoo! responded with a terrific, personalized letter. (Had I known I’d get a response, I would have provided much more detailed feedback). I print the response here, because it is an excellent example of how to respond online to a complaint. I still like using Google much more, but at least I’m not going to cancel my Yahoo! account and stop advertising (which is where I was at yesterday). Notice how they cover in detail my issues, apologize where appropriate, explain their service, and give advice about things I can do better.
Andrew Neitlich
Here is their response, printed here as a template you might use for your sites or even clients:
Dear Andrew, I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience these issues may have caused you. I have taken the liberty of submitting your listings that were incorrectly declined for Broken Site.
According to my research, your listings that were declined for Blocked Site were also declined for Duplication of Results. This means that the keywords that you were attempting to add to your account, already existed in your account, and were seen as a duplicate of an existing listing. This means that the keywords you were hoping to add already exist in your account.
You are correct, after further review it was acknowledged that your site does not offer a product of service that Yahoo! does not to be affiliated with, and therefore the Blocked Site decline reason was an incorrect one. This decline reason did not affect the outcome of your submission. The keywords that were declined for Insufficient Content, were declined correctly. You were attempting to bid on keywords like “business coach executive professional,” and “life and business coach,” but it is not clear if a user can actually find a business coach on your site, or if they will be referred to 3rd party for assistance with that request. If you were to offer more information on the “Locate an Executive Coach” section of your site, you could be approved for those keywords.
You may be interested to know that Yahoo! is developing a new advertiser interface that will offer business owners a more powerful advertising experience, and we plan to roll this interface out during the second half of this year.
I understand that there are several things in your account that you would like changed, and I would just like to let you know that we take advertiser feedback very seriously as we are always striving to improve our services.
We welcome any additional feedback you may have. Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can be of any further assistance. Thank you for choosing Yahoo! Search Marketing!
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Closing
That was a perfect handling of customer complaints. You also can adopt these techniques while educating your sales team or customer service to respond to customers. At Simtech Development we improve your communication based on the CS-Cart or Multi-Vendor platforms adding new functionalities, leveraging chat functionalities, and making all the technical part under the hood of your online store to make your conversation handy, fast, and feature-rich.
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