#upselling

[yours-trudy]

famous last words.

dm29dra.ws is my new artist webpage! Tell your friends!

[longarmedlockhart]

Thought of an upsell the other day "how much does a milkyway? About 3 musketeers"....... anyways mars brand candy bars are 2for$6 at Circle K

[skjam]

Grandma's Calendar Company

As I was recently reminded, back in the 1990s, I worked a few years at Rivertown Trading Company, the official catalog company for Minnesota Public Radio and Minnesota Public Television. (Plus a couple of other catalogs.) MPR was riding high back then as they were the home of the nationally popular A Prairie Home Companion show. We sold a lot of merchandise for that and other cool stuff.

I worked inbound phone sales and sometimes customer service. (Thankfully, the company did not do outbound calls.) One of the job functions was "upselling." We'd have three or four items from each catalog on "special" each week, and would mention this to callers to see if they wanted to add one to their order. It wasn't so bad, purely optional for the customer, and if you managed to upsell an item, you got a few cents on the dollar added to your paycheck.

As was customary in the business, the Winter catalogs were printed in June and went out in early July so that people could start their Christmas shopping well in advance. This particular year, we had a new product from Grandma's Calendar Company.

The idea was that you would order a packet from Rivertown, fill out all your important birthdays and anniversaries, include favorite photographs, and mail it off to the calendar company to create customized calendars for your family. This is before everyone and their little sister had the software and hardware to do it at home, so was a very cool idea. So cool, that management decided to make it the upsell item of the season, to be pushed on every call that would let you.

This item sold very well, only encouraging management to push it more. But in late July, I got a scattering of concerned callers. The calendars they'd ordered in early July hadn't arrived yet. I referred them to GCC's customer service line and informed management. Management was like "thanks for telling us, but this is clearly an anomaly due to startup times."

By late August, I was getting three or four calls a week on this subject. I suggested to management that perhaps we should take the calendars off our specials, as it seemed likely there were supply chain issues somewhere. I was assured everything was fine, all the calendars would arrive by Christmas, and to keep upselling them.

While I was obligated to follow the general upsell script, I began deliberately emphasizing the other specials and downplaying the custom calendars. I did not sell any myself after this point. More people were referred to GCC's customer service line.

By late September, I was up to a call a day minimum on this issue, and usually more. Management insisted we continue to upsell the calendars, everything was going to be okay.

By mid-October, the trickle of complaints had turned into a flood, and we got callbacks saying that GCC's customer service line was disconnected. We started referring callers to GCC's regular phone number. Management still refused to let us stop upselling the calendars, and a rumor got started that one of our executives was in an improper relationship with someone at Grandma's Calendar Company. I got a particularly heartbreaking call from a grandparent who had included all the pictures they had of their infant grandchildren--who'd now died in an accident.

Finally in November, we were told to stop selling the calendars as the owners of GCC had fled the country in the middle of the night. Rivertown and a couple of other catalog companies got an injunction so they could go down to Texas and get all the photographs back for our customers.

Turned out that GCC had gotten more orders in just July than they could have processed by the end of the year, and at first they were stalling in hopes of getting the production capacity they needed, but when that didn't work, they just kept lying until they had enough money to enjoy an overseas trip.

Rivertown took a bath on the product, but I felt pretty good about my part as I'd spotted the problem early on, alerted the folks who should have investigated/fixed the problem, and didn't trick the customers into buying the vaporware calendars.

[doitfordan]

guest: one ticket for Little Women please

some employee somewhere probably: would you like to upgrade that to Large Women for 50¢ more?

[zenscapes-blog]

😂😂😂 Up yours #att! My phone is in perfect condition! Dang #marketing 😡😩 #cell #cellphones #attservice #upsell #upselling #manipulation #powerofvisualization #powerofthought #insightinmind #outofsightoutofmind #phonenotbroken

[ekremdum-blog]

A practical guide to upselling and cross-selling — the difference between them, when each fits, and how to grow account value by genuinely serving the customer rather than pushing unwanted products.

How Do You Upsell and Cross-Sell Effectively?

[rarilee33]

big problem with retail and fast food places that insist on upselling. its such a dumb concept especially in these settings and when it gives no value to anyone but the companys bottom line and who cares about that

[detailus]