Is It Difficult to Do Business with You?

My guess is that each of you have had the same experience I recently had, at least once, if not a hundred times… here’s what happened:

Since it’s been about a year since I had Comcast set up cable, telephone and Wi Fi service in my apartment in PA, I began getting renewal notices and “special packages” that are available to me for the new contract year. In fact, I was somewhat surprised that one of the renewal packages was actually cheaper than what I’ve been paying and included more services.

Rather than wait for a lapse in service, I decided not only to follow up, but to see if I could add a separate phone line for a dedicated fax. Fortunately, the afternoon that I placed the call, I was still getting over a bad cold and had no other plans for the afternoon!

Anyway, I called the 888 number and began my great adventure. The first thing I had to navigate through was the automated machine that wanted to know what language I wanted to communicate in. Next, I needed to press 1 for service, 2 for payment, 3, 4 or 5 for various other options. Of course, I usually just press 0 for an operator, in the hopes that I might get a live person to talk to, regardless of what country they might be in.

Guess what, it worked. I did get a live operator who asked me the same questions. When we finally got to what I was trying to do, I was put on hold until the operator who handled the renewals got on the line. That operator kept telling me what I currently had and didn’t have in services, even though they obviously didn’t have a clue (They kept insisting that they were going to give me HBO even though I’ve had it for a year!).

The real problem was that I wanted to add the additional phone line, which I was told would cost me about $10/mo. Which I agreed to, but I now had to talk to someone else, since the operator who I was taking to didn’t know much about that service. Needless to say, I ultimately spoke to 5 different operators before I was able to complete the transaction. When I hung up and looked at my phone, I realized that I had been on the phone with Comcast for 54 minutes!

Here’s my sales question… do we make it that difficult for our clients to do business with us? As sellers or service people, do we know enough about each of our products (many more than the cable company offers) to help our clients spend money, or are we pushing them to our competitors?

It’s time for each of us as sellers and managers, to make sure that we all know as much as we can about our products to easily help our customers. I’m sure we can all do better!!

By the way, I can’t wait for the first bill to reach me, so I can see if the information I got on the phone is correct and if I was given the discounts as promised. At least my fax machine is working. For the time being anyway…