Are You Selling or Phishing?
Posted by George Pasley on July 18, 2007
Over on InfoWorld, Roger Grimes talked about his experience when his bank called to offer him a new service. After going through the sales spiel, the sales rep then asked him to confirm his account information, billing address and SSN. Understandably, he refused to give out the information, but asked if the sales rep would tell him the information and he would confirm it. This wasn’t an option and the sales rep couldn’t access his account nor complete the upgrade without his confirmation..
How many of you have given out personal information on a sales call? I know I have in the past. Now, I tend to hang up before they even get to the sales pitch. Even more so since I got burned with a “debt reduction offer.”
Does your financial institution follow this same process during phone sales? For me, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence when the sales rep can’t pull up my information and they’re the one that called me. In Mr. Grimes’ case, either the sales process is broken, or the sales rep needs more training. Regardless, an experience like that can leave a very bad taste in a customer’s mouth.
rshevlin said
And therein lies the beauty of caller ID. Funny thing is, when my bank calls, and I can see its them — I don’t even answer.
But you raise an issue that has no easy answer. Would you prefer that your bank make your acct info available to anybody w/in the firm that wants to call you to pitch a product?
Or maybe just have one person — like an acct manager — have access to the account info, but who has limited knowledge of the products and would have to refer you off to someone else if you were interested. Which wouldn’t be a great customer experience either.
No easy answer here.
gpasley said
Fortunately, my bank never calls. Unfortunately, mortgage brokers do. In those cases, I find that answering the phone in Spanish helps. When the Spanish speaking rep calls back, I answer in English. That’s a lot more fun than just hanging up.