This is what happened to my wife yesterday.
Wells Fargo calls up our house and said, “We’d like to appreciate you for being a valued customer and would like to offer you our great life insurance”. A few moments later, the lady who made the initial call, hands the call to her male manager. He said we could try 30 day free trial of their life insurance, and if we don’t like it, we could just cancel it.
My wife, not designated as our family’s finance manager, politely declined the offer. As soon as she says no, the manager got annoyed and discontinued the call.
Why would Wells Fargo do this?
Why would you do anything to jeopardize relationship with your “valued customer” by interrupting her life and offering something which wasn’t requested?
Wells Fargo does this because they see other banks doing it. They see Citi does it, so why not them? That’s how their industry works, right? After all, they have our personal information, so why not abuse it and pitch products and services?
How about offering services like ING Direct? Instead of offering low interest bearing saving, why not reinvest your profit into high interest yielding accounts? Why not get rid of branches at cheesy strip malls and build call center with live operators? Why not get rid of annoying telemarketers and generate businesses more from referrals?
It’s so easy for Wells Fargo to do what ING Direct does, but they’re not doing it. Because they see other banks do stuff they do to their customers, so why not them?
But here is the problem. People’s time is getting more expensive today than ever before. People have more choices every day than they ever did before. So if Wells Fargo is merely offering services and products that Citi does or Bank of America already does, they won’t grow.
People today need to be blown away. They must feel overwhelmed by your ability to deliver.
If you cannot do that, you’re only “great”, which is the irony of everything in business today — it used to be it was okay just being “great”. But not today though, everything great is only a click away. Instead, you have to be exceptional to stand out from the rest.
If not, this economy will eat you out. If you’re trying to be sneaky on the call, trying to enroll someone who has no idea why you’re calling, you’re not doing any service to your customers.
Wells Fargo, delight your customers or go home. You’re not doing your customers any favor by offering “$10 gas cards” for their time wasted listening to your stupid sales pitch.
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