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Cross-selling: helping or annoying the customer?
Author: Mike
November 22, 2006
“Do you want fries with that?”
How do you feel when you hear that phrase? Are you grateful for the delicious, oily suggestion? Or are you thinking, irritably, “if I wanted fries, I would have ordered fries”? Or perhaps: “How stupid of them to suggest fries with my super-healthy organic fat-free salad”?
It probably depends on the context. And so it is with all cross-selling.
Sometimes, cross-selling is an expected part of the dialogue. Take the aforementioned fries for example. I don’t even bother mentioning that I want fries until I’m asked. I would almost find it to be rude to rattle it off as an initial part of my order. What if I overwhelmed the order-taker with my lengthy list of demands?
Conversely, there are the times that I have to call customer service about one of my credit cards. This process now fills me with dread. Why? Because I’ve decided I like a credit card company enough to earn them many dollars in transaction fees…yet when I call them, I know that I’m going to have to fend off their advertising spiels for their other services.
The company that is the worst in my life for this is Capital One. The phrase “selfish and opportunistic” springs to my mind immediately when I think of them. Their customer service reps are trained to shoehorn as many service offers as possible into the conversation. I suspect that if I were amicable, they’d go on for hours, perhaps even days, describing the many wonderful ways I can give them more of my money. But I’m not—I’m insulted and irritated. I’m even more irritated because I’m trying so hard to be polite. Making things worse, while I am on hold, I have to hear automated cross-selling messages.
So guess which of my credit card accounts I’ve recently closed?
The key to cross-selling is not thinking of every possible way to grab more of your customer’s wallet—it is looking from the customer’s perspective, to identify which of your services might genuinely benefit them. Does your company view cross-selling from the customer’s perspective, or its own?
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