8 How NOT to improve your Telephone Sales Technique
Alan Stewart on Aug 05 2007
Here’s a list of ways to infuriate or annoy your customers:
- Not answering the phone
- Telephone is constantly engaged
- Answering the phone on the first ring
- Answering a business call with just “Hello”
- Answering with just a surname: “Smith”
- Answering with just the company’s name: “ABC Company”
- Answering with just the department’s name: “Accounts”
- Answering with: “ABC Company, please hold the line”
- Putting people on hold without asking for their permission
- Forcing your caller to listen to “Greensleaves” whilst ‘on hold’
- Having the radio playing for people ‘on hold’. (You don’t need them to hear a song that reminds them of an ex-lover who jilted them, your oppositions commercial, or the news telling them that America has just bombed Iraq
- A recorded message that constantly repeats, “Please continue to hold. Your call is important to us.”
- Talking over the STD or ISD pips
- Giving the caller too much information
- Not giving them enough information
- Saying: “We’re not allowed to give out our prices on the phone”
- Sounding like a Police Interrogation when asking questions
- Telling the Receptionist that the subject is personal
- Saying to someone you’ve never spoken to before: “How are you today?”
- Repeating the callers name over and over throughout the conversation
Here here! can we make it a standard for phone providers that they must invent a new recording and replace the “thank you for waiting, your call is important to us” message? May I be so bold as to suggest:
Thank you for waiting. Our goal is to keep our prices affordable. So, we cannot invest in an abundance of staff to accomodate call volumes that spike from time to time. However, we do track our call volumes and will bring in more call staff when we see a consistent trend of call volumes longer than a few minutes. Thank you for your patience while we hire them. If you know someone looking for a job, please send them our way at . We’re always looking for good employees to provide great service to our customers.
Who knows, maybe our little community of marketers here can rid the world of annoyances such as the “your call is important to us” messages! -Kris