Why is Helpful Expertise so Important?
Jim Stein
Published Date: February 19, 2024
Giving Helpful Expertise means meeting customers where they are by customizing your responses based on their job specifics, personal communication style and pacing.
Too often companies fail to help customers because
- of mismatched communication styles
- they don’t provide answers to key unasked questions – your potential customers don’t know what they need to ask, so you need to help them
- a team member lacks expertise – when a potential customer asks questions that a team member should know, it reflects badly on your company
- of overly technical talk– this distorts the connection you’re building with your potential customer
- of a bad attitude – this negative energy will turn a potential customer into a ghost
- they don’t respond promptly – frustration sets in and lack of follow-up blurs the quality of any good work you’ve done for the customer
Your team will avoid all of these failure categories by becoming Helpful Experts who give Helpful Expertise.
Helpful Expertise is the way to serve each customer as an individual, both in style and substance. It’s how you customize both your recommendations and communications based on each customer’s specific situation.
“Helpful” is in the eye of the person being helped, not the person providing the help. Your customer is the judge and has to feel that the expertise you provide really is helpful to their exact situation and given in a manner that suits both their personality and experience with the subject.
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Helpful Expertise #2: Responsiveness
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Responsiveness is the perceived time it takes for your team to act on promised and implied commitments. By definition these implied commitments are unspoken and often assumed by custom, like returning a phone call within two days. Since there’s no official rule of response times per channel between company and customer, unless you specifically set a response commitment, each customer judges your responsiveness subjectively based on their individual sense of what the standard should be for the channel of communication and the nature of the commitment.
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Expertise is what members of your team know about the various types of work they produce and the industry they belong to. They’ve gained this knowledge through direct experience and study. You’ve trained them on Best Practices, which produce better outcomes, and they use their expertise to communicate with customers and decide how to do the work.
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