Customer Success Management
Fasthosts mainly focuses there advertising towards SMB’s (Small to medium end businesses), it does also sell to the consumer directly but it is designed to be a business to business seller instead.
The main page of the Fasthosts website is comprised of a large main advert to the right of the centre called the “masthead” with 2 other adverts that are designed to be more targeted to the buyers e.g. through their local area or from other collected data.
The Fasthosts control panel also has adverts in it as well. On the control panel there are 3 boxes of native content, this is content that does not change and is not adverts, this is things like information on the last paid invoice or other things like that, above that is a bar, this bar can have adverts injected into it from an ad server in Germany, the server is nicknamed as “Penguin”, or the “Personalisation Engine”.
The whole system within the control panel is designed to encourage current customers to buy new products which is the aim of customer retention.
Customer retention is a vital for Fasthosts as a business. Most customers start off by buying a domain name, this is a relatively small thing. The person might then want to get a site online might purchase the website builder product or WordPress if they are a bit more confident.
As the person becomes more experienced the person might need more powerful tools, more control or overall more powerful specs. This might make them move to shared hosting, in shared hosting the user has more control over their product.
Eventually they might build up to a virtual private server, which has even less people on it and more control available. Finally, they will hopefully go for a Dedicated Server. This chain of retention is very important for the company so a large emphasis is put on trying to keep customers choosing Fasthosts and not moving to a different service.
The role of the sales team
The main role of the sales team is to take calls from perspective buyers and to guide them on what would be best for them and to try and possibly turn a perspective buyer into a customer.
They also have the role of trying to retain customers who may be trying to cancel the products they have. This is done on a trying to help the customer and first and trying to sell last. What they would do would try to give support for the person if they are struggling with the product and if that does not work possibly suggest other products that might suit the customer more.
The team is comprised of 12 members, 4 in Gloucester and 6 in the Philippines.
It is an important role of the managers to look after the workers in this role as a happy worker is more likely to perform well in sales environment.
When taking calls rapport (French for bridge) is important to build up between the customer and the person taking the call. If someone is pretending to be someone they are not the customer will see through it damaging rapport.
A important part of the sales team is looking at the data and statistics to do with there sales. This allows trends to be identified so that actions can be taken to either reduce outflow or to try and increase inflow.
Statistics are given in the form of percentages as they are easier to understand then being given a load of numbers compared to other numbers.