Customer relationship management tools abound, yet let’s hear it for old technology. Your voice is the most multifaceted customer service tool in your toolkit. Your voice can convey concern, care and compassion. It can alternately convey boredom, neglect or contempt. Your challenge: to insure your voice reinforces the service you strive to deliver through your actual words and action.

Customer service is about more than mouthing the words customers want to hear. You have to sound believable. How do you sound? Try this experiment. Call your own answering machine and leave yourself a message normally intended for your customers. Now replay it. Are you convincing? Does sincerity ring from your voice or are you just mouthing clich

While companies focus thousands of dollars on external customer service in hopes of wooing and retaining customers, little attention is being paid to the effect poor internal customer service has on customer satisfaction. It all starts within your organization! Sooner or later the ripple effect reaches your customers. To really walk your service talk, make sure your commitment to internal customer service matches your company’s external focus on customer care.

When we think of customer service we think of staff serving customers over a counter or over the phone. But customer service occurs within your organization as well. How well is your staff serving its internal customers: other departments, its management, vendors and consultants? Believe it or not, it all counts. Internal customer service refers to service directed to others within your organization. It refers to your level of responsiveness, quality, communication, teamwork and morale.

I define Internal Customer Service as effectively serving other departments within your organization. How well are you providing other departments with service, products or information to help them do their jobs? How well are you listening to and understanding their concerns? How well are you solving problems for each other to help your organization succeed?

Teaming with Success

How well do you work with other departments? Does your Marketing department communicate well with the Legal department? Does Fulfillment relate well with Shipping and Receiving? Do Catering and Facilities work well together? When it’s time to communicate with others from different departments do you take a deep breath, or smile and relish a chance to renew contact with colleagues from elsewhere in the company?

As a manager I once joined a publishing company and found myself in the midst of a war between departments. Production resented Editorial for the way they missed deadlines and delivered shoddy copy. Conversely, Editorial had little respect for the resulting manuscripts they received back from Production, full of errors and oversights. Poor teamwork, poor communication and myopic thinking had led to a hardening of positions over time. They each cared about the finished product but were putting pressure on each other without realizing it. It took time, but eventually both groups came to appreciate each other and how to best work together to achieve win-wins for the greater good of their customers.

Do you relish or dread committee work with other departments? Does it seem their aims are contrary to your department’s? When other departments contact you for help do you regard it as a nuisance, a distraction and a drain of your valuable time? Can you see the greater good that comes from helping them solve their problems or fulfill their needs?

You can take pride in opportunities to help other departments look good. Obviously, you don’t want their success to come at your expense. Usually helping others doesn’t mean you lose a zero-sum game, where only one of you can win and helping others hurts you. In most instances helping other departments leads to a win-win situation. And what goes around usually comes around. Helping other departments succeed can help yours too when the roles are reversed.

Up with People

Good internal customer service starts with good morale within your group. Are your people happy? Do they feel good about themselves and their contributions to the goals of the department and to the company at large? They should, and effort should be made to help them do so. Happy employees are productive, and customers take note. Happy employees are also better team players. Will you fly the airline whose employees are striking with management, or the airline whose employees are management? Employees invested in employee stock purchasing plans with matching contributions see themselves as much more a part of the company. Thus, as the company goes, so do they go.

When I fly out of Oakland Airport I use an outlying parking lot and shuttle van. This shuttle is shared by employees from Southwest Airlines, coming to work or returning to their cars after their shifts. I’ve found them as happy and upbeat when they’re starting their shifts as when they’re finishing their shifts. That’s great morale, and tells me they like their jobs. It’s contagious! Sometimes I’m envious on that shuttle when I know I’ll be checking in at a competitor’s ticket counter.

Who’s On Top?

Many organizational charts employ an inverted pyramid with customers at top. Some companies instead put their employees at the top. In many senses, the employees are management’s customers. Corporate values that emphasize treating employees well translate to good customer care too. Does your organization value its people? Invariably, companies that care about their people can better ask their people to care about their customers.

Catering to Customer Service Needs

Here are five tips for your organization to help strengthen its internal customer service orientation.

1. Employees should never complain within earshot of customers. It gives them the impression your company isn’t well run, shaking their confidence in you.

2. Employees should never complain to customers about other department’s employees. Who wants to patronize a company whose people don’t get along with each other.

3. Employees at every level should strive to build bridges between departments. This can be done through cross training, joint picnics, parties or offsites, or creative gatherings, as well as day-to-day niceties.

4. Utilize post mortems after joint projects so everyone can learn from the experience. Fences can be mended and new understandings gleaned when everyone reviews what went right…or wrong. By doing do after the project the immediate pressure is off, yet stronger bonds can be forged while the experience is fresh in peoples’ minds. Not doing so can result in lingering animosities that will exacerbate future collaborations.

5. Consider letting your employees become “Customer for a Day”; to experience firsthand what your customers experience when doing business with you.

Congratulations on turning customer service inside out! By improving internal customer service you have just enhanced the customer service your external customers receive. You’re walking your talk regarding customer service. Touch

“Objections” or “Concerns”

The problem is, that’s where you often lose them, because reacting to “objections” almost inevitably lets prospects pigeonhole you as “salesperson”.

Think about it for a moment. When prospects raise an objection and you cleverly dismiss it, what often happens?

They come up with even more objections.

When you dismiss those, they may suddenly remember that they have another appointment, or that they have to make an important call. Or they may agree to your offer…and then a day or two later you get a message that they’re not going to go forward after all.

That’s probably the most demoralizing outcome of all, because you thought you “had” that sale, and they’ve reneged on you.

What’s happening here?

It’s about sales pressure. When you’re so focused on making the sale that you counter a prospect’s objections, you’re pressuring them. It’s that simple.

I’d like to share with you a different perspective on how to view objections.

Objections aren’t roadblocks, red flags, or stop signs. They’re an opportunity to learn more about your prospect’s truth so you and they can decide whether the solution you’re offering can solve their problem or issue.

In fact, we should probably stop using the term “objections” entirely and start talking about “concerns,” because that’s what objections really are. But for you to be able to look at objections this way, you have to let go of the traditional goal of selling, which is to make the sale.

When we adopt the mindset that objections are another way to learn about a prospect’s truth, we stop panicking and falling into the trap of pressuring them that chases them away.

When we respond to objections in a way that invites them to share more about their situation with us, we sustain and enhance the relationship of mutual trust and openness we’ve shared so far.

When we don’t fall into the traditional “I’ve got to rescue this sale” reaction, we free ourselves to continue the process of discovering whether we can help solve a problem.

Here’s another advantage of reframing how you view objections — they give you another opportunity to learn whether your prospect is a match for what you have to offer.

When you stop trying to overcome objections and just listen, you may hear that there really is a problem around whether your product or service is a fit for them.

In that case, you and they can talk further, or you may decide it would be best to wish them well and move on. This means that you can make better use of your time.

“This all sounds great,” you’re probably thinking. “But how do I actually do it?”

Common “Objections”

Here are some specifics about how you can respond to 3 common “objections” in ways that avoid introducing sales pressure and open the conversation to more exploration of your prospect’s truth.

“Your price is too high.”

Traditional sales approaches tell you to defend your pricing or to deny that it’s too high. Consider this response instead:

“You are right, it can be perceived as high, especially if you haven’t had a chance to experience the solution yet. The last thing I want to do is have you feel any pressure from me, that I’m trying to persuade you otherwise. Maybe it might help if we took a look at the core issues this should solve for you and then identify what the return will be. That might provide you with a broader perspective on the pricing, would you be open to that?”

By inviting the other person to tell you more, instead of challenging or denying how they view things, you’re validating their viewpoint and reopening the conversation around the idea of why they feel the price is high.

By not trying to counter the “objection,” you allow the dialogue to move back to a discussion that centers around whether you’re a good match for each other.

“Why should I go with you?”

Traditional sales approaches to tell us to defend our company and our solution and to try to persuade prospects as to why we’re better.

Instead, consider saying something along these line, in a relaxed, low-key way:

(Gentle pause.) “I’m not quite convinced you should yet, not until you’re completely comfortable with the reasons why this solution might be best for you. The last thing I want to do is put pressure on you by trying to convince you to do something you may or may not want to do. Would it make sense for us to take a look at the actual issues you want to solve and then see if we are a fit?”

Here again, you’re not creating sales pressure by defending your solution. You’re simply communicating that you’re focused solely on helping them to solve their problem.

“We don’t have the budget for that.”

Again, traditional sales approaches focus on overcoming this kind of objection by showing prospects why they should choose your solution.

Think about saying this instead, in a very calm, relaxed voice:

“That’s not a problem. (Gentle pause.) Quite a few of our clients originally had not allocated a budget for this, mostly because they hadn’t become aware of all their options.

Would you be open to a different perspective on how this could impact your business and provide you with a solid return?”

When prospects express a concern and you reply in a very calm, relaxed voice, “That’s not a problem,” you’re validating whatever they said as having truth. “That’s not a problem” immediately defuses any tension and allows you both to continue your dialogue.

You’re not jumping frantically into defending your product or service — you’re simply suggesting that it might make sense to continue your conversation to see if there really is a justification for solving a problem they might have.

One More Advantage…

Here’s one more benefit you’re likely to experience if you start thinking about concerns rather than objections: less stress. Sherri put it well when she called me back the other day:

“Ari, I have to tell you how much more effortless and relaxed my sales conversations have been since I started thinking about ‘concerns’ instead of ‘objections.’ It’s made a huge difference. I can almost see prospects breathe a sigh of relief when they raise a concern and I respond to them with a gentle ‘That’s not a problem,’ and they realize I’m not trying to deny their concerns or steamroller them.”

If you consider a different mindset that looks at “objections” as “concerns,” you too may find that they can turn into gateways instead of roadblocks.