Friday, June 25, 2010

Customer Service & Sales Associates

Principal Duties and Responsibilities:

Responsibilities can include processing customer orders and sales, providing and receiving information, and up-selling client products plus handling miscellaneous customer service and general information calls via the phone or Internet.
Greet customers in a courteous, friendly, and professional manner using agreed upon procedures.
Listen attentively to customer needs and concerns; demonstrate empathy.
Clarify customer requirements; probe for and confirm understanding of requirements or problem.
Meet customer requirements through first contact resolution.
Confirm customer understanding of the solution and provide additional customer education as needed.
Prepare complete and accurate work and update customer file.
Communicate effectively with individuals/teams in the program to ensure high quality and timely expedition of customer requests.
Effectively transfer misdirected customer requests to an appropriate party.
Contribute ideas on ways to resolve problems to better serve the customer and/or improve productivity.
Participate in activities designed to improve customer satisfaction and business performance.
Determine appropriate response to customers by using a script or sales flow.
Place and/or receive structured customer inquiries.
Provide product information and receive customer information.
Prepare customer correspondence.
Respond to common customer work/service orders, inquiries, and requests.
Sell new services and retain existing services.
Maintain basic knowledge of products, pricing, promotions, procedures, and other important issues through management communications, meetings, client focus groups, and formal training.
Occasionally use decision-support tools to answer questions (depending upon program).
Solve problems that are sometimes unstructured and that may require reliance on conceptual thinking (depending upon program).
Offer solutions to issues that are often non-standard/non-routine and require some clarification (depending upon program).
Maintain broad knowledge of client products, services, pricing, promotions, procedures, and other important issues through management communications, meetings, client focus groups, and formal training (depending upon program).
Conduct needs-based selling by using non-scripted probing techniques to determine customer needs and to offer the most appropriate product or service to address their needs (depending upon program).
Update customer records (depending upon program).
Place and/or receive customer inquiries that may require deviation from a script or sales flow process (depending upon program).
Provide answers and/or advice to customers based on their particular requirements and customer profile (depending upon program).