Partner Article

How to lose friends and alienate people

I spend a large amount of time calling other businesses pedalling my wares, speaking with receptionists, PA’s, colleagues or anyone available to give me the run around and keep me away from my intended. The way in which these people react to me varies hugely, even with receptionists.

The scale slides from surprisingly rude all the way to talking me through the family tree.

As a sales person I’m used to this and don’t take offence to people being short with me. I get it, I am one of many and people don’t like being sold to.

But I don’t think this experience is exclusive to my ‘kind’.

I recently called up Sky to pay my bill, it was never going to be enjoyable but I was not expecting the experience to be this terrible.

I’m not keen on parting with cash at the best of times and if I’m honest call centres unnerve me. A bit like hospitals only without the risk of coming in contact with MRSA.

One thing I did come into contact with was a comedian.

I can only assume he had handed in his notice and was ‘sticking it to the man’ with his own brand of well observed creative banter. Either that or there’d been a gas leak.

Said comedian answered the phone mid laugh and then asked me to take part in a laughing exercise. What followed was not a laughing matter (although in hindsight it is pretty funny), he asked me if I had loads of money and if I wanted to pay his bills for him, then asked me how old I was and told me I was in no place to question him. All of this was punctuated by a slow laugh. HA, HA. Then the phone went dead.

It’s safe to say I wasn’t impressed. Once I’d pulled my phone out of the lounge wall I checked just to make sure I hadn’t called the wrong number. I hadn’t.

I called back, told them what happened and they looked into it. Lucky for them I just wanted to get my bill paid and get off the phone, but I’m not entirely happy with their response. They barely even apologised and told me there was no record of the call.

I’m not one for making a fuss, I rarely send food back and have never decided to call the ASA or Ofcom after an episode of top gear. Not everyone shares my affliction, a strange politeness reflex that kicks in whenever I’m uncomfortable. Small things like this, when given the right exposure can be very damaging to a business or brand, which got me thinking….

When at work some of the people I speak to are rude or short before they even know who I am or why I’m calling.

Despite our best efforts business is still based on people, there is no Skynet, it has not become self-aware.

As people, all of our daily interactions drive an emotional response, some small, some big. These emotional responses might be subconscious but as we all know, have a lasting effect. We build stereotypes, associations and opinions based on our emotions. Sometimes we will try to reason, make considerations and weigh up both sides of a story.

In my experience emotion is the death of reason.

These emotional responses are hugely important and we need to consider them where ever people can interact or come into contact with your business or brand.

It is not the sole responsibility of Sales, Marketing or customer services to understand how to interact with ‘outsiders’. Everyone in business should be given the time and tools to learn how to manage these situations in order to drive the best emotional response.

This tends not be an issue in larger companies but in smaller businesses it can be a massive problem. I currently work for a small owner managed company, this is something we sell on. Our culture people and knowledge are the key things we use to attract new business.

This means if the comedian from Sky was answering our phones they would have stopped ringing a while ago.

Not so much HA, HA afterall.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Selby .