Three upselling mistakes that hurt customer service

It's natural for companies to want to upsell their customers on additional or more expensive products or services. Just be sure your company doesn't make one of these three mistakes that can hurt customer service.

Mistake #1: Being pushy
I took my car to my local car wash last Saturday. "I'll just have a regular wash today," I told the ticket writer. He responded with the obligatory upsell, trying to get me to upgrade to a more expensive package. "Not today," I replied. "I just want a regular wash."

That should have been it. He made an offer. I declined. End of transaction.

Unfortunately, this guy wasn't going to take no for an answer. He continued to push the offer even after I repeatedly said no. He didn't relent until I finally I said I'd have to take my car somewhere else if he couldn't honor my request.

Upselling is never okay if it is annoying to the customer. Employees should be trained to back off once they receive a clear signal that the customer isn't interested.

Mistake #2: Upselling on price alone
Part of what made the car wash guy's sales pitch so weak and annoying was he only talked about price. The upgraded car wash may have been an insanely cheap deal, but that didn't matter because it wasn't something I needed or wanted. 

He may have had better luck if he had explained some of the benefits offered by the upgraded package. An even smarter approach would be to ask me a few questions first and then tailor his offer based upon my responses.

Upselling based on a customer's wants and needs can actually be helpful to the customer. Upselling on price alone can often feel pushy and transactional.

Mistake #3: Making your customer feel stupid
The car wash guy tried really hard to make me feel stupid. He repeatedly asked if I was driving someone else's car since the only people who wouldn't go for his sweet deal were people who didn't care about the cars they were driving. 

The kicker was when he finally agreed to do a regular wash and I started walking towards the waiting area. While I was still within earshot, he turned to another customer and began bad mouthing me and my poor decision making. 

It's never a good tactic to talk down to your customer when upselling. Especially if they have a blog.

Epilogue
I was tempted to take my car somewhere else after hearing the ticket writer's disparaging comments, but I'd be the one who lost the most on that deal. This car wash does a great job, is reasonably priced, and is convenient to my home.

Instead of leaving I went to the cashier and politely asked to speak with the manager. When he arrived, I calmly explained what had happened. He was very apologetic and told me he would be happy to take care of my car for me. Thanks to a few tips from my recent blog post on how to get better service, I left the car wash with a clean car and confidence that I'll get better service the next time I visit.

I should also note the manager's actions are the reason I'm not mentioning the name of the car wash in my blog. My personal policy is to give businesses a chance to handle a complaint before I air my gripes in a public forum.

Customer service survey mistakes to avoid

It seems like such a good idea.

Send out a survey to your customers to get some feedback. Your company looks like it cares and you might actually gain some ideas for improving service.

Just beware that any good idea poorly executed can quickly become a bad idea.

Here is a case in point.

I recently took my car to the dealership to get an oil change and complimentary inspection. A day or so later I received an email from my service advisor giving me a heads up that I would soon receive a survey asking me about my experience. The service advisor referred to the survey as her “personal report card” and urged me to contact her immediately if I was unable to rate my experience as truly exceptional.

The survey arrived via email the next day. I clicked on the link to open it up and was astonished to find 36 questions crammed into one long, rambling page. That’s right – 36 questions to ask about my oil change!

The survey seemed like a hassle. I was also concerned that my responses would reflect poorly on my service advisor if I responded that I was satisfied with my oil change but didn’t view it as truly exceptional. I decided to send her an email instead to provide my feedback and also share my concerns about the survey process. She didn’t respond.

The intent may have been good, but there are at least three big problems with this survey. Make sure you don’t make these mistakes if you plan to survey your customers.

Wrong Goal
The point of doing a survey should be to find out how satisfied your customers are and learn ways to further improve. The goal of my auto dealer’s survey seemed to be getting a good score. The heads up email, telling me the survey is my advisor’s “report card”, and urging me to give her a chance to fix any issues the survey may uncover all tell me her primary goal is earning a high score. If this wasn’t the case, why not just call or email me to ask about my service without mentioning the survey at all? Why not respond to the feedback that I did email?

If you are going to survey your customers, make sure you are doing it for a good reason.

Too Long
Does it really take 36 questions to accurately assess my satisfaction with an oil change? Really?! My level of satisfaction declined significantly with each survey question after the first five.

Keep survey questions to an absolute minimum and never ask for any information that you don’t specifically plan to use. Be respectful of your customers’ time when asking them to help you improve your business.

Dumb Scale
Most of the survey questions contained a response scale from one to ten with the following points labeled:

1 = Unacceptable

4 = Average

7 = Outstanding

10 = Truly Exceptional

This scale invites problems. If I answer truthfully, I’d give my oil change a 5. Is that bad? Not at all. It’s actually slightly above average. The problem with the survey is the average experience with my dealership’s service department is pretty good. There were a few minor points on my recent visit that were slightly better than usualy, so I’d rate the experience a little better than average.

I could also answer untruthfully if I felt compelled to rate the service as “truly exceptional” so my service advisor would get a good grade on her report card. The problem is I find it hard to imagine an oil change being truly exceptional. Maybe if they waived the charge, gave me a $100 gift card to my favorite steakhouse, and filled my car up with gas I’d rate it as truly exceptional. But they didn’t and I was just fine with their service anyway.

If you are going to ask for feedback, make sure you design a response scale that doesn’t lead to inaccurate or inconsistent responses.

You lost me at "Hello"

There’s something magical about a warm, friendly, and authentic greeting in customer service. As a customer, you feel immediately at ease and gain confidence in the other person’s ability to serve you well.

So why doesn’t it happen more often?

Here’s an example that can help us better understand some of the reasons why so many greetings fail.

Rep: “Thank you for calling The Bayside Grill. This is Jane. How may I help you?”

Me: “Hi Jane. My name is Jeff. I’m calling to make a reservation please.”

Rep: “It will be my pleasure to assist you. What's your name?”

Here are just a few misses in this very typical exchange:

• I gave my name, but Jane missed it.
• Jane sound rushed when she answered the phone.
• Jane sounded robotic when she said, “It will be my pleasure to assist you.

I know, the fix is easy, right? Jane should just answer the phone with a bit more enthusiasm, listen carefully, and then respond with sincerity.

Unfortunately, the problem is often created by management practices that influence Jane's performance.

Here are a few other factors that may contribute to poor customer service greetings.

Employees are distracted. In many customer service situations, the person greeting you is expected to simultaneously perform other tasks, depriving you of their full attention. For example, Jane may have be staring at a line of guests waiting to be seated when she took my call. (Check out my recent post on how multitasking hurts customer service.)

Scripts are for robots. Many customer service greetings are scripted, presumably because employees like Jane can’t be trusted to create an acceptable greeting on their own. The problem is that employees start focusing on nailing the script instead of nailing the greeting. (I wrote a post in 2009 on getting more consistency by ditching the script.)

Employees aren’t monitored for friendliness. When I worked in a large call center I remember having endless debates over what friendly sounds like. It’s easy to observe whether or not Jane used the correct, scripted greeting. Unfortunately, friendliness is inherently subjective. It might be very difficult for Jane and her supervisor to come up with a shared definition of what “friendly” looks or sounds like.

What’ the solution? Here are three simple things customer service leaders can do to improve their employees’ greetings:

1. Eliminate distractions. Give employees the tools, training, and coaching to help them focus on one customer at a time.
2. Ditch the script. Replace cumbersome scripts with more general guidelines. Employees like Jane can use their own personality to come up with something that works or them and still achieves the desired result.
3. Hire naturally friendly people. Obvious, I know, but this practice isn't as common as you would think.

What else can we do to make greetings more friendly, warm, and authentic?

Why multitasking hurts customer service

The ability to multitask is often viewed as a critical customer service skill. For example, there are currently over 1,000 customer service jobs posted on Monster.com that list multitasking as part of the job description. The problem here is that multitasking, or the ability to consciously focus on two tasks at the same time, isn't possible.

According to David Meyer, a researcher at the Brain Cognition and Action Laboratory, when we attempt to multitask our brains are actually rapidly switching our focus between tasks. This rapid switching leads to decreases in productivity and increases in errors as we constantly try to refocus our attention.

A famous example of this phenomenon is called the Stroop Effect, named after an experiment conducted by John Ridley Stroop. In the experiment, subjects were shown a series of squares and asked to identify the color of each one as quickly as possible. Next, subjects were shown a list of words that were each the name of various colors. The words were all printed in colored ink and subjects were asked to identify the color each word was printed in as quickly as possible.

The catch was that the name of the word and the color the word was printed in didn’t match, so “red” may have been printed in blue ink while “orange” might be printed in green. On average, subjects took 74% longer to correctly name all the colors in this second list. 

Try a Stroop test yourself and see how you do!

What does all this mean to customer service? 

It means that customer service reps can't finish up an email while answering the phone at the same time. The grocery store cashier can't talk to her supervisor about her break schedule and make sure I found everything I needed at the same time. The account manager at the bank can't respond to a co-worker's instant message while simultaneously explaining the benefits of a certificate of deposit to a customer.

Employees who multitask risk making errors. They risk making their customers feel ignored, neglected, or misunderstood. Multitasking tends to slow things down despite a whirlwind of activity that makes us feel like we've actually sped things up.

You can try this little experiment to see things through a customer's eyes. The next time you receive customer service, pay attention to how much the other person is paying attention to you. Are they fully focused? Or, do they seem to be slightly distracted by other thoughts or activities? See if you notice a difference in the service you receive from fully focused employees and distracted ones.

I bet you can guess how this is going to go, but I encourage you to leave your comments describing your experiences.

Listening to customers is harder than you think

I was halfway through my question when the customer service representative interrupted me. “That’s actually a separate password than the one I’m resetting for you. That one is just for billing.”

Great, except that wasn’t the question I was about to ask. “I know, but I was going to ask if I can reset the billing password myself so that I…”

He interrupted again, “But you don’t need the billing password to access your online account.” 

Sigh… Still not the question I was trying to ask. Why do so many knowledgeable customer service representatives find it difficult to truly listen to their customers?

Believe it or not, one explanation is poor listening skills are a product of our brain’s natural wiring.

Our brains have a unique design feature that allows us to take a small amount of information and compare it to familiar patterns. This enables us to make quick sense of large amounts of data without getting bogged down in the details. It’s an ability that comes in handy in many ways, such as determining if something is safe or dangerous, recognizing people we know, or even reading.

Here’s a simple example. Try reading the sentence below:

People can easliy raed misspleled wrods as long as all the lettres are there and the fisrt and lsat letters are in the corerct position.

You can read sentences like the one above thanks to this handy pattern recognition ability. Your brain recognizes the pattern presented by the arrangement of the letters and the context of the sentence. It doesn't matter that the letters aren't perfectly placed. They are close enough for your brain to quickly interpret their meaning.

Unfortunately, this same ability gets customer service representatives into trouble when it comes to listening. The customer service representative I mentioned at the beginning of this post had likely heard questions similar to mine many times. The start of my sentence fit a familiar pattern so his brain naturally stopped listening and presented an answer to the question he thought I was going to ask. The problem occurred because my question was a new variation this pattern, so the answer that leapt into his mind was incorrect.

In other words, it was a natural behavior that caused the customer service representative to keep interrupting me.

We can learn to short circuit our natural wiring and become more adept at listening, but it takes training, effort, and practice. Here are a few things you can try the next time you are listening to a customer:

1. Eliminate distractions and concentrate on what the customer is saying.
2. Don't interrupt customers while they are speaking.
3. Ask clarifying questions to confirm you understand their needs.