Category: General Information

I really dislike calling service companies, like the telephone or cable companies, with questions or concerns. I know what’s coming – they will help me (or try to) and then at the end of the call, highlight a new feature or service and try to get me to buy.

I know it’s coming, and I’m sure it’s part of the employee standards that have to be followed. It’s their job, but to those who train the staff managing customer calls – please train your staff to understand that when it comes to upselling services, timing is everything and know when to stop.

Last week I had trouble with my cable TV. I had just changed out my furniture in the family room and the cable box was no longer working. I went to the company’s website and it said there was an outage in my area, but I couldn’t quite tell if that was the problem or if it was something I did.

I was not in the mood to call the company, knowing that at the end I would be a hostage in hearing of new services; I thought the live chat would be easier and less intrusive. I was wrong.

Things were going okay and while we were chatting, the TV suddenly started working, so I’m thinking it was an outage. I thank the rep and see that he’s about to pitch a new service. I think to myself that I’ll see what he says and politely decline, and I’ll be on my way.

No such luck. Here is how the rest of the chat went. After my last statement, I waited a few moments with no response from the rep. I was thinking that, perhaps by staying in the chat room, I was giving him some sort of authorization to send me whatever initial email he referenced earlier, so I printed the chat and left the room.

Two things went wrong here:

• First, I don’t know that it’s appropriate to try to sell additional services when a customer is having issue with one of your services. I wonder if the companies feel that customers will be more likely to add on after an issue has been resolved, but in my experience, I’m usually cranky that something isn’t working right and just want to resolve it and move on. Additionally, if the rep does not have my history available (I’m not sure if they do or not), they may not know that this is the third time I’ve called in a week about the same issue and may be close to dropping the service. If that’s the case, trying to sell additional services could be the end of the relationship.

• Second, no means no. I did telemarketing one summer in college and remember that we were trained to make the customer say no at least two times before we could end the call; I get the impression that the same is the case here. However, to push it to the point of saying “don’t even use the service, focus on saving $10 a month” is over the top and sounds desperate to me – either the rep really needs to make a sale to keep his job, or he just wants to say he closed sales and doesn’t care if it benefits the customer at all. Either way, it turned me off completely as a customer.

Upselling is an art form really; it’s about timing and presentation. Done effectively, it could do wonders for growing sales. Done incorrectly, it could result in losing customers over time.

There are newer methodologies available to assist you in learning more about your competitors. This can be difficult to do traditionally, and can be costly and time consuming. Below are some ideas for capturing key insights about your competitors and staying in front of them when it comes to customer service, product offerings, and other key points of the customer journey.

Mystery shopping: if you’re employing a mystery shopping company for your business, why not open it up to measure your competitors? Many businesses have taken advantage of this with positive results.

What it will tell you: mystery shopping the competitor can be useful in learning more about customer service levels and procedures, how sales associates present information about products similar to what you carry, and view the customer experience through a set of objective eyes. A narrative based report will give you the “meat and potatoes” of the experience, giving you insight without ever stepping foot in a competitor’s location.

How it’s done: some companies will use the same report that they use for their business to have shoppers report on competitor locations. Because most mystery shopping programs are customized to measure your company’s specific standards, this is not always beneficial. Your mystery shopping provider can create a more generalized survey with standard key customer service standards to be used for this purpose. With this approach and a narrative detailing the shopper’s experience, you can learn quite a bit about your competition.

Social media monitoring: many social sites are open, but Twitter is the best for easy following of others. While the more bold companies will choose to directly follow the competition, others turn to social media monitoring for this purpose. By using a robust monitoring program, companies can monitor online conversations about their own company and competitors quickly and easily, capturing all online conversations that are related.

What it will tell you: a successful monitoring program can give you invaluable information, including:

• Finding out if a competitor is having financial troubles, or on the flip side, expanding faster than you first thought.

• Learning more about their customer base. In many cases, when customers are engaging with a brand, it’s very easy to identify them on social sites and start following/engaging with them, especially if it’s a dissatisfied customer of your competitor. It’s an easy way to turn the tables and gain some new customers.

• Find out your competitor’s “pain points.” Customers are very vocal and often times more honest when engaging with friends and family on social media. Find out what customers are dissatisfied with from your competitor and gauge your marketing message to address these.

• Learn about promotions and events. Is your competitor doing something “outside the box” with regard to events and/or promotions? Was it something you were considering yourself but weren’t sure of the reception it would receive? Especially with events, location based social monitoring can give you insight into customer perceptions and success – by essentially creating a social “fence” around the event location, you can capture social media content from the area, even if the user doesn’t use a hashtag for the event or reference it in the caption directly. This is a newer technology that can bring a lot of real time insight for your company or your competitor.

How it’s done: by using a service provider that is familiar with the ins and outs of social media monitoring, you can set up a regularly monitored program. Just identify the competitors you would like to monitor and you’re done. You will receive weekly reports that include all collected conversations, including user names and handles of those talking about the competition, allowing you to add them to your own social networks. Using the analytics system will allow you to dive further into the data collected, finding themes and areas for further investigation.

Location based monitoring can be used for events once your service provider knows the dates, locations, and time frames for the event. The data will be captured in a similar manner to social media monitoring, but will be provided at the end of the event. This program also provides analytics to dig deeper into the content collected.

Keeping tabs on the competition is nothing new, but technology and new uses for old methodologies can make it much easier than it was in the past. Hopefully these tips will give some food for thought on scoping out your competition.