Magazines Archives - 2010 February

Good customer service drives sales ... up
Story 5 - Focus

Increasing sales is foremost among the goals to be achieved by Avon Malaysia and this goes hand in
hand with customer service. Azlan Ismail, director of Human Resource for Avon Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, is working to impress on Avon’s franchisees the importance of customer service training and multi-tasking on pushing for more sales.

“We provide customer service training annually for frontliners,” says Azlan. “These are normal classroom training [sessions] aimed at refreshing our customer service providers with the
latest techniques and best practices.

However, I must admit that more needs to be done, especially for our franchisee outlets as they continuously interact with the public.” Avon is discussing with its franchisees on investing more in staff
training, he adds.

“Apart from people skills to handle‘damage control’, we are looking forward to expanding the scope of training that can help increase sales. Selective merchandising buying or alternative product
selling can be an option. This means that our frontliners will have to multitask.

Instead of only handling customer queries, they should also initiate selling by promoting the various product ranges of Avon that suit the customers. This requires good communication skills and
product knowledge.”

Asked whether the slowdown in retail business has affected training in customer service, or has more importance been placed on training to generate more business, Azlan says that with the availability of the Malaysian Ministry of Human Resource’s HRDF (Human Resource Development Fund), Avon’s
investment in customer service training has not stopped. The corporation is a contributor to the fund and “we have made it a point to increase training opportunities for our staff since funds are
already available”.

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