Why is the car buying experience so awful? Year after year, customers have made it clear that they hate it. They hate the time it wastes. They hate having to negotiate and being left wondering if they got played for a sucker. And yet, that's the way most dealers still insist on playing it. Like every other industry though, the car selling business is about to undergo radical transformation. Not only will self-driving cars and car-sharing apps change the perceived need to own a car, but companies such as Hyundai Canada are experimenting with a direct-to-consumer car sales model that takes away the pain of today's usual car buying process. In today's Frank Reactions Podcast on Customer Experience interview, Tema Frank talks with Don Romano, CEO of Hyundai Canada.

I've begun my 16 months of world travel, and the customer service experience examples I'm sharing with you today cover some of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world of customer experience. Today's examples include:

- Apartment rental agencies in Canada and in the United Kingdom

- Wineries in British Columbia

- A bathing suit shopping experience

- Insurance brokers.

 

With companies like LL Bean getting rid of their unlimited returns policies, and fraudulent product returns costing retailers billions of dollars a year, today we look a real-world research study that shows how organizations can turn returns into a profitable and positive experience instead of just an upsetting drag on revenues. Tema Frank interviews Dr. Necati Ertekin, Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. There are important lessons for retailers in his recent paper, Immediate & Long Term Benefits of In Store Return Experience.

Dr. Ertekin notes that because we see returns as an unpleasant cost of doing business many retailers have their most inexperienced staff handling them. That’s a big mistake!

In most cases, the best a customer can hope for from such staff is that they’ll take your return without arguing with you. In a worst-case scenario, they’ll try to pressure you into replacing the return with something that doesn’t meet your needs any better.

Not surprising, says Dr. Ertekin, when you think about the incentives at play here. Most retail staff are paid on commission. If you return a product, they lose their commission. If they persuade you to exchange it, they can keep their earnings.

But for the retailer, that’s not the best option.

Pressuring a Customer is Bad

What the study showed was that if salespeople pressure a customer into exchanging a product instead of returning it, the customer is unlikely to come back and buy from you again. It leaves them feeling bad about your company.

Listening to a Customer is Good

But a skillful salesperson recognizes that when you are returning a product there’s a chance for them to better understand your needs. What was it about the first product that didn’t work for you?

If customers feel that the salesperson actually has their best interests at heart, there’s a good chance they will exchange the product, and often even upgrade to a more expensive one.

Competent Salespeople Turn Returns into Future Sales Too

In this study, they not only looked at the short term, they also looked to see what happened with customer loyalty afterwards.

Turns out that if the customer felt genuinely listened to and helped by the salesperson, whether or not they exchanged the return at the time, they were more likely to come back and buy from the retailer again. So there’s a long-term benefit as well as a short term one.

Retailers Must Change Their Training & Compensation Structures

As long as sales staff have only short term commission-based incentives that reward them for converting returns into exchanges, they’ll keep on pressuring customers.

And those customers will feel unhappy with the experience, so they won’t come back. The retailer suffers in the long-term.

So to change the situation two things are needed:

* Sales staff need better training. They need to become more skilled at empathizing and uncovering the true customer needs. That, combined with good product knowledge, will help them find a product that really is better for the customer, and leave the customer feeling happy instead of pressured.

* Compensation can’t be just on short-term sales figures. Customer satisfaction has to be brought into the formula when calculating sales staff pay.

Glenise Harvey worked for 28 years as a Grade 2 teacher before taking the helm at A&H Steel. In this episode she talks to Tema Frank about how and why she made the culture more kind and gentle, and how that has built a stronger team that can deliver better customer service.

When agricultural and fitness equipment retailer, Flaman Group, realized that it had a leaky sales funnel it discovered that many leads were lost due to poor customer service. In this Frank Reactions interview, VP Sales & Customer Experience, Steve Whittington, discusses what he did to change the culture and processes. In this episode Steve and Tema discuss:

• how he made the case to get his company investing heavily in customer experience improvement and training, and what a difference that made.

• the exact steps he took to get buy in across the organization and to help people up their customer service game.

Lots of great advice in here that everyone can use, regardless of the size of their organization.

I get that doing little things for customers than help you stand out from the crowd takes time. It takes thought, and effort, and often money. So it is easy to dismiss as not worthwhile. But the more competitive your industry, the more important those little touches become.In today’s Frank Reactions Podcast episode Matt Ruedlinger, owner of Triple R Marketing, and I discuss how much of a different those little touches can make in helping you stay in the game.

We’ve all heard it. Many of us have even been tempted to ask this question on a sales call.

The Sales Call Question You Should Never Ask

You are nervously wondering what you’ll ask when you go on that sales call, and some well-meaning person advises you, “Ask them what’s keeping them up at night.”

DON’T DO IT!

Maybe it was good advice once upon a time, but as Matt Dixon, co-author of The Challenger Sale, explains in today’s Frank Reactions Podcast interview, asking that question now — when information is so easy to find online —  is just showing that you’ve haven’t done your homework before the sales call.

“You should already have a hypothesis about what’s keeping me up at night,” Dixon explains. Discuss that hypothesis with your prospect and then (once you can see that you’ve hit the mark) tell the prospect how your clients are solving that issue.

Give them insight that they didn’t have before. If you can do that, they will see you as the expert they need.

[This is part 2 of my interview with Matt Dixon. The first part focused on customer experience, and his book, The Effortless Experience.]

Marketing & Sales Must Work Together

It boggles my mind how, in so many companies, marketing and sales are still not only separate departments, but see themselves as rivals!

I’ve often thought about writing a book about this. (How about Marketers Are From Mars; Salesfolks Are From Saturn?)

The good news is that both sides are starting to realize that they need each other.

Depending on what stats you read (and on the industry) 60 -75% of the sales process now happens before the sales call. In fact, potential clients don’t want a sales call; they’ll call you when they are ready.

Insight Selling

“Insight selling,”  says Dixon, “is an approach that requires both sales and marketing.”

“Part of the reason there was this rift between marketing and sales is that they just had nothing to collaborate on,” he adds.

To sell with insight means reframing the way the customer perceives their world. Finding the crucial insights that they are too thick in the weeds to be able to see.

Can Your Company Deliver?

To be effective at sales, your company first needs to look inward. Your marketing team needs to ask itself:

* Is what we are claiming really unique?

* Is it credible?

* Can we deliver?

* Is it defensible?

Once the answer to all those questions is yes, comes the time to develop the story to put in the hands of the sales department.

Can Your Sales Team Deliver?

Not all salespeople will be able to get comfortable with this approach to selling. Some may need to leave.

But with good coaching, many more can learn to be great insight sellers. Do your sales managers really know how to coach?

“Most sales managers confuse coaching with performance management,” says Dixon. They do “spreadsheet coaching.” This does not lead to effective sales people or successful sales calls.

What creates effective sales calls?

The messaging and the manager are the two most important things.

Get those right, and your growing list of clients will thank you.

If you missed it, check out part 1 of my interview with Matt Dixon: Does Customer Effort Score Trump Net Promoter Score?  

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