From personal recent experience I would say the Post Office can urgently do with some uk sales training .
The papers and TV news have been filled recently with the subject of post office closures and how this will kill off many local communities. I can understand this and can only sympathise with people who rely on the post office for essential services.
What I can’t help is my feeling that largely the post office have brought this upon themselves with untrained and quite frankly appalling customer service / sales staff . I know that many of the post office counters operate as mini franchises but they should insist on some element of sales training or sales management training .
I recently went into my local branch to send a parcel to the USA. The man at the counter huffed and puffed his way through my request and looked at me like I had asked him if I could kiss his mother.
After a few minutes of huffing and puffing he came back with the words:
" We can do it but it’s going to be expensive and we will have to fill out a whole stack of paperwork"
Being difficult to put off I said OK.
After about 10 minutes of him reading through a few simple sheets of documentation I gave up and went to DHL. Within 3 minutes I had completed the transaction with a nice customer friendly sales person and was on my way.
If I was giving training to the local branch of the Post Office to increase their sale s I would start with:
- Sales Attitude - people are busy and they want to be treated with respect and be made to feel that their business is valuable
- Sales Words - It doesn’t take much retail sales training to change the emphasis of the words the sales representative had used to something like:
"You would like it sent to the USA sir - absolutely. Consider it done. Based on the weight and your delivery requirement of 4 days, I’m delighted to tell you it will be there on time and probably early and it will only be £42.00.
There are a few forms to complete and I know them like the back of my hand so all we need to do is get you to sign here and here and I can fill in the rest for you.
Is there anything else I can help you with?"
If all post office staff received customer service training so that they could think like that then I am certain their sales would not be in decline.
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