Friday 2 December 2011

A lesson in how not to sell courtesy of a lady who said she was from BT

Had a really curious call this afternoon from a lady who said she was from BT. We use BT as our broadband provider and she said that she was calling to offer us a deal on the new BT Infinity service which it appears is now available in our area. Problem 1 was that the place where she was calling from was so noisy that it was difficult to hear what she was saying over the background hubbub. Then she started to ask me questions about which calling plan I was on, whether I made many calls during the day or whether I mainly used the phone in the evening. In other words she was asking me to describe in BT's product language what my service was. Stuck me that this is asking quite a lot of your customers - much better I would think to talk to them in their language rather than yours. I expressed surprise that having phoned me she didn't have such details to hand. At this point she cited the data protection act as the reason why she couldn't know which service I had, my calling profile etc! Most odd. Companies clearly can know about their customers and have discussions with them about their service/ account etc so I'm left a bit bemused as to why she would have been told the root problem was the data protection act. At this point part of me even began to question whether she was indeed from BT but in any event it seemed like a good time to say goodbye and return to playing a game of Rameses' Pyramid with my daughters.