Is that a package?
Why do companies insist on trying to pull one over on people and sell things as a “package?”
I worked at Sprint for a few years and one of the great scams, IN MY OPINION, was that we would receive a call from someone with just ONE feature, like caller id.
We would then claim that we could, “SAVE YOU MONEY” if you would just “upgrade” to one of our custom packages.
Customer: “But I don’t want anything other than caller id, maybe call waiting.”
Salesman: “That’s OK, it will save you money and you will get ALL of the calling features including caller id, call waiting, call waiting id, call forward, return call, repeat dial, messageline, line guard and an excellent long distance plan---OK?”
(That’s called a presumptive close, you TELL the person some ambiguous crap and you tell them it is in their best interest and you finish the sentence with “OK” and the natural human response for the customer is to reply, “OK.” Taa daa….you just made a sale.)
The reality is that the “Package” almost always is MORE expensive, includes more than the customer wants, but because the customer cannot figure out X from Y because the company intentionally makes that information difficult to obtain, and the seller has an incentive to keep that information to himself----it’s a loser for the consumer.
Think about your cable bill, or your cell phone service plan, or ______ you fill in the blank.
My point is: if you are offering a good product or service at a reasonable price, you don’t have to trick your customers with pricing or package gimmicks. If your company is unwilling to be transparent with its “menu” of services, if it is unwilling to be upfront with its prices, then it probably won’t be offering that “package” very much longer.
I worked at Sprint for a few years and one of the great scams, IN MY OPINION, was that we would receive a call from someone with just ONE feature, like caller id.
We would then claim that we could, “SAVE YOU MONEY” if you would just “upgrade” to one of our custom packages.
Customer: “But I don’t want anything other than caller id, maybe call waiting.”
Salesman: “That’s OK, it will save you money and you will get ALL of the calling features including caller id, call waiting, call waiting id, call forward, return call, repeat dial, messageline, line guard and an excellent long distance plan---OK?”
(That’s called a presumptive close, you TELL the person some ambiguous crap and you tell them it is in their best interest and you finish the sentence with “OK” and the natural human response for the customer is to reply, “OK.” Taa daa….you just made a sale.)
The reality is that the “Package” almost always is MORE expensive, includes more than the customer wants, but because the customer cannot figure out X from Y because the company intentionally makes that information difficult to obtain, and the seller has an incentive to keep that information to himself----it’s a loser for the consumer.
Think about your cable bill, or your cell phone service plan, or ______ you fill in the blank.
My point is: if you are offering a good product or service at a reasonable price, you don’t have to trick your customers with pricing or package gimmicks. If your company is unwilling to be transparent with its “menu” of services, if it is unwilling to be upfront with its prices, then it probably won’t be offering that “package” very much longer.
posted by djobe at 3:32 AM
1 Comments:
Yeesh! You couldn't be more correct.
Bottom line: does your cell phone allow you to make calls when you want? Are the rates acceptable to you?
Simple. I was telling a friend that I've never been in an area where my cell phone didn't have a usable signal. That makes it okay by me, no matter how many text messages, song downloads, etc. that I get.
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