Our favorite workflow acronym at The Brandt Group is GUEST. While the model has existed as a sales flowchart for quite a while now, we’ve tweaked it to amplify customer service over pure sales, which we believe will not only help win long-term loyalty from your customers but also ensure lasting profitability.
As you’ve no doubt guessed, each letter stands for a step in the employee-customer interaction, and it makes for an easy mental checklist for your staff to follow. Over the next few weeks, we’ll cover each of these steps and how we like to measure them in our mystery shops.
Finishing our overview of the GUEST model, we move from Secure to Thank. The customer has been greeted, his needs understood, the products or services explained, and the objections secured; the time to conclude the experience has now arrived. At its core, Thank is about expressing gratitude to the customer for taking the time to consider your business—there are a lot of other choices, after all. But there’s more to this stage than merely saying, “Thanks for stopping by!” and then walking him to the door.
As important as saying thank you is, committing to follow up with customers is even more so. Nothing expresses appreciation to customers as much as your desire to establish a line of a communication, to keep an open-ended relationship with them. This applies whether a transaction has concluded or not: for a successful sale, this means a follow-up call to the customer to confirm their satisfaction and to intercept any problems before they escalate. But even when the customer doesn’t buy (yet), a follow-up reminds the customer about your business before it disappears into the background noise of his life. Tell him you want his business. Whether this is a phone call, an email, or a handwritten note, the gesture will be noticed and appreciated. This lays the groundwork for long-term customer loyalty, which not only helps to ensure that sale but future ones as well.
This concludes our GUEST overview: from Greet, to Understand, to Explain, to Secure, and to Thank. We hope that you found these posts insightful for your business’s customer service and sales process. As with everything we do, this process is highly customizable and can easily be custom-tailored to your business.
Reach out to us at The Brandt Group today and we’ll help you do just that. Through mystery shopping, you’ll be able to monitor your sales and customer service processes, as well as get feedback on everything from your business’s visual presentation to the quality of your products. Establishing and testing those standards will help to ensure ongoing profitability and success. We can’t wait to work with you!
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