Giving clients simple, effective sales tools: Nicolas DeSarno, Director of Reflex Brands

When our clients come to us, … they're coming to us looking for recommendations. What should I do with this? How do I use this? And I want to make sure that whatever we recommend to them is going to not just work well, but it's also going to be simple to use and effective. — Nicolas DeSarno, Director, Reflex Brands

How does Reflex Brands delight clients with simple, effective sales tools for their websites? We spoke with Nicolas DeSarno, Director of Reflex Brands, to learn how tawk.to makes it easy to support their clients.

Reflex is actually a sister company or child company of a bigger company called FlexScreen. FlexScreen is a Shark Tank company, which is very cool to always say, and it gives an interesting talking point when we talk to new clients and customers. Reflex was created out of the efforts of myself and other employees for FlexScreen.

A couple of years ago, FlexScreen was a brand new product and didn't really have any foothold in its marketplace. Joe Altieri, who is the inventor and CEO of FlexScreen, couldn't go buy a Super Bowl ad, so he needed to kind of pivot and not just do traditional sales. So we started creating social media content.

We built a brand new website and kind of disrupted the industry. And because of that, a lot of customers were like, "Hey, can we do this? How do we do this?" So we had a little boutique marketing agency up the street from us that we ended up bringing in-house. We rebranded into Reflex Brands and expanded the staff greatly.

tawk.to is our number one recommended website chat that we use. You guys are phenomenal with how you guys handle your service. Ultimately, our clients love you guys for the price. Our clients love to hear that word, "free."

But one service that we use a lot from you, and we use it internally, is the white label. Being able to put our own brand or our own spin and colors and looks on the website chat — it's something we don't see with a couple of your competitors.

Right before Reflex started using tawk.to, FlexScreen actually used tawk.to. We were specifically selling our Windows screens — that's what FlexScreen's product is — to B2B customers. And we wanted to get into the online retail space.

When we built our website, we had a customer support number, but we didn't have a website chat. And our entire team is local to the East Coast. So we were like, "Oh, no, what are we going to do when we're in bed?" So tawk.to, you guys have a live 24 hours monitoring support, which was really interesting to us.

And then ultimately, the back end of your team being able to be an assistant to us when we were off-hours was a really nice benefit to have and something we were able to adopt into our marketing agency, as well as promote to our clients as we talk to them: “Hey, when you're asleep, you can still be making money. You can still be closing sales with this service.” So it's definitely been beneficial, not just to us, but to our clients as well.

When our clients come to us — most of our client base — they don't know what they want. They know that they need a website. But we always say, "Listen, you're a drywaller, you do spray foam insulation, you're a car salesman. You do what you do best and let us do what we do best."

So they're coming to us looking for recommendations … and I want to make sure that whatever we recommend to them is going to not just work well, but is also going to be simple to use and effective. So when someone goes to their website, we're building clean, simple websites most of the time ... we want to make sure clients can easily use it — show it off as a sales tool. And tawk.to kind of fits right into that realm of simple but effective.

So clients download your app on their iPhone or Android devices. And now they have 24-hour access to their customers through their website. Even if they're not replying to chat, they can always go in there and look and see how many visitors they have on their site at a time. So it's been a very fun tool that we've gotten to see our clients experience and play with, as well as being able to use it for the sales.

One of the features we really love using is the internal chat inside of tawk.to. When one of our customer service reps or one of our sales reps are online chatting with a current customer or a potential customer, sometimes there are questions that get asked that they don't know the answers for right away. So the fact that I could log in, or anybody else on our team can go on to the app as well, and secretly or privately chat with that representative is really fun and really cool and it's effective.

But you can also have some fun internal camaraderie with that, like, “Oh, come on, you can close this. Good job.” That internal communication you kind of miss when you're online. And I know in the past year, we all kind of went into this digital space more, and that feature has really kept our community at our office alive while we all work from home.

So that has been very beneficial. And we also show our clients that like, hey, look, you can actually talk with your sales reps or your customer service reps straight through this. So you don't have to go to another platform or go to email to answer questions or text somebody or quickly call. It can all happen right there through tawk.to.

The advice I give to new partners is that your platform is free. There's no risk … Even if you don't use any of the other services, you're now getting another communication method to [talk to] your customers. So go for it. Jump on board. And when you love it, you're going to be able to tell your customers how much you love it and get them to jump on. And again, there's no risk. It's a free platform that works.

Learn more about Reflex Brands on their partner profile.  Or connect with Nicolas DeSarno on LinkedIn.