Command and Control at Work- The Forced Upsell

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I wrote a post over the weekend about Chase having bankers pull people out of line to upsell products to them (Banks – Don’t Copy Chase on this Policy). Then today I researched more upselling that happens in other industries at The Consumerist website.

The United States Postal Serviceapparently has to try to upsell on your packages, AMC , Verizon, Best Buy and many more. Forced upselling has got to end. I mean when a customer comes in the door and says don’t try to upsell me and the front-line worker continues to do so . . . we have a problem. We have both waste and customer anger, so what’s the upside here?

The coup de grace is to follow up this madness with mystery shopping for compliance and bonuses. It is to make stupid . . . lethal. Demeaning to both the customer and the worker.

There are better ways to generate revenue for companies. Understanding customer purpose and delivering service that gives customers what they demand.

Good service is getting harder to find as service organizations weren’t that good at providing good service in the first place, now customers have to compete with internally-focused programs like upselling that make it even harder. This is a hard sell in many cases and increases costs and loses customers.

Service organizations that participate in upselling have been sold a bill of goods that can’t be delivered. Trust erodes the confidence of customers to get what they want as this is over-ridden by mandates for revenue. To me, it is the beginning of the end.

Provisioning what customers want and how they want it should be the focus, not some arbitrary financial target that leads to chasing away customers.

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Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here. Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com. Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.