The Key Ingredient to Customer Service When You Sell a Product

There is a common misconception about customer service, that exists almost everywhere and many times it leads to the actual failure of a company or personal VO business, while working online. I have seen, read, and heard many make one common error while selling their voice as a product. They make this statement:

'You tell me what you want, and I will provide it for you.'

I will say first, that this is a common mistake I used to make myself, until I realized that buyers never know what they want, but they want people who know what they can sell. There are many reasons why asking the buyer to tell you what to do without offering a choice, is a bad thing especially when finding potential clients:

1. As the seller, you are supposed to know your product, better than anyone else. If they do not know you, and you state, 'Tell me what you want.', you actually create work for the client to figure out your product for you. They want someone who knows what they are selling, not someone who is not sure.
2. The buyer always wants to feel like the 'winner' in a deal. If you offer solid choice, and they say, 'Can you try something different?', you actually show more flexibility to change at their request, than to say, 'I am flexible. I can do anything.' First of all, no one believes one person can do everything these days anyway, and you want to make the buyer feel as if he shaped you into something to enjoy working with you.
3. Oddly enough, more choices confuses the buyer. Buyers want to feel that 'you know what they want', and even if you give them something they did not expect, but they enjoy it, they will feel you knew what they wanted. This makes you enjoyable to work with.
4. Less talking...show more talent, and that you mean business...then perform. This one is tough because it requires intelligent people to think like they are a piece of clay to be shaped into something. When it comes down to business, the buyer is not there to empower you to succeed. You are there to empower him/her to hire you.

Let me give you a few analogies to explain:

Imagine you want a can of soda, or a light snack. Do you go to a supermarket, or a convenience store? More than likely, a convenience store. Who needs 25 isles of products, when you only want one thing.

Imagine going into a fast food joint, where they do not offer 'meals by numbers'. You would have to search the full menu and do more work than the seller. SO, fast food places took common meals, and added numbers to them. Now, even if you dont want a meal by number, it is easier to say #13 than to spell out an entire meal.

Finally...the quote we think of at Voice123.com...

"If I asked people what they wanted, they would say faster horses" - Henry Ford

You see...as the 'developers', what makes for a better website is to recognize what is not working, what works, and observe how people feel about certain things. In this case, the path of least resistance, or the most simple of answers, actually never works...because what people want is not always very simple to figure out, and also...not every customer knows that what they want can actually be very bad.

After all the psycho-analyzing of what people want and what actually works for them, all a company can do is their very best to create a system that works, and makes the customers' lives easier, and tune it up when it does not.

The one X Factor in all of this is that people, by nature, never really know what they want until they experience it, yet once something is created it takes on a life of its own, so you can never tell what will happen next.

The key ingredient is then...be proactive and reactive to the needs of your customer. Show that you care enough to do the work for them, when needed.

Business is business.